Started From The Bottom

Now we're here.

Heard that song for the first time today, repetitive, but I'm a Drake fan. Points for them smoking hookah randomly through out the music video too haha.

Basically as soon as I thought I was going to have time to read books and post on here and do side projects... everything I had to do came down in a rush and lasted 3 months.

I ended up being contracted to build two websites through out the semester. One of them is mostly done, but I have a few things to update on it. I guess it's really a short to-do list of things I want to do for it that I don't necessarily have to, but it reflects on me, you know? It's BridgeIQ+. The other isn't complete. I've gone through a few iterations of the design, but the application the website is marketing for hasn't been completed so I haven't been able to do anything too concrete, it does look really good though.

I finished with decent grades. They kind of reflected my post at the beginning of the semester, the part where I was describing the classes.

I don't really feel like writing so this might come out as one of those broken flow / archiving life event / museum cold posts.

I did so much this semester. I was so busy; coding basically non-stop.  And the funny thing is, I enjoyed it so much. You would think the lack of social time would have been really annoying but... it wasn't. My friends thought I was a ghost sometimes still, but I managed to balance being social and all my work alright, it turned out great actually.

I am still working with those Biomedical engineers on our startup. We won $5000 dollars from a venture fund competition at UT for the idea, and we're in the middle of another one that is Knoxville wide. If we win that one it's another $10000, it ends June 20th.

I really wanted to stay in Knoxville and take the job that was offered to me here, which was the part time job I had my last two semesters. It was a pretty huge pay cut from Garmin, not really in terms of money, but in terms of no benefits being offered. My idea was I would take that job and work 40 hours a week for pretty decent pay and spend all my free time working on our startup. If it takes off obviously it could be worth a lot of money.

I like the idea, it solves a real problem and that makes me happy... but it is kind of boring to code for something that isn't technically challenging.

My mom of course hated the idea of me not going to Garmin and was very upset with me. She had my family working against me on this. I ended up getting wind of one more possibility, a doctor friend of the doctor we did (are doing..) our senior design project with, looking for someone to make an iPad app for his clinic. It could have been huge but I think he kind of flaked out. If that had come through I would have definitely stayed. I decided to go to Garmin.

I am moving to Kansas City in less than 10 days. I had found an awesome two bedroom two bath condo right on the river in the area I want to live, but right before I could complete all the paper work I got an email from the owners saying they found someone who wanted to buy it and they decided to take the offer. :(

That's ok though, because in the week that passed with that happening, one of the original condos I found when looking opened up, so I swooped on it. It's a 1 bedroom 1 bath in the Library District of Kansas City. It's pretty awesome, I put some photos in this Dropbox folder: Condo Pictures.

Everything is exactly how it looks in the place, except that the bedroom is actually 14x10, which is about the size of my bedroom right now, which is awesome. It isn't furnished, but I'll be decorating how I like, minimal, modern.

I've come to realize I have an insane appreciation for design. I started looking for furniture and 4 hours later realized that I was using intricate queries and looking up the correct words to describe different pieces of furniture. I eventually decided that I have to learn how to design furniture. Add it to my list.

I want to be able to...

I stopped writing for a minute and came back to "I want to be able to". I don't know what I was going to say, could have been anything.

I started writing a To-Do list app in my free time, it looks really great, I hope to have it in the app store by the end of June. Speaking of which, there is a hackathon in Kansas City the weekend after I start my Job at Garmin and I'm really excited for it. I want to network and I think it will be an awesome chance. The condo's I'm going to live in are right next door to the Kansas City Club, which is basically a country club, I'm going to join. They have awesome gym facilities, a pool, and a hot tub and they are literally right next store. The networking opportunities there will be pretty awesome as well. I'm excited for that.

I think this summer I'm going to spend part of my time studying for the GRE. Then starting Fall of 2014 I'll pursue my masters in CS at the University of Missouri Kansas City, unless something else comes up; Garmin pays for it so I might as well take advantage of that. I might start taking Japanese classes even sooner at a local community college or somewhere. I really want to start learning it well. Also, piano, I'm still just ok. Definitely going to pay for lessons after I settle.

I have 309 Quora notifications right now, a new personal record. I'll probably spend a couple hours sometime soon clearing them out and absorbing all the information. Sometimes Quora can be exhausting because it is so much information at once, but I still love it. I never applied there, I don't know why not, I guess I just didn't have time. I might still, in a while.

I've grown so much in the last 6 years. I really can't believe it. 6 years is a really long time though, I'm just sort of now realizing it. Life is extremely fleeting. I feel like watching 5 centimeters per second now.

It's 1 am and I have to be up for work. I'll be back sometime soon. I want to start writing about technical things, but I think I should probably start another blog for that. This one might fall by the wayside (that idiom comes from the bible) if that happens, but I can't be sure, I like introspection too much.