About Me

As the title suggested, my name is Wang, Guansong and this is my site. I’m also known as Butters because I use his picture as my icon all over the internet. Despite what the picture implies, I’m not blonde, short, cute or round-faced. Although my friends claim I look exactly like Butters.

I’m born and raised in Shenyang, the largest city in Northeast China. As I was searching for the wikipedia page for Shenyang, I was surprised my high school also had one: Northeast Yucai School!

Then I went to Beijing for college at Peking University. I was enrolled in Yuanpei program (now renamed to college), which confused a lot of people who cared to ask about my department. Or I could have just answered Economics, since that was my major for graduation.

Afterwards I studied in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, concentrated in financial econometrics. For those who don’t know, it’s statistics or mathematics to be used in economics and especially finance.

Interests

Basketball is my sport. Every tall kid has to be encouraged to play basketball by some one at some time growing up. After Yao retired I don’t really have a home team in NBA. However, I do enjoy watching Spurs.

I run occasionally, mostly to lose weight. I don’t have runner’s high and I hate it most of the time.

Not an avid reader, but I do like books. I have a Nook Simple Touch, which I paid $30 for at Thinksgiving sale. Love it. I bought paper books mainly to support the local stores. The book stores I frequent in Chapel Hill and Shenyang are all occupied by some cats. Coincidence? Right now I’m reading A Dance with Dragons, and The Three-Body Problem.

I enjoy watching US TV shows. I will not list them so you can judge me watching too much TV.

Programming and Data Analytics

I guess this will be my trade. Fortunately I am interested in the subject enough to do them sometimes just for fun. Half of the purpose of this site is actually as a showcase for my projects.

I mainly work with Ubuntu 14.04. I mess the system around once in a while (most likely 6 months for some reason). Yeah, geek alert. I have 4 or 5 laptops still running well. So it was not a good experience upgrading systems back then when Ubuntu was not that user-friendly.

R is my major working language. I began with Matlab and used it for a few years. I’ve heard about R a lot but never really bothered to try until I got to do some parallel computing on a remote CLI server. The Matlab parallel toolbox requires the GUI to be open so I had to keep the login status. Maybe there’s a way for Matlab to do it, but I’m happy with R now.

I know C/C++ and that’s about it. I had classes on them but never had the proper occasion to really practice them on.

Python, Shell, SQL, etc, I only learned them just enough to accomplish whatever I needed to do. So yeah, I’ll put all of you in my resume.

Last thing, I write either plain text or LaTeX.