It’s a well known fact that I have many interests. What is less known is that I feel stretched in too many directions. I need to find a path and focus on it.
Where do I excel? Work that involves people and creativity. I thrive on positive feedback loops that incrementally increase the level of difficulty. Photography, music, and certain types of software design provide an excellent outlet for this type of work. All three mediums provide a form of instant gratification that allow me to subjectively evaluate myself.
The question is, what path should I take. I cannot eliminate all my activities that require procedure and conformity, but I can try to set myself up for more positive feedback loops by simply removing the events that generate negative feedback. As such, I’m going to start removing activities from my schedule and focus strictly on the positive. Less quantity in my work, more quality. We’ll see where that gets me.
Many thanks to the Greek Life office for awarding me the “Creative Achievement” award for my photography work. I wasn’t able to attend the award ceremony last night, but I’m very honored. Last night I had my Object-Oriented design final and then performed with the orchestra in Thwing Ballroom.
When? This Friday at 10pm
Why? Two foam machines.
Who? You. Me. Her. Him. Oh, and that other girl.
Where? The only place that makes ancient Rome look like a Mormon dental convention: Phikap.
Oh, one of these days I’ll emerge from my pile of work and tell you about all the fun details I have neglected to blog for the past week. Until then, it’s back to studying for me!
These last couple days have been particularly packed with activity. Between interviewing with Hyland Software and Avanade, fraternity events, sorting through too many pictures, and a Diff Eq and a Sociology exam…I have not gotten much sleep. I have come to perfect my “go to bed at 23:00, wake up before 04:00″ strategy and it has worked out pretty well. After a stale bagel, a slice of cheese, and some oatmeal - I’m good to go.
Today I coded on my EECS430 Project - “AuPair: AI Home Automation” with Alex and Justin until it worked - which took over 6 hours of Java and MySQL coding. The good news? It works. That is, we have a client which can connect to a server which can populate and pull from a mysql database and execute wireless X10 events causing a lamp to turn on and off. The artificial intelligence is still being worked out using Ruby language and tied in with our super-slick Ruby on Rails web interface. Hopefully we’ll get a link to share once we give our presentation. Justin really has made the web interface look amazing.
Of course, on a sadder note, I spent my Friday evening coding. I plan on doing FPGA coding tomorrow morning. Then graph theory java coding in the afternoon until the evening. Repeat this all again on Sunday until finished…
One of the stipulations of joining the masters program is that I have to maintain a 3.5 GPA for all of my masters work courses. Considering my masters program officially starts this semester…let the fun begin.
I received my first “real” job offer today. Avanade, based out of Chicago, contacted me and told me they would be extending an offer for me to work fulltime starting at the end of December 2006. The offer is pretty good for a fresh college graduate, but I told them I had been accepted into the Case graduate program and would get back to them shortly about my decision.