As if June 3rd wasn’t already burned into my mind, the CFA Institute actually emailed candidates this week to notify us that Examination tickets are now available online. Get em while they’re hot. An excerpt from the email:

“EXAMINATION TICKETS NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE
Examination admission tickets for the June 2006 CFA examination are now available online. CFA Institute does not distribute paper admission tickets. It is your responsibility to print a copy of your admission ticket on clean, unused paper and bring it with you to the test center on exam day. If you do not have internet access, please contact Information Central to obtain your ticket by facsimile. You will not be admitted to the testing room without an admission ticket.”

I love to think that my competition may a) not have internet access and b) need to be told to print their tickets on clean, unused paper.

To address a) first: how does The Institute think candidates would receive this EMAIL in the first place without a networked computer? Why not just write us the following … “If you don’t receive this email please hit reply-all and let us know ASAP.”

And b), well I wonder if this is some kind of endemic problem that affects all sorts of self-ticket printing industries, like Ticketmaster, airline boarding passes … do people actually go around printing their boarding passes, concert/movie tickets on paper that they also use to wipe their bums?

OR

is the Institute is smoking crack?

Those are the only two possible explanations that I can think of right now. Not sure what either means for my passing the CFA.

On to my journal:

Days left until exam: 36

Class attendance: 50%…I stayed most of class…well, almost half. My laundry HAD to get done, I swear…

Class: This week’s theme: “Blue Monday”. (1) An informal sampling during class showed that 67.5% (+/- 3%) of the male students were wearing blue shirts. I was going to dig deeper into the data by running some regressions, correlations and Monte Carlo Simulations but unfortunately I have no clue how to do that. What’s up with the white collar workers wearing blue shirts? Another closeout sale at Brooks Brothers?

Also blue were the students. You couldn’t find a more depressed and low energy group of people. The guys all – except for yours truly - appear to be losing their hair and the girls just don’t seem to care as much about their looks. Gone are the days when the class hotties used a little makeup and wanted to show off their slutty Spring outfits…which leads me to

Hot Girl Count: 1…cute girls 5. I’m a naturally bullish person, but I’m getting very bearish at the prospects of seeing hot girls in class over the next month. Should I even bother attending going forward?

Resolution: Buy the Jack Bauer hoodie and canvas messenger bag…I’m thinking it will help to set me apart from the clan of blue shirts in class when I finally hit on The Class Hottie.

24 Update: Jack Bauer rules! Episode rundown: Jack Bauer kicked ass AGAIN … nuf said (episode recap here.)

Read the rest of The CFA Follies.