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This week the 2009 UFE results come out and I'll try and follow along - as long as you are in touch with CA students, there'll be people you care about who are waiting for CA exam results at the end of November, or beginning of December. I'll no doubt be slow in conveying my congratulations though, as I'll be on vacation starting tomorrow, far away from here. This may give me time to catch up on my writing here, maybe not. We'll see how relaxing the trans-Oceanic flight will be. And when you find out you passed, go celebrate, in whatever way you choose. There are stories of adventures in CA volunteerism and other fun topics coming. In the meantime, some Statistical Adventure news : spam filters must be getting increasingly effective - traffic has fallen to what must be an all-time low - and 332 in October wasn't bad either.
PriceWaterhouseCoopers Advisory has made some significant cuts to their US workforce, as mentioned off-hand by Francine and discussed in detail here Skip down to comment 4 in the post for an interesting dissection of firm revenue math and the possible impact it'll have on partner income. It's a topic everyone seems to be curious about knowing more about, gets very little information about, and is often to afraid ask questions about - so go check out "TT"'s breakdown and the follow up if you want to know more. Or skim all the way down to comment 114 , which points out that while the cut of roughly 300 people is small compared to the size of the entire US firm, the internal PwC webcast apparently stated that this represents a cut of 6% of the affected group - one value provided by a commenter is 260 of about 4300 people. I spent way too much type going through all the other comments, and things did in fact get kind of dark. Consider this post - it's anonymous, but...
The month before, the count was 416; in September the total count was only 376, that's an improvement. Accounting firms continue with dismissals as they welcome new hires and prepare for another busy season. After condemning the day-of-UFE terminations , a week later I heard that more terminations went through. Exact numbers are, as usual, hard to come by, since each firm is understandably secretive - but the carnage seems to be less severe than last year - if you had a chance to spot the warning signs, and had an escape route, it was a good time to transfer out of regular audit as soon as you could. As anyone would, I feel bad for everyone who was sent home, especially those who haven't completed their CA student programs, since your options are a bit more limited. The big upside is that lots of small and mid-sized firms still need people, even in a lousy economic time. Hopefully they'll all find a good new home. Some people find a job that's less stressful than audit...
The number of spam e-mails hitting me continued their downward trend landing at 416, sliding even lower than last month's 437. Better spam filters at last? Wonderful. I had several topics come to mind regarding how companies measure various metrics for success and failure, and of course they all slipped my mind, which points out a simple fact: I should really write down those errant ideas when they come to me instead of letting them drift off into the ether. If it would be possible to get the electronic junk to disappear, and the glaciers to stay, we'd be set.
I'm finally back from vacation while city staff continue to clean up after their labour action . Posting was sporadic lately due to real life intruding, and the next week is going to be quite busy. In AuditLand the current crop of interns are going to be winding down their summer terms and the brave crop of 2009 fall hires will be showing up in an accounting firm office near you in a matter of mere weeks. Enjoy summer while you can, and dodge the spam - last month's count was 437 which tells me that either the filters are getting better, or I wasn't the only person both on holiday and too usy to write .
Happy Canada Day - 142 years young! I didn't have much time to reflect on that or do much more than watch fireworks, since today was a relaxing catch-up day, after a hectic June, where I got hit by 612 spams - a fall from May's 768 . Busy season is a relative concept, based on how much of a crushing workload you're currently enjoying compared to other times of the year. Oddly enough I got to experience what's essentially busy season in what's usually the slow season for most people around here. But that's ok, now I get to enjoy a brief lull before the storm of 'real' busy season hits in the fall. The other concept of "relativity" regarding busy season is that where you're busy depends not only on your job and department, but your hemisphere. It's winter in Australia now and from what I understand, the madness of busy season is in full swing there. And yes, I don't understand how they thought "Fly Girls" would somehow make...
768 is a sharp jump from last month .
Hopefully you've already filed your taxes and didn't just toss in a football-sized package of disorganized receipts in the mail . Similar to tax cheaters , spammers continue their annoying work of clogging the internet - but their numbers fell to only 459 last month, a huge drop from the 684 in March, some happy and good news. How I would picture fighting spam, in snow-form.
684 pieces of spam hit me in March. One of the funky blurry pictures from Metric's Thursday April 2 secret show. The good stuff is loading up and will get shared soon. That's an increase of 42 from last month . Wonder if April's massive worm attacks will exacerbate matters? Maybe not . But the information on that last link pointed me to an interesting article about Google's server containers - the computers are stored in a shipping container, making the whole operation nice and modular. If you take 4 of these containers you have 4640 computers that can draw a peak load of a full megawatt . Impressive - especially considering they have much than a mere four units running their very fat corner of the internet. In comparison, the entire province of Ontario uses anywhere from 16000 to 27000 megawatts of electricity at the daily peak point It's always fun to read the paranoid comments in response to an article like this - the news came out on April 1, and there's a tradition...
The spam tracking continues. 642 pieces of junk mail hit me last month, a very similar count to the 639 in January . If I had more time I'd tie this into some sort of global spam tracking tool. But I'm sure someone else has already written up all this - I'm not really putting a huge amount of effort into this lazy little record keeping project at the moment knowing that there are much larger repositories of this sort of information. Yet it would be a pity to stop tracking my own stats for some reason.
The lazy stats project continues - 639 pieces of junk mail hit me in January 2009. Significantly less than the 808 from last December .
Happy New Year! Starting off 2009 and saying goodbye to all that has gone by causes many to embrace looking forward to what's coming up, or to write up a retrospective. Since I've been asked about why my writing frequency varies, I figured why not add up the totals on the side of this page and identify the trends? After all, even Google is looking back at the statistics on their blog too . How often I write depends on both a combination of how much inspiration and spare time I have. If I have plenty of both, I write more, not surprisingly. And while I wrote yesterday about the typical auditor's busy season , you can't assume it's the same period of time for everyone, in the same company and in the same country. It's easy to get hit with a heavy assignment that eats up all your spare time during an unexpected time of the year. This blog got off the ground in the fall of 2005, and started to gather steam as I continued to prepare for the UFE - using it as an excuse...
All three of my mentees passed - I'm so incredibly proud of them. Each of them had their own challenges - as we all do - and all of them were successful. The only thing as good as passing the exam is seeing your friends pass. They're out still partying, catching up on missed sleep, or still jumping around with joy and relief. Congratulations also to young Mr. Direnfeld, CA student blogger and another successful writer! Passing the UFE: significantly more challenging and satisfying than winning the Fruit Loops Olympics While scanning through the results list, I realized a friend from elementary school also passed - congrats to her as well!. Now the only question is - why did the ICAO decide not to publish the passing rate for Ontario? Other provinces have revealed the overall national pass rate is 71.7% - thanks for the heads-up, Bill . Is Ontario afraid of a little competition from Quebec? Oh come on now. One of my colleagues, another successful writer, is so full of increased...
Check out this post, exposing yet another crazy scam, "241 Financing." Here's an excerpt from their ad - with David Fleming's comments below each underlined segment from the ad: * Fully open line of credit from $10,000 to $250,000 So they’re not only going to approve your mortgage, they’re also going to give you access to a huge bank account full of money. So either the borrower will use the line of credit to pay make the mortgage payments, or they’ll just spend, spend, spend. Either way, I don’t like this idea one bit. * Poor or no credit Are we really in the point of the economic cycle where people with poor or no credit should be getting mortgages approved? Isn’t this where the United States went wrong? What’s worse: poor credit or no credit? Does it matter? * Beacon reject or scores from 400 and up When I see the word “reject” in the advertisement, I can’t help but question the calibre of clients they are actively TRYING to attract. So when you’re rejected elsewhere...
I got one of my friends Water Rant for his birthday - it's a book based on the blog written by The Waiter; he recently wrote about his short field trip to buy coffee and ask questions at a Dunkin' Donuts shop, where he learns that monthly tipping has fallen from $500 to $350 for the two young men running the shop . That's a 30% drop - though he adds that the employees report that people aren't spending less on food, just on the tip side of things. Of course, you can't extrapolate a donut shop - a single data collection point - to cover an entire 300 million person nation, but it's an interesting insight nonetheless. Conducting research at a fancier place: would it make the economic situation look better, or even worse? I wonder if economists have given much thought to the "food service tipping index" as another measure of consumer confidence? But, given the fixed prices and - let's assume this is true - similar spending rate on donut shop products...
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