thehowe_v7.1

One of my AIM friend's current away message:

here

It's a paradox! She's both away and here! Gaaah!

(head explodes)

...

As you can see, I find this amusing to no end. Clearly something is wrong with me.

I quietly added a link to the side navigation menu under the "friends" section a couple of weeks ago, but I thought I should probably mention something here, as the event it refers to is rather momentous. My old old friend, Nikki Wendling, whose family has known my family since before we were born, got engaged. Obviously, congratulations are in order.

As the story goes in my family, my parents didn't decide they wanted to have a kid until they babysat Nikki - so, as I've been told many times, I owe my existence to her. Our families didn't see much of her when we were children - her family moved to Ohio, so typically only once a year or so. Then in the summer of '98 our families started an annual tradition: Canoe trips into Quetico Park in Canada, just north of Minnesota. She, her sister Jess, myself and Troy have become much closer in the years since.

As always, news of people in my age group entering the "real world" is a little scary. Nikki's only a little older than I am (1, 2 years? That's horrible that I don't remember.), and the fact that she's engaged is just downright scary. Yeah, sure, people I graduated with are already getting married, but plenty of people I graduated with already had kids when we graduated, so that doesn't mean much. This is Nikki, whom I've known forever, and she's getting married.

Yikes.

So Ashley graduated from college yesterday (congratulations and whatnot). I went out to dinner with her and some of her other friends and family, as well as out to a bar for a little while afterwords. I won't lie, the company was decidedly pleasant (I'm not afraid to say it - yowzah!), but I have to say the highlight of the night were her dad's jokes at dinner. I'll have to pass them on to my dad over break, because they were pure comedic gold.

So there's this hill down the road from the house I'm living in. It's about a 200 foot run at almost a 35° incline. Last week, we got a lot of snow. My housemate Eric got the good idea to go sledding. Let me just say this: if you're ever at Meijer and you see a large green plastic saucer sled manufactured by a company called esp, buy it. So anyways, we got some sleds and we went out to this hill, at about 11:30 at night. Kids had obviously been on the hill all day, so the snow was quite well packed, and somebody had built some pretty damn sturdy snow ramps near the bottom of the hill.

Picture this: you're shooting down this hill pretty damn fast, and you're getting close to the bottom. You avoided the first snow ramp about 2/3^rds of the way down, and you see the second one coming up, so you steer towards it. Then in an instant, you come to a realization: there's a drop right after the snow ramp. A three foot drop, at about 55° - if you hit that ramp, you'll get about 4 foot of air before you hit the ground. And, once you've hit the ground, you'll only have about 3 yards to stop before you hit the tree line.

So anyways, both Eric and I came to this realization as we were nearing the bottom on the green saucer sled of death (he didn't believe me the first time). Here's an idea of how fast we were going: I dug in my heels about 2 yards before I hit the 3 foot drop, and I still went over the edge. Eric dug in his heels at about the same spot, hit the snow ramp with one, and instead of stopping actually got flipped over.

It was totally awesome.

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don't speak often, please post a comment with a memory of you and me. It can be anything you want - good or bad. When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people remember about you.

All right folks, let's be honest. Nobody reads this, and anybody who does knows that any memory involving me is automatically boring. I don't even know why I bother.

Oh well, it's not like I have anything better to do on a Monday night. You know, besides work, but who wants to do that?

It's been awhile; life's been busy. The project cycle has been pretty vicious this semester, and when you add in the stupid busy work from non-engineering classes, I've been kept pretty busy. Deadlines for applying to grad school are coming up in a few months, so I should probably start working on that. I don't think I mentioned it here, but I did get a job offer from Amazon. A very generous offer. So that was nice. Even though I'm doing grad school, the job offer extends into an automatic internship offer, so I'm pretty well set for this summer, which is also nice.

News from home: apparently OE is doing exceptionally well in football this year. I don't really know all the specifics (my eyes kind of glaze over when people try to tell them to me), but apparently this team is the best in at least a decade, which is pretty cool. On a sadder note, apparently some kid in Troy's class commited suicide. I guess Troy sat next to him in classes the day he died, so he had a really tough time with that.

What else... I saw Dahlke a few weeks ago! He was in A² for a checkup, so we caught up over lunch. A big article appeared about him in a medical journal a few months back, which was neat. Apparently his cancer treatments were really experimental, and kind of a big deal, which I wasn't aware of. On a more selfish note, I also learned that I'm even more pathetic than I was previously aware of: apparently Loren Hunt has a girlfriend at Alma. The fact that Loren is now socially more successful than me is really pretty pathetic.

Moving on... work on the new website is progressing nicely, despite my lack of free time. It's currently about two-thirds of the way complete, with only the photoalbum, "about me" page, and some administrative stuff for me to finish. I expect I'll be cycling the links on the thehowe.com front page sometime early next month. At that point I'll also be shutting down the blog replies functionality on v5.0, since some of the changes I'm making for v6.0 have broken the old code.

I've been told that I don't post often enough to satisfy my out-of-school-yet-jobless contemporaries (i.e. Tom). This is a natural consequence of having the TV and my computer in two separate rooms this year. The internet is an excellent window into reality, but the TV is a portal to the magical world of the imagination. When it comes down to a choice I'm going to choose the TV because, let's face it, my life is boring as hell - which brings us to the second reason I haven't been posting. Unless you'd like to hear about my troubles installing graphics libraries for 487 or how cool function pointers are in C, I really don't have all that much to talk about.

That all being said, I actually do have a fair amount of news. Amazon has formally extended me a job offer for after this year. I'll get more details from them at the career fair next week, but I'm pretty much set on sticking around for a Master's degree.

Living in the house has been going well. Brock's been on an exercise streak since his girlfriend broke up with him, so I've been tagging along with him to the pool to get some laps in whenever possible. Eric keeps on buying cheap meat whenever we go to the store, so he keeps on having to cook it before it goes bad, so I've had some breaks from frozen dinners. On the downside, he likes to use lard in his cooking. Frequently. So, I try not to eat his food too often. We were supposed to have another Eric living with us, but he didn't come back to Michigan this year. We're in the middle of trying to get him to pay us - hopefully all will end well in that regard.

Classes have been busy but manageable. Despite the fact that I'm taking two absolute blow-off classes (Cultural Anthropology 101 and Astronomy 102), this semester is shaping up to be my busiest one yet. That's due to my two EECS classes, 487 (Intro to Graphics), and 381 (Advanced and Object Oriented Programming), both of which have a pretty heavy workload. As a nice surprise this semester it turns out I'm in the same Astro 102 lecture as Gracie Byrnes, so that's good. It's nice to have an attractive female actually happy to see me again - that hasn't happened since Ashley visited me in Seattle. Well, Jess did stop by to see me on her way to Northern before school started, but she's basically like my little sister, so that doesn't count.

Well, I'm back in Ann Arbor. I'm living in a house this year with Brock and a friend of his, Eric. We've been here for about a week and a half now, and besides all the spiders, the windows that won't stay up, the strange odors coming from the carpet near the door, and the weird guy that rides by on his bike every day, I'd have to say it's pretty nice here. At least, compared to some of the other student housing available on campus. We were supposed to have another Eric living with us as well, but we found out a few days ago that he's not coming back to school. His name is on the contract, so he's trying to get somebody to sublet the room from him. I'm hoping for somebody that isn't too creepy, but this soon before school starts I'm not holding my breath.

So, it occurred to me that I hadn't updated in awhile. I'd say I haven't done anything, but that wouldn't be strictly true. Last weekend my parents flew into town for the weekend to visit. On Saturday we drove about two hours north to a little port called Anacortes or something like that, and took a ferry out onto one of the islands off the coast and did a 5-hour sea kayaking excursion. It was a lot of fun - perfect weather, saw lots of wildlife (harbor seals, various starfish and jellyfish, even some orcas in the distance), and it was a hell of a lot easier than canoing.

After we drove back Saturday night, we got up Sunday morning and went on a 4+ hour hike at Tiger Mountain just outside of Seattle. It was a beautiful hike - awesome forest, a pretty damn rough hike. We gained roughly 2500 feet of elevation in about 2.4 miles - but over half of that (1300 feet) was in the last approx. 0.8 miles. Needless to say, it was pretty damn steep. We had some great views of the city and the surrounding mountains at the top, after which we took a slightly easier (but longer) trail down. My legs were sore as hell at the end, but it was worth it.

After the hike we came back to the apartment, showered, went out to dinner, and then went and saw Batman Begins at the local theatre. It was the best Batman movie ever. The villain wasn't the coolest (nobody beats Jack Nicholson as Joker), but it was the best representation of Batman I've ever seen on screen. I may even go see it again this weekend - we'll see.

What else... not too much going on this week. My project at work is progressing nicely, and it's been getting more satisfying as I get deeper into it. We've got an Intern rafting trip this Friday, so that should be fun. In about two weeks, on the 6th, Ashley is flying out to visit for a few days, so that should be a blast. I'll have to figure out what we're going to do, though. Going up in the Space Needle is a given, but beyond that there doesn't seem to be too much to do in Seattle. Ah well, I'm sure I'll think of something.

Oh, and in case you haven't noticed, I added a PhotoAlbum to the site, which is updated with what few pictures I've taken this summer. Enjoy.

Where to begin? Last week was our "spring break". I went home to a snowstorm. Stupid Michigan. Then I didn't even get to sleep in late. Between a dentist appointment, an allergist appointment, and chauffeuring my little brother around, it really wasn't much of a break at all. On the other hand, I did get to have lunch with Ashley, which is always a blast. I know I say so every time I go home, but it's true. I did feel kind of bad - she was on a diet and couldn't eat any real food, and she had to skip class to fit me into her schedule. Hopefully I was entertaining enough to be worth it.

But on to the big news - I'm going to be living in Seattle for three months this summer, because I scored an internship with Amazon.com! I don't know exactly what I'll be doing yet, but the projects interns work on are all actually used on the website or infrastructure, meaning that I'll actually be writing code that will be used in a professional setting. I know, sounds boring, but I'm really excited about it.