Pockets of Blue

It’s been a real busy (read: enjoyable) past few weeks.  I have been gone every weekend and just about every weeknight too.  Several sports have been taking the vast majority of my free time: climbing mountains, tennis, soccer, and golf.  All I thoroughly enjoy, and all are cheap.  Well except for golf, but just because I have to buy a new pack of balls every 3-4 rounds since I suck. 

I have climbed nine high peaks over the past month in three weekends.  Twice with John, once with my old man.  Last weekend we were detoured around Lake Placid because there was a veritable caravan of cyclists spread out over 50 something miles in the loop between Keene and Placid.  More specifically, it was an Ironman triathlon. 

For those of you don’t know, the Ironman is not your ordinary triathlon.  Imagine waking up at 6 AM on a sunday to get ready for a bike ride.  Now imagine biking 56 miles on unrelentingly hilly roads in a long circle.  Now imagine coming back to the start, and having to do it again.  After the second lap is done, wipe your brow, drink some water, and go run a marathon.  Yep, 26.2 miles.  Get to it.  Upon giving it your all in that last final stretch of running (assuming your heart hasn’t exploded), you are reminded that you are participating in a triathlon.  Tri=3.  You are instructed to jump in the lake, which is nice and cool and feels great.  Unfortunately, you must swim 3 miles over 6 laps.  Merely finishing one of these in a 15-hour span of daylight is a superhuman feat, in my opinion.  Yet there are scores of people out there who do this professionally, 25 of which showed up in Placid that weekend.  Crazy stuff.

So we bypassed the psycho- err, triathlon, and made it to the trailhead for Cascade peak.  Cascade is a joke of a climb, the summit is about 2 miles from the road.  We ran up to the top in a little over an hour.  It’s view is phenomenal, the peak is bald and has a glorious 360° view, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since ascending Dix.  After chatting with a few French Canadian girls, we took off to hike nearby Porter Mountain, another High Peak and less than a mile away.  It took us under four hours to climb two high peaks.  Not bad.  Cascade was my 23rd high peak.  Halfway there baby!

The weekend before John and I knocked off four peaks in the Nippletop range.  Yeah, we were out there in the 90° sun while you were lounging about in your air-conditioning.  And it was awesome.  Pics are at left. 

Oh, and I posted my best panorama yet, of the entire Great Range.  Low and high quality

What do people usually do after graduating college?  Well, sadly, most go and live at home.  I never quite understood that, especially coming from as small a place as I do.  Why would you want to revert back to your high school life, minus the friends that you shared it with?  I have things to see, people to do.  Err…something like that.

So where does that leave me?  Well, I’ve been asking myself that all summer, flipping back and forth as to what I’m going to do after this co-op is over and I finally get my degree.  And no, I haven’t come to a decision.  In my mind I have two options:  Stick around Rochester, enjoying the job security and my circle of friends, or pack up and experience someplace else, essentially starting from scratch.  Various things are pulling me back and forth: my desire to be close to my family and friends, hike the adirondack 46, but also travel, experience the great beyond, and land a great job.

So far I’ve decided a couple things: First, it’s time to take that road trip I’ve been wanting to.  I will be driving across the country after this summer to see a good chunk of the good ol’ USA. If anyone else has had this in mind, let me know and I’ll take you along.  It’ll be real open-ended, off-the-cuff, and completely free of time constraints. Second, I’m not going to be living in this house anymore.  It’s just too damn messy, my room is the size of a closet, and it way too closely resembles the Forman house on That 70′s Show.  So that’s where I stand.  As I’ve said before, the future is bright…almost blindingly so.

No, I didn’t forget about the blog.  Just haven’t had much to post.  Over the past weekend I was in Michigan to attend my cousin’s wedding.  It was great; I met my folks there as well as a lot of relatives I hadn’t seen in awhile.  The wedding itself was short but sweet, and the rest of the weekend a lot of fun. 

A few weeks ago I promised to post some of the stuff I had been working on in the spring.  I had to do a bit of cleaning up and refactoring with my checkers project which took longer than I had thought.  I also included scripts for starting the server.  Everything can be found here, including source and executables for both Mac and PC. 

I also posted my astronomy poster here.  It is the culmination of ten weeks of work, maybe 80% of which was spent processing over 300 astronomical images to create the four displayed on the poster.  The resolution is pretty poor due to the compression of the images in the telescope’s camera, but I think they’re still pretty interesting.  You may want to download the file rather than viewing it in a browser, because it’s pretty big.

The summer’s going pretty well thus far.  I will be doing some hiking in the near future and will be working on some projects (reformatting the PC…) so stay posted!

Oh, and if anyone has pictures from the wedding, please send them my way!  Maybe I can even host them online somewhere. 

I spent most of the evening tonight working on an old panorama photo I started compiling last fall after a trip into the ‘daks.  It is a combination of eight images, comprising the most fantastic view I have experienced on a high peak (from the knife-edge summit of Dix).  Here it is in its full uncompressed glory, and again in an easier-to-handle version.

Foolishly, I used the camera’s auto settings to capture the images, so there are significant portions that were washed out, and huge exposure differences throughout.  However, I think the image is still pretty good.  Yeah, it could be better: give it a shot if you’re a photoshop whiz, for I’m not.

I have graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology.  Well, almost.  As part of my degree, I need four quarters of co-op experience, and as of now I only have three.  After the summer this will have been taken care of, and my degree will be in the mail.

Commencement was overall a satisfying experience.  Hardly any of the CS students showed up for the actual commencement ceremony, but of course everyone was there for the actual graduation ceremony (y’know, the one where they hand you your degree).  The speaker, Dean Kamen (inventor of the Segway among many other things), delivered an excellent message focusing on technology and how it can be used to aid people.  We, as degree-holding students in a technical field, are empowered with the knowledge necessary to make a difference in the world, and should strive to do so.  He, of course, said it more eloquently, but the message was largely the same: Use your degree as a means to give back to society, not just to earn a hefty paycheck and accumulate "stuff."

Mom and Dad came up for the ceremonies and we all had a great weekend together.  On sunday I headed back to Lowville to embark on a journey into the wilderness: a thru-hike of a portion of the Northville-Placid Trail, specifically the section between Long Lake and Lake Placid.  We encountered pretty rotten weather along with an army of mosquitoes, but it was still a blast.  Nothing can keep me from enjoying the wilderness, not even a rash of bug bites reminiscent of a chicken pox victim.

So tomorrow, I guess, is the start of my work life.  It feels kind of strange saying that, for I know that there will be plenty of activities distracting me from such work in the near future.  The future is bright, and I’m looking forward to an awesome summer.

Oh, and today’s my birthday.  Happy two-two to me!

I have been employed.  Yesterday morning I had an interview with Soleo Communications in Fairport.  I showed up at 9:30 and soon met with the CTO.  I was feeling kinda spacey at the time but squeezed in some insightful business questions for him (I’m good at that).  He talked about the company and its past, present, and future.  After forty minutes or so he passed be on to a couple other people, a manager and the company’s technical guru.  We discussed pretty much every aspect of my resume, right down to HarmoGen and my time in Germany.  The guru happened to question me on pretty much every technical part of my resume that I really don’t have much experience with (J2EE, XML, UML), but I handled them gracefully.  We chatted for an hour or so before passing me on to a couple former co-ops turned full-time employees.  I wanted to ask them exactly what they did there, because by that time I knew I had a shot at the position.  At around 11:30 I headed back home, content.  Five hours later they gave me an offer (come to think of it, every interview I’ve had with a woman has resulted in a job: go figure).  It’s only for $12.50/hr, but I knew I would be taking a pay cut from previous jobs just because it was a small company.  I had previously taken an oath to not work for another large corporation; mission accomplished.

It’s not that the atmospheres in these large companies (Paychex, Kodak) are all that undesirable, it’s just that there’s so many hoops to jump through to get anything done.  The larger the company, the less productive its employees are, for this very reason.  This is why these companies tend to hire poorer programmers.  Smaller companies need the best workers since they are more reliant on them individually.  I’m ambitious and want to make a noticable impact on the company(s) I work for.

So then:

May 27: Graduation
June 5: Begin work

In between: Hopefully a ton of hiking

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about programming languages, startups, and the current state of the software industry lately.  I’ve admitedly been kind of wading through the field in my head but realize now that in reality I’m pretty much submerged.  This is a good thing; my favorite classes at the moment both involve a lot of programming, and they keep me busy doing interesting projects.  Side note: these projects will be posted here or somewhere soon, so stay posted. 

The next project I want to do is rewrite this blog.  Right now TypePad provides all the code, layout, hosting space, everything.  I want to be able to write my own blog keeping this same URL.  Not sure if this is possible, but after finals are over I will have the time to further investigate.  The main reason for doing this is to learn Ruby, and the Rails framework as well.  Web applications (and their developers) are a hot item right now, and Ruby on Rails seem to be the best way to attack them.  At the RubyOnRails site their is a link to a demo of someone setting up a (very basic, but database-driven) blog in 15 minutes.  Very encouraging. 

So it’s week 9 and I have about two weeks left of college.  Pretty exciting. 

I have proved the cliché.  The video is about 7 megs so it might take a while to load.  I am too lazy to compress it so if you’re on dialup, sorry.  Right-click to save the file and just wait, I guess.

Proof that time does indeed fly when you’re having fun

I was coding at the time, and it was late at night.  I guess this proves that I enjoy coding in Java.  Note: the clock is radio-controller and I did not tamper with it.  The speed of the video was also not tampered with, rather I was just in a crazy time warp.  Actually, if you can figure out what was really going on, leave a comment: If you are correct you win a prize!

My schedule over the past 5-6 days has looked like this:

• 9:15     Get up for class
• 9:45     Drive to class
• 18:00   Return from my fourth class
• 18:01   Begin coding
• 4:00     Stop coding due to my brain turning to mush
• 4:05     Go to bed

…and repeat.

Tomorrow (today?) won’t be much different, just replace "Go to class" with "Move lots of heavy furniture."  Six more weeks…