Jeff

its almost over

I have my final final ever tomorrow at 1 PM. That is all that stands between myself and alumni-hood. It is a weird feeling. I have just wrapped up a very long and exciting semester. I participated in Senior Design and was able to learn a lot about embedded development, not to mention make a (almost) flying quad rotor, learned Django for a project, got a job (yay!), got to enjoy a few last weeks with some close friends, and in just over a week, I get to walk across stage, tip my hat (this is ridiculous), and get my degree.

It has been a good semester. We got a chance to get to know Kevin, our fourth member of team 8. It allowed for us to thoroughly enjoy the project and he was an amazing fit for the team. He got along fine with everyone and made the project very enjoyable. Ryan and I worked together on the OS labs and we work well together, beyond the fact that I was not very helpful the last two labs and he rocked them out pretty one-sided. Software Engineering gave me the chance to learn Django, which I have been aiming to learn for some time, and get to work on some ground up software development. I rediscovered Python (after about a year with little contact with it) and am now working on a few things. I passed the 1 year mark with Kim, that is something special and hopefully it will continue to be special. And now, here I sit, procrastinating OS studying for a bit before lunch and in 26 (or so) hours time, I will be wrapping up a horrific OS final and calling it a day, or more like four years.

Now that life is on the verge of making the leap into the next realm (career driven adulthood) I find myself thinking about what I want with life. I am now armed with a qualification and degree in a field that I enjoy. I now need to figure out where to head, there is no major goal left, its make money and be happy. I find that I continue to think about Japan, and I miss it. I am going to try and learn Japanese over the next few years, my goal is 5 years to be good enough to get a JLPT Level 2 (thats the second highest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test) and possibly move to Japan and find a job in software there. Kim graduates in 2 (or so) years and I would like for our relationship to continue. She has told me that we cannot marry right after she finishes, so if I propose to her, itll be probably three years from now. Then she wants to get her U.S. citizenship, so that will require a few years living here before that comes to fruitation. Until then, I just get to dream about Japan, maybe I will save up and take a vacation there in a few years. First I need to start my job and get my head out of the clouds.

Well, until I cross the stage, I will be a student…

django goodness

So I am probably about 50% through converting the journal on this site into Django. It is quite a magnificent piece of web development stuff. I barely need any code to accomplish stuff. The only major hindrance will be in migrating the databases over. I need to migrate them because I have been utilizing some of the great database models Django gives me that require me to re-enter parts of the entry. I also need to try and update to the latest version of Django on my server (or just wait for a few months until I get a better server OS) so that I can establish the relative link formation better. I still need to figure out the form handling which looks very clean and helpful. I will eventually move the set up into Apache as it is currently running through the dev server built into the framework. I may have time this weekend as we are getting to a slow down point in our senior design project and my software engineering project is going to be a joke with how well I am getting with Django right now. I really want to spend a good amount of time doing this Django code right, I am hoping to make the set up very clean and easy to maintain and expand.

coding frenzy

So I have been in a coding frenzy and will continue to be in one for probably the next three weeks. I have gotten a large amount done on the senior design software (all of the software has been mine) and hopefully we will have something to show by the end of the week. I am pretty excited about it and have been spending more time than I should working on it. I will probably finish the client this weekend and make it look nice. I also am getting started with the Django for our CS project and along with that will be working some with this website as a basis (since it gives me some of a learning curve). Along with my job, I should basically be coding around the clock until graduation (or until everything is done). I have been carrying the software load in our senior design project and at this point don’t trust the other software guy to code his way out of a paper bag. I think he is just going to be along for the ride at this point and we are going to carry him across the line. I know that I will be throwing all the documentation stuff at him without much guilt. I hope to be invited to the bonus presentation, I think that would be one of the most redeeming things to end my time in this major, being good enough at what I have learned to be invited to tell further undergrads about it.

It’s down to 30 some days. That’s it, all that is left between me and the end of school. I have a lot to do, but its still just that small. I have been a student for over 15 straight years and a week into May I will be done with it all. I don’t know how it will feel, but it will be different. I just hope that I will have a job and be off to somewhere else and not stuck idling around waiting for my 16 years of education go to waste.

Oh, I also got a beta for Trillian Astra (I have used Trillian as my all-in-one IM client for a long time) and it is amazing. I am seriously thinking of paying for a professional license (which I never do, since I get the basic for free) just to support the fantastic product that they have made. It really is an awesome IM client and I really do hope they put it out for Linux so that I can find one to stay with.