Welcome to the Projects

If we really are going home soon, it certainly, definitely, does not seem anything like it.  The fact of the matter is that class does not seem to be winding down, or well, if it is, I must be thicker than anybody because I have not noticed it at all.  The content is still complicated and rigorous, the lessons are still fast-paced and a bit on the exhausting side.  Even though office hours seems to have lightened up over the past few days, it does not give any indication that things are coming to a close.

In fact, I think today has been too busy of a day to see things coming to a close.  Because today, there were two very long, very tiring lessons that came our way:  one on overbooking and one on creating a payoff matrix.

First off, Reneta gave us a lecture on overbooking.  This was more or less the easier part of the day, since the concept of overbooking is simple to understand.  It is a technique where a hotel may cautiously book more than it's occupied rooms in order to maximize occupancy and profit.   We went over the specifics, such as how to predict whether or not it is profitable to overbook and whether or not it is ethical to overbook a hotel.

After that, we went to the Binenkorp Computer Lab, where Mark gave us a very speedy lesson (well, in terms of the pace he was going) on creating a payoff matrix, a graph on Excel that would allow me to predict how much I can make through overbooking by way of predicting how many people would not show up at the hotel.

Mark also gave us a crash course of what we have done over the past three weeks.  That did not turn out as well as we had hoped.  While we did know the answers, it took us a little while to figure them out.

To be honest, I am rather tired and a bit worried about our final project.  Our group had a few issues when we ran the CHESS simulation and now we are rerunning it, which will not bode well for the amount of time we have used.  Tomorrow, I plan to get most if not all of it done, so I can do not have to worry about much for the rest of the week.

These last few days are starting to get to me, as three weeks of endless late nights in order finish up work is starting to catch up to me.  But I will be fine I think, at least I would get as much as I can done.  It makes me feel a little accomplished, if only a little.

On a more interesting note, I found a really peculiar-shaped leaf.  I thought it was rather interesting and I wrote a little on it.  That was fun.