So in my efforts to do everything generically Californian, I have managed to head down to Santa Cruz on a weekend and try surfing. The drive was generally nice, we passed Pacifica early on but Christina's parents lived there so she wanted to get away. We drove for the next hour or so and went down the 1 and the 17 which both were actually quite beautiful and wound up meeting a surfing instructor (who i later found out we got off craigslist!) and he drove us to a secluded part of the beach so we could have some privacy when we were learning (and also for the well being of other surfers that would inevitably die from our out of control boards). Kyle and I pondered the night before as to what the hell you wear under a wetsuit when your surfing, that's when the instructor told us that guys go commando underneath and this not only made this a little uncomfortable but the wet suit was extremely hard to put on (just in general, had nothing to do with going commando). Then once we got all suited up we walked onto the beach and headed near the water. The instructor basically told us everything about how to surf on the beach (paddling, getting on the board, how to get out on the water without getting knocked back by the waves, etc.) and then expected us to pick up the rest as we got in the water.
When we actually went out there I had a little trouble keeping balance and paddling. This all changed after I got a little comfortable and then I was moving fine. The saltwater of the Pacific irritated my contacts but I was willing to put up with it. I was trying to surf my first wave and ended up crashing early on. The second wave was amazing because I actually got on the board and was riding it pretty comfortably and then I actually started to go sideways but then failed as I got too excited and just fell. This happened quite a bit but I was proud of myself nonetheless as I actually made it on the board on my first session out. Afterwards, Kyle and I actually didn't have money on us so the instructor had to follow us to a Safeway so that we could get money out for lesson. The Safeway ended up not having an ATM so we had to use cashback on our debit cards and I bought a thing of bugles (gotta love finger food) and pulled out $40. The lesson turned out being $60 so I had to have Kyle spot me . I think I might go surfing in Pacifica this weekend but I haven't made up my mind yet.
So after surfing we wanted to find somewhere to eat. We wanted to stay down in Santa Cruz so we thought we'd check out the boardwalk. It was a beautiful place, just an amusement park on the beach. The parking when we got there was ridiculous! We probably wasted about 20 minutes or so parking and then walked the boardwalk to find something to eat. There really wasn't anything but your usually carnival-like food and we were looking more for a meal so we walked off to the pier. We found a couple restaurants and we were in the seafood mood so we stopped at one place and got some beers and good food. Kyle is still impressed that he had shark. The place didnt' take credit cards so I had to withdraw money from an atm for the second time that day. I was frustrated so I ended up doing fast cash for $120 and just wanted to not go to an ATM again! Then I convinced everyone to get gelato and we walked the pier and had some delicious ice cream. Then we decided to head back to SF and stopped at a Target in Daly City. We were lacking in all sorts of Kitchenware and just normal stuff over at the house so we indulged in about $120 worth of necessities and hopefully that will be the last thing we'll have to buy for our place. Then once we got back it was time to just relax. Kelly just moved in which is really cool just to have more people around and she has a really cool dog named Kenya. The place and roommates are starting to come together and its really feeling homely now. Thats all for now but there are possible plans to get my scuba diving certification....more on that soon
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Monday, June 18, 2007
Podcasting
So this past Friday, we had an intern Podcast over at Yahoo! It was fairly interesting and I've never done a podcast so I thought I'd give it a shot. I was in the production studio in Yahoo Headquarters with some sweet Sennheiser headphones and got to talk about blogging for an hour of the day. They said they would somehow cut that down to 15 minutes but I'm not sure at all how they are going to do that.
They asked a series of questions to us going from basic "how often to you blog?" to more in-depth "what do you think the link (if any) is there between social networking and blogging?" and on of the last ones "what effect do you think the blogs of the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting have with their classmates and family members? what happens to your internet identity after you die?" I was caught probably most off guard about the Virginia Tech questions as I never really thought about it or just the presence of someone on the internet once they pass on. I haven't had a friend pass away in that regard so it was interesting to hear that their profiles were like shrines to them and that on important dates (and random dates as well) other people are leaving messages telling them how much they missed them and well intentioned comments.
That left us at kind of a sad feeling in the air so we switched it up to our favorite thing about blogging. Mine was just how blogging has evolved into showing multiple forms of expression whether it be text, audio, or video because you can only convey so much in text without having a connection to what the person may be feeling or trying to express. Sometimes text is nice in the fact that we have to leave it up to our minds to put together the pieces and visualize it for ourselves and then it is interesting to compare it to an actual video of the events described events. Audio is another interesting medium because it is still up to your imagination but you can hear a persons tone, when they might have to pause and varied levels of emotion that you can't express well in text.
When I got into that room I had no idea what I was going to say and being a fairly opinionated person I wasn't worried that I wouldn't have anything to talk about. It was a definite learning experience where you really evaluated what you thought on a particular topic that doesn't normally come into common conversation or deep evaluation. Hopefully I'll get another opportunity to podcast and I nominated discussing the Facebook platform possibly as another podcast so hopefully we can expect that soon!
They asked a series of questions to us going from basic "how often to you blog?" to more in-depth "what do you think the link (if any) is there between social networking and blogging?" and on of the last ones "what effect do you think the blogs of the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting have with their classmates and family members? what happens to your internet identity after you die?" I was caught probably most off guard about the Virginia Tech questions as I never really thought about it or just the presence of someone on the internet once they pass on. I haven't had a friend pass away in that regard so it was interesting to hear that their profiles were like shrines to them and that on important dates (and random dates as well) other people are leaving messages telling them how much they missed them and well intentioned comments.
That left us at kind of a sad feeling in the air so we switched it up to our favorite thing about blogging. Mine was just how blogging has evolved into showing multiple forms of expression whether it be text, audio, or video because you can only convey so much in text without having a connection to what the person may be feeling or trying to express. Sometimes text is nice in the fact that we have to leave it up to our minds to put together the pieces and visualize it for ourselves and then it is interesting to compare it to an actual video of the events described events. Audio is another interesting medium because it is still up to your imagination but you can hear a persons tone, when they might have to pause and varied levels of emotion that you can't express well in text.
When I got into that room I had no idea what I was going to say and being a fairly opinionated person I wasn't worried that I wouldn't have anything to talk about. It was a definite learning experience where you really evaluated what you thought on a particular topic that doesn't normally come into common conversation or deep evaluation. Hopefully I'll get another opportunity to podcast and I nominated discussing the Facebook platform possibly as another podcast so hopefully we can expect that soon!
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Twas the Week of Unofficial
The time is upon us again for the annual celebration of unofficial st. patricks day. Dreaded by the University of Illinois faculty as a day of recklessness and disgracing a school's honor, the student body looks forward to this event all year. The premise of Unofficial is that you wake up early and drink green beer and do Irish Car Bombs all day and the big thing is that YOU DON'T MISS YOUR CLASSES! This creates for some interesting events and an unusual amount of public drunkenness on this prestigious campus. There is few things that this university makes an effort to control and this just happens to be one of them. My freshman year there was plenty of fraternity parties (kegs and eggs are amazing) and people drinking and celebrating on any patch of lawn they could find. Green floods the streets and havoc occurs. The havoc however is mostly from those that don't attend the university and are attending from other campuses and cities. They simply don't know how to control themselves here and are giving unofficial a worse reputation than it deserves. This year they have tried to crack down on the bars and stores on campus and have restricted 1 keg per residence and that the bars cannot serve pitchers of beer and shots must be diluted. I am unsure whether I stand behind the universities involvement. It would seem their acknowledgment of the event and taking action almost seems worse than doing nothing and not associating it with the university and its policies.
Another big thing is the Chief. A proud symbol and mascot of our university has been removed and have outraged a majority of the student body. It's a constant debate that I've lived with as in Cleveland we dealt with the same issues with Chief Wahoo! which in my opinion is much worse than the University of Illinois symbol and they have never done anything regarding Wahoo! The students replied with a proper send off to the chief as they mourned at his last game by switching their shirts from the usual school orange and blue to all black, symbolic of the death of the chief. I've recently become a big supporter of the chief and I think its crazy to go against the wishes of the majority of the student body and disregard a large number of alumni that have canceled season tickets to university sporting events and have said they will not donate while the chief isn't here. I'm glad someone has the balls to stand up to the university and make it hurt.
I have to go finish some work right now but I will continue on other current events soon.
Another big thing is the Chief. A proud symbol and mascot of our university has been removed and have outraged a majority of the student body. It's a constant debate that I've lived with as in Cleveland we dealt with the same issues with Chief Wahoo! which in my opinion is much worse than the University of Illinois symbol and they have never done anything regarding Wahoo! The students replied with a proper send off to the chief as they mourned at his last game by switching their shirts from the usual school orange and blue to all black, symbolic of the death of the chief. I've recently become a big supporter of the chief and I think its crazy to go against the wishes of the majority of the student body and disregard a large number of alumni that have canceled season tickets to university sporting events and have said they will not donate while the chief isn't here. I'm glad someone has the balls to stand up to the university and make it hurt.
I have to go finish some work right now but I will continue on other current events soon.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Monday, February 12, 2007
It's been a long time..
I lost the information to get back to my blog for a long time / being busy. I think that I will (over time) recount the past year as best as I can remember.
Topics Include:
Topics Include:
- Internship at Riverglass
- Projects and other accomplishments
- Getting Dropped from University of Illinois and how it was the best thing that could have happened to me.
- Delta Sigma Phi and how I am still in awe of what I've been a part of here.
- Different Relationships and events that have shaped me into the person i am presently
- Web technologies
- Programming Languages
- Internships
- Entreprenurship and General Ideas about building a company
- New things I am trying to do.
- .......okay so there's a lot but I think you get the point
Monday, October 10, 2005
SigSOFT - Prof. Research Project
The meeting wasn't as indepth as last weeks introduction to the Overhaul Project.
Actually, Jay showed up and neither him or Luke knew if he was supposed to be there today (bad communication i guess).
The research I will be doing will look good for grad applications if I decide to do that and also writing an extension to firefox will look good for a lot of companies.
This Project is going to require a lot of research/learning in various areas :
I'll link anything I can, Human Knowledge belongs to the world!
Actually, Jay showed up and neither him or Luke knew if he was supposed to be there today (bad communication i guess).
The research I will be doing will look good for grad applications if I decide to do that and also writing an extension to firefox will look good for a lot of companies.
This Project is going to require a lot of research/learning in various areas :
- Network Programming (Beej's Guide)
- Peer 2 Peer Programming and Techniques (Jay has a Paper)
- Mozilla Firefox Source Tree Code
- Exploring the innerworkings of Overhaul.
I'll link anything I can, Human Knowledge belongs to the world!
A New Beginning and Overcommitted
Well a little bit about myself.
I am the Recruitment Director for my Fraternity, Delta Sigma Phi. I'm a Computer Science major at the University of Illinois. I'm starting next week as an intern at Riverglass Inc. I am a member of SigSOFT, a special interest group directed in Software Engineering. I am doing research with a grad student, Jay Patel, on the Overhaul Project by developing an extension for Firefox in C++ that will utilize the Overhaul Apache Module. I am also working on a Collaborative Text Editor that will be written completely in Java and will be able to support multiple people editing the same document at the same time (or multiple documents if they wish per session). Between all of these (oh yeah I also quit a different job with the University as an Engineering Workstation Op), I have been very strapped for time. I also intended on working out more often which I haven't had a chance to do all semester so far. With our rush finally ending ( keyword: finally ), I think I might be able to schedule and find time to do everything I originally intended on doing.
Wish me luck!
I am the Recruitment Director for my Fraternity, Delta Sigma Phi. I'm a Computer Science major at the University of Illinois. I'm starting next week as an intern at Riverglass Inc. I am a member of SigSOFT, a special interest group directed in Software Engineering. I am doing research with a grad student, Jay Patel, on the Overhaul Project by developing an extension for Firefox in C++ that will utilize the Overhaul Apache Module. I am also working on a Collaborative Text Editor that will be written completely in Java and will be able to support multiple people editing the same document at the same time (or multiple documents if they wish per session). Between all of these (oh yeah I also quit a different job with the University as an Engineering Workstation Op), I have been very strapped for time. I also intended on working out more often which I haven't had a chance to do all semester so far. With our rush finally ending ( keyword: finally ), I think I might be able to schedule and find time to do everything I originally intended on doing.
Wish me luck!
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