Google Analytics--Econometrics, and self analysis

12:52PM
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I love Google Analytics. It is just floors me. It is just like taking Wharton School, University of Pennsylania classes all over again. Only this time, I am totally focused. I will master this. I know it.

I started back to my room and then I suddenly stopped an turned around and headed for Main St. I stopped at the Banguette. It was my desired destination. Monica was there. Monica is the very nice lady that owns the quaint, cozy and very much the gathering spot where people eat cakes, drink wine, eat cheese and play on their wireless computers. It reminds me of La Terrasse restaurant, on Sansom St, on the University of Pennsylvania campus. Anyone who was at Penn, especially in the 70's and 80's, remembers the family atmosphere that was created by the owners, Elliot Cook and Judy Wicks. Both were graduates of Penn.

Every body was at that bar/restaurant-students, professors, lawyers, judges, business people, law professors(Penn LAw school was across the street), doctors
artists and construction people. Judy and Elliot encouraged entrepreneurship their.

Elliot lived upstairs as he spear headed the renovation of Samson st into a beautiful townhouse development. Judy's brother had a music studio on the third floor, above elliot. Patti Labelle, Grover Washington and many of the Philadelphia International artists would try out new stuff on the 8 track studio.

The restaurant was my office and I would study at the bar there. Each day I would come in and there would be calls for me, pinned to the board below the chalk scripted menu. Banguette has the same chalk type menu on the wall. My mother would call there, at the restaurant and bar because that was the only place she could find me. The women bartenders would not serve me before I called my mother out here. she knew that and knew the women would activate the "women fellowship" card and make me call. I would act as if it was an aggravation but I loved the fact that the women banded together and also made me call. I was family.

I get the same feeling at Banguette. It is entrepreneurial and struggler friendly.

Anyway, I love the fact that I can study the quantative results from analytics.
There are varying ratios just like the ratios in Brigham and Weston's
Corporate Finance textbook or Van Horne's textbook from Stanford that was used at Penn before Brigham and Weston. I made flash cards of those ratios.
Any finance student would know what I am talking about.

I envision myself there working and developing my entrepreneurial endeavors. At least one of them is going to be internet site related. I love those analytic tapes
of google stored at Youtube.

Yes, folks. Google Analytics is educating a Skid Row resident and he aims to understand it all. It is a chance to become the expert student that I was before all of this happen and to revisit the discipline and art of reviewing the quantitative methods of analysis that I first learned at the Wharton School.

It was not until I came home when some one said to me.
"Walter, numbers at like books. Read them and they tell you a story. They tell you more than words." Those words were told to me by Baron Jones. Baron is a legend in Los Angeles REal estate circles. He graduated from Dorsey High School and went to Princeton. He went to the University of Pennsylvania to capture his MBA. He was at Princeton at the same time Brian Taylor was there. Brian was a Princeton Basketball great and played under the legendary Pete Carril.

He played there when I was a freshman at Penn. At that Time, Chuck Daly was the varsity coach who later went on to coach the championship teams of the Detroit Pistons. Rolly Massimino, of Villanova, was the assistant coach.

Brian ended up coming out here to San Diego to play professional basketball. I was with him when he used to talk to Charlie Grantham, who was the executive director of the National Basketball Players Association.
Brian did not meet me. He was one of the only ones. My father used to talk to me about him all of the time, I mentioned all of that because Brian became the Director of Admissions to my prep school Harvard/Westlake School. It was when I was playing basketball at that school that my father talked about this great player from Princeton. Small world.

Yes, I talk about these schools in my past because I feel them today in my present.
Of course I feel my parents today, deeply. I feel what they stand for, deeply and more than ever because I am living by the standards now, 100%. I am not a phony,
a fake person.

I am at the Transition house in the computer lab, where the STRIVE PROGRAM IS LOCATED. It is the best program in all of skid row. Just like Hillary Clinton said at the last Democratic Convention when she introduced her husband, Bill clinton"I know a little bit about picking winners". I know a little bit about education. My father was the best educator I know. He taught me how to teach myself. He taught many in the Crenshaw community to do the same. He was revered in that community.

His teachings and that confidence of teaching oneself, coupled with the incremental educational training at different institutions and corporations, let alone life, will be be the tools used to master google analytics. I love it. I love looking one graph and saying, that is a leading indicator. That one is a lagging indicator.

I did not expect to write this. However, it is a day of many things. I am sharing this day, my parents wedding day in its kaleidoscopic forms and manifestations with you. I hope you benefit from this.

My intent is to use google analytics to help me design a website that will help the
people of skid row. It helps that I was exposed to econometrics. Econometrics was an economics forcasting method founded by Dr. Lawrence Klein, economics professor at Penn. He was Jimmy Carter's Chief Economic advisor during the presidential campaign.
He is considered the father of Econometrics. I used to hangout with him and a friend of mine who Klein mentored. It is funny when they were talking 200 weighted variables on a Wikipedia lecture about SEO's and search engines that experience kicked in.

Econometrics and understanding weighted variables helped me understand what variables interplayed and how much at each stage of my decreased consumption of drugs. Can you believe that? Econometrics, a forecasting tool, is what I used to help me monitor and predict my behavior while I was attacking my drug use.

And you know what? I just realized that the weighted variables I used when I was doing it, came from econometrics. That is why this flow of conscious, as my father calls it is so good. It is a RESEARCH TOOL.

more on that later. more on a beautiful Christmas season night spent at Dr Klein's house with him, his son and my friend. It was one of those memorable "hallmark moments in time"

Keep the Faith