OWAC...Again!

So, during my last semester at BYU I entered the Omniture Web Analytics Competition. Last time I thought I had a good chance at winning. But, turns out that didn't happen.

This semester I'm at the University of Utah. I felt it would be an interesting idea to enter in the competition this year especially if I had the chance to compete against some of my friends and former classmates from BYU. As for an added effect, I decided to partner with another BYU-alumni.

Our project took a lot of time. One problem we found was we had very little data to go off on. Even so, we tried to make it work. After many hours planning, data digging, and analyzing we completed our slides at around 2:55 AM the day it was due. Both of us were unsure how well we'd do, but we both felt we gave it our best shot.

This morning I found out that our group had made it to the college finals! Meaning we were 1 step away from making it to the intercollegiate finals. We will present on Nov. 6th.

5 Minutes

Today was another long boring day in class. I mean long. Four hours long to be exact. In my opinion, a class should never be that long. My attention span is only so good, and there are only so many things I can do on Facebook...yeah, I was on Facebook while in class, but you would be too...

Anyways, as the minutes slowly ticked on and class was nearly over I was getting ready to celebrate my freedom for the weekend. When the professor ended the class, I got my belongings and was about to leave. However, my freedom was stalled for just a minute...then 2 minutes...then a total of 5 minutes. So, what was this five minutes? It was a girl in the class who I never spoke to before. If you know me, you're probably thinking "Oh! A girl? In an ISYS class talking to Jeff? This is too good!" Nope. She'll remain anonymous, but she came up to me and asked me if she could join my project group for my Process Analysis class. You're probably wondering what's wrong with that? Well, I'm about to tell you.

Graduate classes here at the U pass faster. Back at the end of August we began this class. It is now the beginning of October. My Systems Analysis class is a little over half way over. Now, one would think that a semester long project should have been started a long time ago...in this case everyone had completed over half the project (especially my group). Just think how crazy that sounded to hear someone wanted to join my group after most of the project was done.

Anyways, she had this outrageous story that she got in the class late and needed a group. Wanting to get home, I just told her to write her information down and I would email her. That took a whole 5 minutes... 5 minutes that would turn into a full half hour later. If you have ever taken the train in Salt Lake City, you know that if you miss the train, another train comes in 15 minutes. Turns out I just missed the train (I saw it pull into the station, but I was too far away). So, I missed the train. I had to wait another 15 minutes for the next train, and then another 15 for the connecting train...just my luck.

When I got home, I was pretty upset. I had a long train ride to think of what had just happened. Of what the girl in my class wanted. She wanted to basically have my group and I carry her through our semester project. This will not happen.