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Well, I have survived the first two days of work. Luckily there is plenty to do, so the days are going by rather quickly. I still have this strange feeling like I’m ditching school or missing something. It doesn’t quite feel permanent yet. I’ve got several large projects which should keep me occupied and learning for the coming weeks. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do at home. With all my time being MINE finally, I can’t seem to figure out what to do with it. The last couple of days I’ve been playing video games, I find this to be the most cost effective form of entertainment at the moment, as everything else that pops into my head involves buying expensive equipment. I’m moving along in my latest book “The Soloist” which is quite good so far, I can’t wait to finish and then see the movie. I might have to buy myself some new toy to try and occupy myself, or to retrofit something I already own. I hate to waste my time with games, but it seems like my only option since I’m going through books and music so quick they’re no longer cost effective.

Everything went great with our big server migration at work. Very few complaints, we still have a few lose ends to tie up, but that is to be expected. Well, I have a few things on my list to finish up, so I might as well get to those. If I can make some side money maybe I’ll get one of my toys, or perhaps I’ll be a responsible adult and save the money like I know I should.

So, Graduation was Friday. I am officially done with school. Immediately following graduation I went to lunch and then to work for the next 9 hours. The day after that I worked for about 5 hours and then was off to Palm Springs. I had a great dinner and went to see “The Taking of Pelham 123″ which was excellent. Went swimming for about 45min and then left for home. So, tonight should be the first night I get to catch up on sleep in about 5 days. Tomorrow morning is the first day of work meaning I have to be up way earlier than normal. Hopefully my body will catch up to me.

The big question now, is what am I going to do next. I have planned on a few things, most of which are already on my Goals page, but I’ll go into a bit more detail here. For the next couple of months I’m going to be saving up a down payment for a condo. The timing seems right, and I think I’ll be able to get something pretty nice that I can fix up or just upgrade in general. My plan is to purchase the condo by mid September, so I’ll probably start looking in mid August. The rush being that Obama’s first time home buyers stimulus tax rebate is only in effect for this year at the moment, and you have to close on your home purchase by November 31st. So, with 60 days or so of escrow I don’t want to cut it too close. My basic requirements for a place will be 2-3 bedrooms, >=2 baths, and a community swimming pool. I don’t want to be too picky to ensure that I have a good group of places to look at. Once I find a place my plan is to rent 1-2 bedrooms out depending if I get a 2 or 3 bedroom condo. This should help me offset my mortgage cost.

As I mentioned earlier I am starting to work full time at IMARC on Monday. So, I will be able to check off my full time job with benefits goal then. I’m hoping I can get a lesson or two of flight school between now and getting my own place, but that might not be realistic with the ammount of money I need to save up. So, I might have to put this plan on the back burner for just a little while longer. I definitey will not be dropping this, as I can’t wait to get back up there flying. As for Piano Lessons, I will be enrolling in the Introductory class at Saddleback for the fall semester. I’ll take these in the evenings which should be fun.

I don’t know if I’m still in shock that I have absolute freedom from school, or if I’ve had no regard for school for so long that this is the norm. I have noticed I’ve been remembering things that I had to drop because of school such as Piano Lessons, playing the cello, and other things which I now find myself excited to start again. At the moment I’m trying to decide what I can do to bring in extra income, I think I will start consulting on weekends and evenings again to try and beef up my down payment and to allow me to have a little fun now that I’m free of school.

So, after struggling for nearly 48 hours straight to get my last 165 assigment completed and turned in I gave myself quite the weekend in my book :). After working all day on Friday I split from work and headed over to The District to meet my bro, his girlfriend, and Izzie for dinner and a movie. We had Lucile’s and then went to see “Up”. Bother were excellent. Saturday morning I went for doughnuts with my Dad, we walked on the beach trail afterwards. After we got back I got ready and headed up to Fullerton for my first flight lesson. I will definitely be going back for more. I flew a Cessna 172 plane from Fullerton, out over Long Beach, down the coast over Balboa Island, inland back over Santa Ana, over Disneyland and back to Fullerton. I haven’t stopped thinking about going back since. The owner of the flight school started talking to me and asked about school and all that. After hearing I was a Computer Science major he recommended “The Last Lecture” to me as a great read. So, after getting home I snagged that on my Kindle. Started reading through it. Saturday night I went out to dinner with my dad and brother to Fred’s for dinner and then we went to the movies again and saw “Hangover” which was absolutely hillarious. After I got home I read through the end of “The Last Lecture” before finally going to bed. This morning I woke up, went to Starbuck’s with my dad for breakfast. Headed over to Walmart to pick up oil and an oil filter for the Jetta. Changed the oil and rotated the tires on the Jetta. This afternoon my dad an I took the Jeep out for fish n chips at a local Mexican restaurant we hadn’t been to in several years. From there we cruised up to the Toyata dealership to check out Tacomas. Cruised on home after that and played some video games. Then we went up to the Irvine Toyota dealership to look at one specific Tacoma, which turned out to me incorrectly described on the web. Swung by the Spectrum to grab some T-shirts. Got home, watched Antitrust and had a great steak dinner finished off with a Coldplay concert on TV and now here I am. By far one of the best weekends in a long time, and very welcome after a not so fun week. Here’s to a great last week of school. Graduation is on Friday.

We are fast approaching the final week of classes. I still have a good amount of work to complete, but feel that I can finish it. Today I picked up my cap & gown along with tickets to my graduation ceremony. Even no it still feels kinda creepy to think that school will be gone. Having been in school non-stop for the last 8 years, no matter how much I hate it, I know it and can do it. With this chapter of life closing, I have a very strong compulsion to continue my education finally with the subjects of my choosing. I have decided that I will take an Intro to Piano course at Saddleback in the evening starting in the fall semester. I played when I was really little, and had to stop because of school. Come to think of it, I stopped a lot of things because of school in my past. Projects, hobbies, dreams all placed on the shelf early on. I have only recently begun to see what I left on that shelf and am reinvigorated at the thought of being able to pursue these items without interruption. I also am considering taking flying lessons. I was an avid Flight Simulator player when I was younger and never saw it going anywhere. After doing some research and being inspired by a friend whom flew when they were in their late 20’s, I too would like to experience the freedom of flying my own plane. I’m hoping I can get in on a demonstration session this Saturday. It will tell me everything I need to know in terms of flying a small plane and whether this is something I really want to pursue. I’m very much looking forward to it and hope that I might have found myself a new hobby with untapped potential. For now, I must continue working on my Huffman compression algorithm :(. More to come soon.

We are down to less than 2 weeks to graduation time. I’m freaking out about how much school work I still have to do. I can’t believe it all has to be done in less than 2 weeks. I will definitely be cutting back my hours at work for the next few weeks to ensure I can do whatever I can to finish these classes once and for all. I haven’t worked on anything super productive in terms of personal projects recently. I did however play with XBMC for the first time which I am taking quite a liking to. There are a few features that I would need revised for it to better fit my purposes, but based on how open and well documented everything is on the project I don’t think I’ll have a problem writing some scripts to bridge the gaps. I have been working on a side project for my aunt the most frequently of all my outside projects. I have been putting together a prototype/beta setup to try and get the idea off the ground. I will share more once I have stuff up online, don’t want to give anybody any ideas until I get mine out first. Well, got some school work to work on, and the American Idol finale to breeze through. I have almost finished my 3rd book on my Kindle. This last one has taken much longer with all the goings on, but I’m looking forward to completing the Assasin series by Robin Hobb and moving on to something else.

With all the work I have been doing outside of school I have very quickly fallen behind. With only 4 weeks left before graduation I have much to catch up on and much to make up for grade wise. Strangely over the last couple of days I felt more inspired than I have in a long time to create and work on projects. Not only this but to plan for the future. I have set some more goals for myself. I definitely want to be moved out into my own place in the next 6 months. I also want to take the Introduction to Piano course that Saddleback offers in the evenings. I have always loved the sound of the piano and the music that has been created for it. I came across a long time composer I had not heard of last night thanks to the TV show House. In this last weeks episode the show opens on a ballet rehersal and the piece the orchestra is playing I had not heard before. I decided to research and see if someone had recognized it. Sure enough someone else had posted the question and someone whom recognized the song was kind enough to post it as the Second Movement of a piece entitled Company by composer Philip Glass. I had never heard of Mr. Glass before and started sifting through his work on Amazon playing various samples. I came across a Piano Solo Collection of his with a multi part piece entitled Metamorphosis which I have not stopped listening to in over 12 hours. It is a contemporary piece that is minimalist in how few notes are actually used to create the many moods the piece takes you through. It is repetative to those that aren’t big on Techno or any other type of beat based songs where all you have is an instrument and time to create feelings. I purchased the CD through Amazon’s MP3 Download site this morning and am very satisfied. I must say Amazon is impressing me a lot recently. I love my Kindle and am quickly growing to love their MP3 store. The downloads are incredably fast and they have a wide selection of niche artists.

I have begun working on a personal project that I will be undertaking with my aunt in the Real Estate market. I’ve started to construct a prototype and hope to have a beta version completed shortly. That is coming along quite nicely. I also have picked up another work project involving net booting servers and hope to learn a lot with that project. I have considered setting up a netboot server at home for a while. I’m not entirely sure what I would use it for or what I would netboot exactly, but I have always been facinated with the idea.

I also am looking through open source music database projects and music managers. I have used Amarok in the past, and tried Songbird. Both players have features I like, but have things missing that I want. I’m looking for something like a cross of both plus some more features. Here is a list of features I looking for:

• MySQL database (for expandable programming)
• Intelligent Shuffle (IMMS style)
• Wireless iPhone Sync (including playing stats)
• Multi Room Audio Expandable
• Network Audio Playback (PulseAudio)
• Intelligent Playlists and Play Times (i.e. no Christmas music in February, but an emphasis in late November/December)
• Automated Indexing (Purchase a song and it should be auto categorized and added to the appropriate playlists)
• Songbird Style Visualization using Flickr photos in a PS3 style slide show with falling photos)
• Playback Music Videos when available in place of a given Song for visual aspect

These are just a few of the things I’m taking in to consideration. I will be storing my music on my server in an SMB share off of Windows. I want to have new music placed in there well organized and managed.

Things seem to be flying past faster than I can have a glance at them. Two midterms are done, albeit I’m not very satisfied with how they went, the only redeeming hope is that most kids weren’t very content with their performance on them either. My last midterm for this round is on Tuesday of next week, which is also the next round of project due dates. I’m hoping I can go into the week better prepared than last time so that I’m not getting only 4 hours of sleep a night for several days in a row. By the time I was done last time I couldn’t stay awake in class and whatever they were saying went in and out the other side.

On a slightly higher note I setup my office yesterday at IMARC. Kinda funny to have an office at a company I’m not yet officially hired on with and that I only do part time work for, but I like it :). I also came across the program of my dreams yesterday. I’m not quite sure why I never searched for it before, but it adds an “Always on Top” option to every window on Windows. It also has support for transparency and process priority changing all from the title bar of a window. This is perfect so that you can keep those little windows on top of everything else like your media player, chat windows, or in my case VNC to my iPhone. That way I can do everything on my iPhone without ever having to actually pick it up. I will have to get a second charge cable because it is draining my battery very quickly but that is to be expected. The program, if you’re interested, is called PowerMenu. Well, I’m going to attempt to finish up one of my projects now. Hopefully I can stay focused long enough to get through it.

So, apparently I’ve been pretty busy because I would swear I wrote my last post only a week or so ago. Seeing as that’s not the case I now realize how incredably busy I have been. The countdown to graduation continues. I learned that I did just fine on my C++ project and am about to start ramping up for the next. This week I have the first of 3 midterms for the quarter. Luckily they all landed on separate days so I don’t have to pull any insane studying nights, but I do have a fair bit of studying to do. For all the projects I have been working on for my classes I have not been paying much attention to the base material. All my project grades are turning out great, but the midterms count for everything so I will have some work to do. The first is for Compilers & Interpreters on Thursday, followed by Algorithms on Friday, and finally Computer Architecture on next Tuesday.

I have been working much more over the last week, and loving it, but at the same time I have to pinch myself not to fall into that routine since school is not quite over. What can I say I love what I do, and when faced with school or working I love working. I settled on working for IMARC over Arbitech in the last couple of days. I decided that based on the type of work I’d be doing for IMARC that it would end up being a better fit for me at this time. Arbitech was very kind and has actually offered me a consulting job for a project they need some work done on. I think that will be great and I will definitely learn a fair deal more in completing that. As for IMARC I have written some pretty awesome processing and parsing scripts recently for taking client files and doing all the necessary pre-processing that employees are currently doing. I’m hoping to have these done in the next week or so following midterms. I’m hoping they will have as big an impact as I think they will.

On a smaller note my birthday came and went exactly a week ago. It was a wonderful day, all my old friends contacted me through Facebook including my cousins. I had a lovely dinner followed with some amazing music at the performing arts center. This year promises to be quite eventful. All seems to be going according to plan which means I should be moved out and in a condo in roughly six months. I’ve also started looking at possibly getting a new car around the same time. I’m not entirely settled on what I will get, but have commenced drooling on everything I come across.

Several new projects have come to light, and I will hopefully be starting on them in the coming months. I have not forgotten my home automation projects, but will definitely not have much time to work on them in the next month or so. A new distraction that is starting to consume more and more of my time is my Kindle once again. I had taken a few weeks off, but I’m way back into the reading groove. I have over a dozen books ready to be sampled on my Kindle and am looking forward to completing the Farseer line of books by Robin Hobb. Well, got some homework to finish and some more reading to to. More to come.

I just completed, for the most part, my first C++ project for a project course I’m currently taking. After being forced to work with C++ all day I can safely say I have a renewed respect for everything Java does for me. I will say that the speed bump from compiled code is definitely noticable. Without the overhead of the JVM things really do run insanely fast on modern computers. Hopefully I’ll come out of this project OK, and just take it in as a learning experience for the remaining 2 projects in that class. I’m a little worried because there only being 3 projects total for the entire quarter, but if everyone does poorly then we all get curved together. We’ll see what happens.

One thing I did get out the project was that make files are not as magical or complex as they once seemed. At their simplist form they’re really just sh scripts running gcc, g++, or whatever compiler you tell them to use. Their ability to scale to performing incrediably complex or rather boring compilations is quite a feat. Well, I’m going to grab some sleep. Still plenty more work to do tomorrow. No freedom until Thursday evening.

I thought for fun I’d add a little countdown clock to graduation since it’s my sole motivation for getting through the rest of this quarter. I just finished one of five projects/homework assignments that are due in the next couple of days. I’m well on my way to completing a second. Tomorrow I will have to step it up and get a few done if I am to keep up. Hopefully after this burst I will be able to catch my breath. That’s all for now, more exciting things come soon.