(no subject)

[warthog9]

You know, it's a bit amazing to actually find myself on the other side of 16 years of school. I mean thats 8/11 of my life! Freaky. But I'm done... I'm graduated. I am going to get the little piece of paper saying Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.

One of my professors who I do greatly look up to, Prof. Jones, happened to stop by my graduation party. On his way out he specifically said I need to come back and get my masters, so I am no officially doomed, I will have to get my masters at some point ;-)............ It can wait a couple of years though.

So I've been awful quiet the last month and a half, school was taking up a lot of time and I had this insane urge to make sure I did fairly well in all my classes. I also started my job hunt, which I pretty much clamed up about, not wanting to say anything here that might come back to haunt me. I will relate parts of it here to fill you guys in in general.

Started the job search back in June, in retrospect maybe a little early, tossed my resume all over the bloody place. I signed up on Monster.com, I signed up on Dice.com, I wandered through job posting websites, I e-mailed, called, wrote everyone I knew and sent a copy of my resume. Suffice it to say I was putting forth a pretty good effort to find a job. It turned out my then current job was unable to hire me full time due to budget problems, the University is going through all kinds of cutbacks, chops, etc and there just wasn't the money right than to do it. Asked them to keep me in mind in the future and kept looking. Interviewed with the Baha'i National Center up in Chicago, interview went well I thought except.... once I was in Chicago the truck blew a tire. So here I was in my good interview clothes, in the parking lot of the BNC changing a flat tire. Ended up having Sears up there put a new tire on the rim while I finished up day 2 interview and than drove home on that. It's still going so I must have done something right with it. Unfortunatly I didn't hear back from them until just recently about finishing up some interview stuff, at which point a decision had already been made about my own prospects.

Interviewed with a company in Des Moines called Iowa Interactive, a small tech company basically doing websites for the state of Iowa. It so happens a buddy of mine, Ben works for them and apparently was telling them I was almost as cool as sliced bread. Went out there and did the interview and hung out with Ben, Sean and Josh for the rest of the weekend as we basically had Ben's bachelor party. Went to adventureland and hung out there, than went go-kart racing and car staring, etc. I ended up burning my right arm on the muffler of the go-kart though, not sure if I STILL have the burn mark on my arm or not have to go look...... It was a good weekend, filled with NO tires being blown ;-)

Life was quiet for a while, got a call back for Iowa Interactive, tossed some more resumes around worked my tail off trying to finish up school. Than I got an interview from a company out in San Jose, arranged to fly out Wednesday, interview thursday and fly back late that night. Sounds good right? Well it's an interesting story.

So also for the record.... I bought a car :-D. Ended up looking around for about two weeks, checked out places here in I.C., C.R., Des Moines, online, etc. I was looking everywhere. Started looking at new cars, decided I couldn't affoard that. Started looking at used, and realized a lot of them were kind of expensive too, looked, and looked and looked. Early on in the looking Sean mentioned that Carousel Motors there was an intersting looking Audi on their lot that he saw from their website. Made note of it and just kept going. Carousel had some interesting side notes to it, (1) I already knew one of the dealers there, he's a member of the Boy Scout Troop. (2) Josh was one of their mechanics. Hmmmm..... anyway so my general requirements for the car were:

• manual transmission
  
• drive well
  
• sporty-esque, not looking for a two seater but I'm not looking quite for a grandma car either
  
• people need to be able to actually get in the back seat and sit comfortably
  
• price ;-)
  
• sound system (either before or after modification) be good
  
• techy good ;-)
  

anyway, I had also been told that if I bought a Camry I would be killed (Sean), and Dodge's were out before I even started looking (Neon I drove in drivers ed, and every Dodge since than I have actively disliked). So Toyota was high in the running, and their Scion tC had just come out and looked good, drove well, has a seat thats a bit of a pain to position properly, manual transmission and good sound system. Now, it's a good car except for one thing: the stock stereo, while playing mp3's and all that jazz is nice, the buttons on it are a teeny tiny! They are a pain to hit and control nicely while driving. It made me really sad. Also, the way the dash is setup is there are deep wells for the gauges, and some of the side walls for each individual gauge blocks the view, partially, of information, lastly the windshield I THINK isn't all that tall, and offers you a very narrow view out (sorta), it takes a bit to get the seat into the right position to actually see out of it comfortably (see above about seat and it's a pain to get right). Ben M. really liked it and I thought it wasn't too bad so it ended up on the short list.

Sadly though I kept looking around for something else that I liked and could affoard, nothing seemed to fit right. So seeing at this point I hadn't gone and talked to my friend down at Carousel, bro and I headed over to see that car Sean mentioned a couple weeks back. Found it right away and took it for a test drive in the rain ;-). It's a '99.5 Audi A4 Quattro 2.8L V6. It stuck to the road very nicely despite the rain (yay for the quattro awd), and was a very nice car featuring a leathor interior, Bose sound system, moonroof, alloy wheels, power seats, electronic climate control, manual transmission, etc. It drove well and was tagged at about the same price as the tC. Hmmmm..... The downside to the Audi though is it was a used car, and it had several things noticably, and unnoticably wrong with it. All told it needed a new information console, cup holder, cruise control switches, head unit. But it was a certified pre-owned.

So now I had two cars, equally nice (more or less) with equally annoyances, etc. Had to choose. Argh! Ended up with the Audi :-D. It's a very nice car, and it's doing me well so far.

So back to the story of San Jose, picked my car up Wednesday afternoon after classes, got in it, and drove it to the Moline airport, and left it ;-) Great way to start the owning of a car by going and parking it somewhere and flying off. But got to the airport and found that the flight was delayed. Ok, fine not a big problem. Sit around la la la. Also found out that there was a major computer problem for Northwest and that all their flights were delayed. Ok even better. la la la. So plane comes and hour behind schedule, they get us onboard within 15minutes (bloody amazing!) and we are off and going to the Minneapolis airport decently on time. So land in Minneapolis, and taxi to our gate and than wait 15 minutes for the plane already there to clear off. Ok. Not much in the way of aniety at this point on my part. I originally had a 1hr 15 minute layover, and if all flights are delayed I should be just fine. Get of the plane at A14 (this is key), look at the status of my flight to San Jose and find it's only delayed 20 minutes! Aww poo I in theory have 5 minutes to get to..... F7. Awww carp. Book it. I'm running flat out with my carry on (all my luggage thankfully) and in the process sheer the strap's clip, but I cought it before it hit the ground, not missing a stride. So I'm flying through the concourse here, I did A14 - > F7 in 4 minutes I think, maybe 5. However.... I missed the plane, regardless, by 3 minutes. Going: ok this is pretty typical, lets get on the next flight tonight and I'm delayed a little bit tonight. But wait, NO! The next flight out is at 9am the next morning which puts me in San Jose at 11am. Carp. Ok fine, if thats the best we got lets run with it, and oohh yeah go talk to the ticketing agent back at the front of the airport to see what they can do for me tonight. Ok fine, sounds reasonable. So at this point I'm not mad, angry but a little annoyed. Thats it, I'm used to this by now. I'm also hungry hadn't eaten anything since lunch and it's like 9pm now or something like that.

So I get to the front and find a long line of people, ok fine, get in line, stay inline, wait my turn. each person is taking about 20 minutes for them to deal with. Ok, I mean there are going to be people w/ issues and problems on a day that the computer system fails. No biggie, so I'm talking with the nice people standing around me, a family of 4 or 5 heading to a wedding and a business traveler. Nice people, so we get to the head of the line after an hour (rather insane but hey I'm not going anywhere) and the family goes up and finds out they aren't doing any more hotel vouchers. What...... but I was overhearing this one gent two people behind me just tryig to make it to the checkout window to make his flight, I kindly let him go ahead of me after checking with the people behind me so at least SOMEONE could get out of the airport that night. So I get up to the front and see if they can do any better with the flight in he morning, another airline perhaps, etc. And than ask for the hotel voucher. Uhhh un nope, no can do. Not only are they not giving out vouchers, every hotel for 30 miles is full, bad night to fly. Carp. Carp. Carp.

Me: So what am I supposed to do?

Agent: Well your welcome to stay in the airport, probably as good as it's going to get

CARP! So they did give me some food voucher stuff, and I went and ate, knowing I think better with food in me. Also started letting everyone know what was going on, the delays the insanity. So I ended up spending the entire night in the airport, for the record it's not fun. did find a couple of chairs, I pulled together and did my best to sleep on, about it really. Woke up from my 3hrs of sleep, change into my interview clothes and got some breakfast. Waited a cuple hours for the plane (it was ontime, I was early) and got to San Jose right at 11. Did the interview, and because my interview was going to be so short I had my departure time pushed back.... except that means I'm overnighting in Minneapolis again. GRRRR. Luckily I had what I THOUGHT was a voucher but what ended up being a "we'll get you a hotel... cheaper". So I did the interview, got back to Minneapolis overnighted in a bed and got a shower. Went home, grabbed the car went to class, grabbed Sean and... went to Ben's wedding. Talk about a whrlwind.

Now things have pretty much calmed down, ended up taking the job in Des Moines, at least for now, and I'm commuting back and forth. All the stuff on the car is fixed and I'm doing well. Not much else to tell really.