(f)unemployment begins..

And it begins with a 7:30 wakeup!  So here I sit in an incredibly sunlit basement room, basking in the sound of my parent's wolfhound Annabelle clicking her nails around the room, investigating my semi-unpacked life.  I've accomplished the irresponsible; quitting my pretty-decently-paying engineering job with no real backup.  I've got 3 months living expenses in the bank, a ton of career-related research bookmarked, a bike-courier job interview in an hour, and a sheet of paper labeled "to do" with almost nothing written on it.  Well, almost nothing.

We may be done with snow, but the snow is not done with us.

I started making a list of things that I'd like to do or accomplish, and it got me to thinking... what about the things I've already accomplished? I mean, not about making a list of them, but did they affect my life in any positive way? Was I happy when they were done? Should I have taken a few pictures along the way?

  Quitting my job to become an engineer: That was kind of a wild ride. 2 years of awesome grades and (almost) no social life, but it put the lid on a solid 3-4 years of drinking and feeling sorry for myself. The crowning achievement was a weeklong visit to the ICU battling acute viral encephalitis*.

After a semester of recovery and restudying for missed final exams, I went to MINNESOTA - the land of beautiful summers and "what the fuck was I thinking" winters. I made some great friends in MN, and I got to know some of my family that I'd never really been in touch with. My ability (motivation) to study never really recovered after my stay in the hospital, so I kind of feel like the whole experience of getting my degree was kind of tainted... my heart really wasn't in it at that point, but I did finish with a decent overall GPA.

 The whole point of the experience was to get out from behind a desk, and to escape from doing mindless work that I wasn't excited about. This naturally resulted in... *It's funny how two years can be compressed into less than a paragraph. Lots of other things happened, but none that impact my life in a very big way overall. Getting an aerospace job doing mindless work that I'm not really excited about: So, now I live in Frederick, MD. I'm about 40 min from work, which pays about what my old job did. I have to admit, at least the work takes actual skill. I get to use my degree, sort of, sometimes. That said, I'm now eligible to work on much more complicated and interesting things; it's clear now that to find them, I'll have to actively hunt them down. Back to that list... I know the run-up to this point has been a little Debbie Downer, but things ARE actually going pretty well. I've joined the crossfit cult and I'm training for a marathon (more posts on that later). I'm brewing a beer for a homebrew competition (and it's the 5th batch I've brewed, so I guess I finally have a successful hobby that I'm sticking with). I've contacted a few companies who are working with autonomous sailboats because I think the idea of living by the ocean, working with robots, and doing work that doesn't have any military/national-security interests would for once be a really nice change. I'm also looking at possibly moving to Norway. I have friends over there, the economy is doing great there, I'd have more vacation time and the exchange rate means that my Kroner would open up a lot of doors to serious travel. It'll be interesting to read this later and see if I followed through on anything more than just brewing another beer.

A borrower nor lender be.

Since the dawn of time, back when Og had an extra sharp stick laying around, people have been lending and borrowing. Og's not getting that stick back; it's dull now anyways.

Receipt of my College Diploma (title in progress)

In the advent of MIT's OpenCourseWare, Khan Academy, and Just Math Tutoring (just to name a few), I've been forced to re-evaluate the way I look at my current college experience.

I recently quit my job (and the cushy salary that it entailed). I decided that one more day doing something I hated just wasn't worth the money anymore. Even the prospect of being promoted sounded more like punishment than reward.

I love technology; I spend a good number of hours poring over tech articles on the internet, visiting science museums, and taking on projects like building electromagnetic motors and solar calculators. I'm turning my passion into action and I'm a born-again undergraduate student... and this isn't something I'm pursuing idly; I'm "that guy" in class. I sit in the front row, I record lectures, I raise my hand and ask questions when there's only 2 minutes of class left... If the school knew how much time I spent at the student center library, they'd probably start charging me rent.

Maybe it's because I don't go to a school renowned for engineering, or maybe undergraduate academia just isn't given the same level of attention as graduate/PhD programs are, but I've been discovering that most of my real education is coming from the internet.

I owe the vast majority of my calculus knowledge to PatrickJMT on youtube. My understanding of Electromagnetic theory would be limited to a few study guides that don't even MENTION Maxwell or his four equations if it weren't for Professor Lewin's 1992 lectures. I spent more time editing my chemistry lab reports to make sure the histograms matched the specifications than I did learning what the spectrophotometer was telling me about equilibrium between reactants.

So this raises the question: is the college degree I'm chasing little more than a receipt? Am I paying thousands of dollars just to have a few individuals make sure I keep my learning on schedule, and make sure the conclusions I come to meet their specifications?

I'm not arguing that school is a total waste; If I didn't have these task-makers at my back, I might be getting good at Halo instead of finding limits of integration, but I will gladly make the argument that an educated person isn't defined by the diploma he or she holds, but by the undocumented strides they take towards really understanding the courses they take.

Feel free to leave any thoughts; I'll get back to them when I'm done youtubing in the blanks my "formal" education left on motional electromagnetic force.

Facebook and Contra, together at last

Ok Seriously, This Works...THE FACEBOOK KONAMI TRICK---
While on facebook:
On your keyboard - up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, Enter key,
Next: On your mouse = Right click, Left click

Next: On your keyboard press up and down and magic crcles will appear. After you follow all the steps scroll up or down...then the circles will appear. The only way to get rid of them is to refresh the page.

How cool is that?

Give Your Simple Trigonometry problems a (sin) Wave Goodbye

Kate Nowak: mild mannered high school math teacher, or genius extrordinaire? You decide (I hate suspense: she's both).

As I've been bludgeoning my way through calculus, I've been discovering that trigonometry (or as students refer to it: flippin' ghey math) is becoming more and more important. While googling trigonometric mnemonic devices this evening, my buddy Max came across this gem in the rough on Kate's blog f(t):



I won't paraphrase her description since she pretty much nailed it, so let's use some quotes...

"Flip down the finger that corresponds to the angle whose sine and cosine you need.
The number of fingers to the left gives you the sine, and the number of fingers to the right gives you the cosine.

So if you flip down your index finger which corresponds to 30 degrees...
there is one finger to the left.
and there are three fingers to the right.

Try it for the fingers that correspond to the other reference angles. For example, if you flip down your pinky, there are four fingers to the left (sin(90) = radical 4 over 2 = 1) and zero fingers to the right (cos 90 = radical 0 over 2 = 0.) It works!

It's just another way of organizing the cofunction behavior of sine and cosine to remember the values of five reference angles, but adults and kids both flip out when I show them. Kids especially feel that they "don't have to memorize" if they know this method."

Hey Gents, I don't see a ring on that left hand. Hats off to Kate, trigonometry superhero.

Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (oh my!)

My salute today goes out to my favorite web comic - XKCD. I can't imagine that anyone with a shred of nerd in them doesn't check this site out every Mon, Wed, and Fri, but incase you haven't heard of it, now you have. It's safe for work 99.99% of the time.

Starwars Uncut - Create your own scenes and submit!

Hats off to Gizmodo for unearthing this Gem. Casey Pugh, a lead Flash and senior app developer at Vimeo has started something called "Star Wars Uncut." This project challenges anyone who wants to pitch in to recreate 15 seconds of their favorite "Star Wars: A New Hope" scenes any way they see fit and submit it to the collective (http://www.starwarsuncut.com/).

Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

Obligatory Win7 post (Update)

It's awesome. Why am I losing internet connectivity when I put my computer in tablet mode? Still pretty awesome though.

Customer "Care" (and using hangups to solve hang-ups)

I scream, you scream, We've all screamed for better customer care when we finally admit (after hours of fiddling) that we might not be able to fix that faulty piece of gear. Now, we all know in our hearts that when we dial that 800 number-of-shame that we're going to have to endure a battery of choose-your-own adventure choices before a tech graces us with their know-how... and that's not a quick and painless process; god help you if you misdial. Then you sit on hold (though tonight, I actually had no queue in front of me, so boo-yah!). While they connect you, even before getting the actual help you called for, the most important part of the process begins.

I don't know how it's done, but some cosmic lottery assigns you either 1.) the guy who takes his help-manuals home with him, and reads them to his children at night, or 2.) a total douchebag. There really is no grey area here, because when you've fiddled for hours, battled with a voice recording that asks you to input the binary equivalent of what your problem is, and waited on hold, if that person isn't so excited about solving your problem they can barely contain themselves, you kinda want to punch them in the kidneys.

I upgraded to Windows 7 (it's awesome), but I've had some compatibility issues that I've tried to solve on my own for the last couple of weeks. Finally I gave in, called Lenovo, suffered through the shenanigans mentioned above, and finally got Frank on the line. Frank... is a douchebag. Now, if I was still new at the "getting help" game, this story would go a lot further, but I'm a little older, a little wiser, so *click*.

Trust me folks, it's easier to wait on hold for another 45 min than deal with Frank the douchebag. Needless to say Matt was a lot more helpful, my new drivers are downloaded, my problems are solved, and I have time to go grab that Choco Taco I've been thinking about since noon.

Building good habits

As a born-again student chasing my geek dreams, I've had to make some adjustments. Math, for starters... totally awesome, the basis of most of the stuff you spend hours drooling over as you surf your favorite tech blogs, and as it would turn out, really really hard to learn if you've taken a 10 year hiatus from it. (I'm taking a 30 minute hiatus from it now as I write this).

I've found that there's an important connection between learning calculus, getting good at Halo, growing muscle, or accomplishing pretty much anything you set out to do. You probably instinctively know that connection is practice. I didn't just wake up good at Halo (actually, I'm still not all that great); I had a 7 year old (not a typo) wipe the floor with me and taunt me in his sweet, childlike, rotten little voice... and then I practiced and practiced until finally I beat him. Same story with derivatives, finishing a marathon, etc.

What I didn't expect, and what may or may not take you by surprise, is that stuff we don't do is practice too: Not studying. Not going to the gym. Not consistently writing in your blog that only your mom reads. I think the analogy that might strike home the quickest is the dirty laundry corollary. I have a hamper... at least I think I do, but instead, I practice daily carefully using my dirty laundry as an impromptu carpet covering. My room isn't a war-zone right away, but after a week or so, it really starts to build up... that's how I've started viewing the other foibles (did I use that right?) in my life... incrementally not all that bad, but after a while, I have to spend an entire Saturday washing and folding my bad habits.

The beauty for you and I? There are TONS of systems for improving the way we do stuff... my favorite places to look are Lifehacker and instructables.com. If you've got something you want fixed, give 'em a whirl. I'll probably refer to these sites a lot... and very likely point out favorite posts there. I also plan to start posting my own instructables as I progress through my Bio-Electrical engineering/Comp Sci degree. Speaking of breaking bad habits, it's time to get back to the books.

Not a great first post, but not the worst one out there... :)

Post 0

So, if I'm going to start a blog (vice a web-journal), I need to lay down a foundation. I don't expect this to go totally smoothly, but my idea is to get some attention, and more importantly get some feedback... Yeah, the last thing the intertubes need is another tech blog, but I've got long term goals here, and I set them high [Wired, Engadget, Geekdad (one day)].

People that might find something in common with me... new engineering/comp sci students, tech geeks, and DIYers. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe my only follower will be my mom. I guess we'll just have to see.

So without further Ado, onto my 1st post.