Carlos, this one's for you!

we walked our assess off on thursday. I just checked the map. We must have walked 15-20 miles, but it was Tokyo so it was fun.

(Post is almost a decade old but decided to publish anyway)

Was listening to the radio this morning and heard Drump mention that Blacks have a poverty rate of 50%.  The news said it was more like 25%. Still had me wondering what the real number is. Also was interested in the historical numbers.

Seems as though the gov has been tracking these numbers since the 60s. Found a good site, although i dont know  how accurate.  http://blackdemographics.com

Seems that everyone has experienced decreased net worth under republicans versus dems.

Interesting. 

I just received an email from ISACA letting me know that i passed! Alhamdulillah!

I was a little nervous because a few days before the exam i had suspected that i had been studying wrong. While i was taking the exam i had confirmed it.

I bought the practice tests.  My coworker brian told me that taking the questions over and over was the best tool for preparing (he later clarified that it wasn’t the only tool) for the exam. 

So that’s what i did.  ISACA has an adaptive testing utility that loads the exam questions with the area you perform the worst in.  Sounds great right?  So that’s what i did but i kept getting discouraged because i kept performing poorly.  The worse i performed in that area the more questions they sent me.

I did a little research on how other people prepared and someone suggested getting this book (I’ll get the title soon ). I read through that book,  making sure to go through the chapter questions both before and after i read the chapter. 

I still wasn’t where i needed to be.  So I started reading through the manual from ISACA that brian lent me. 

Then it dawned on me.  I had been spending waaay too much time on the area i was performing poorly in and not enough time in the other areas.  Problem was that the exam war just a few days away. 

So i went through and mapped out each domain.  I watched a video on passing the CISA. I prayed. 

Come exam time i was really disheartened to discover that the questions i had been going over the most were severely underrepresented. 

But i got my email today and i found out that i passed. 

Altogether i answered over 1600 questions on the practice exam.  When sorted from high to low,  there was a direct relationship between the amount of time i spent on a domain and how well i did.  I spent over 71 hours on the practice exam.

Two things i would do differently:
1. I would start studying earlier.
2. I would balance the practice tests between the adaptive test and the standard test.
(Edit: 3. i also would join a study group. Half the class were asian and they seemed to have more knowledge about the entire process than i did. Would love to have gotten in with them)

But all in all i think i did ok. Especially considering auditing is new for me. I hadnt even been an auditor for a year yet before i took the exam. I had been in IT for over 16 years before

man, first of all, I was NOT prepared for how long the ride was gonna be!  Man!

When I first got on the plane I lucked out.  I had my section all to myself.  Not only that, but across the isle was the prettiest girl on the plane.  I noticed her earlier, we sat next to her before at the terminal and it looked like she was interested in what we were doing.

I introduced myself to her since we were gonna be neighbors.  She was a very nice girl.  She was mixed, forgot with what.  She was raised on an army base.  She just got into university at Temple, apparently they have a campus in Tokyo.

I asked her all kinds of questions, I’m sure I got on her nerves.  I asked her what it was like, etc.  I asked her what kind of gift would she be bringing back from the states to her friends.  She said colgate.  She told me that the Japanese government considers menthol a drug so they regulate its use.  Sure enough, while I was there it was hard to find peppermint gum and the such.  I asked her about dancing in clubs being illegal.  She said yeah.  She was a part of a flash mob that tried to protest it.  Said it didn’t work out that well because the train was so crowded. She told me to carry ID with me at all times, but not my passport.  Told me a story about how a guy had gotten into a fight and beaten up pretty badly.  Well this american came to help him up and the police arrested him!

She said that she had to go to the bathroom but was scared to go because the fasten seatbelt sign was flashing.  I told her to be bold, do something dangerous, go!  She just buzzed the stewardess and asked her.  It was ok.

Once the plane took off our conversation went in the opposite direction.
It was cool.
I had some movies to watch.

I tried my best to get comfortable.  I watched a movie, I watched some shows, I slept, I conversed with Pete and Nghi.  I looked at the time, I think like four hours passed. The flight was for 13 hours.  Jeez!  It was sooo excruciating.  I tried to lay down, I tried to lean back, I tried to lean to the side.  Finally, I sat up straight, buckled my seat belt and slept for the final few hours.

They fed us well on the flight.  We had more than enough food.  Since the plane was late in leaving they gave us a food voucher but even without that there was more than enough.

Anyway, now I’m at the airport dreading having to do it all over again.  But it was soooo worth it.

Well, it’s been a while.  I never was able to properly download the demo version of TR, so I just went ahead and bought the license.  After I bought it and had trouble with that download as well, I decided to do some searchin on it.  Turns out a few people have experienced this as well, so they have provided alternate links.

The links were for the full version, so I don’t think they acknowledged a problem to the general public.

Since time is of the essence now, I’m just going to blast through it.  So here is what I did to transition from GTDify to ThinkingRock.

1.  Download ThinkingRock version to MacBook.
2.  Configure it to connect to file on Dropbox.
3.  Download demo of Android app.
4.  Determine file format/structure needed to import project(s) into ThinkingRock.
5.  Export projects from GTDify.
6.  Import into ThinkingRock.
7.  Test.