Thanksgiving

Finally a break! The way my school schedule works out, the last time we got school off was in Sept. It's been nothing but school projects and work since. The good part is that now I only have a few weeks left of school and after this semester only a few months left of school at all as I graduate in April!

Things have been fairly exciting these last couple of months. I received and accepted a full time offer from Amazon.com which will start next May. I can't disclose how much their giving me, but when I compare it to those salary services that take in your experience location etc and give you a base salary for you, it is a good deal better than the high end, and that's only with my regular salary not counting any bonus etc which are quite nice.

I also finalized my graduation. I realized that in order to graduate, I only have to take two more classes. This is going to make for a really easy semester next year. I am filling in the spaces as I need enough classes to keep my federal aid, but even if I were to fail these other classes outright I would still be able to graduate. That and the job I have lined up are giving me a nice warm fuzzy feeling for next year.

Speaking of which, we are planning on spending Christmas and New Years in Japan with Mako's family. We have never been back to Japan in the winter or any holiday, so it should be a fun time. If we get a nice cash present from here parents, we are also considering getting a Wii. I might actually have time to play it next year. That is if our two year old will let us. He is getting really into computers and what not. If we leave the computer on, he will start up firefox, click on his bookmark, and start playing his online toddler games that we set up for him. It astounds me how quickly he picks these things up. Was I this quick? I don't, but it gets really fun to see your kids grow intellectually as well as physically.

Well, I'm writing this in class, and the bell is about to ring so I'll have to call it good, but stay tuned for an amazing story about the durability of the Nintendo DS. It's not pretty, but as astounding me.

Till then

This will be my last post for a while as it is just too hard to sign in and change things on this blog since I tried out the new beta blogger. The new features our nice, but since my login was the same for both it kind of screwed things up.

Anyway... Amazon was awesome! If you have a chance to do an internship for them I wouldn't pass it up. Currently I'm back in school until next April when I graduate. At that point I will be forced to move this blog elsewhere as it currently runs off my school account. That still gives me a good 8 months, but given my load with school and the part time job I returned too, its not likely to happen anytime soon. And so I will let this sit for the time being and concentrate on graduating and what not. Amazon is supposed to contact me by the end of the month to tell me whether I have a full time position waiting for me after I graduate. That would be great and would take a lot of stress out of this last year, since I wouldn't have to go job hunting.

So till then you won't see much change here. If you really like my entries so much you just can't live without them, you can check out my other blog which will be used for one of my cs classes.

Seattle

I really need to switch over to a new system and design. Every time I look at my own site now, I just cringe. I'm pretty sure that I will be moving to word press, and I even have some ideas on the design, but time is what is missing. Here I was thinking that I would be overflowing with free time once I started my internship, but it has yet to materialize. Maybe we are still adjusting, but it has been a month already so you would think we would have settled in by now.

Anyway, Amazon is great. It's all the things I never knew I wanted, but couldn't do without. I'm so glad I ended up in web services, it literally feels like it has changed my life. I've been drinking in all the junk about object oriented programming and the 'correct' way to program for so long from school work, that I didn't even realize that there is a completely different mindset out there. Services, that is where it is at. Try doing some research on SOA. Anyway, that is what I have been doing for the last month.

After a few weeks of research (believe it or not, I have yet to write a single line of code yet), ideas just keep popping into my head. Long lost dreams of programming ideas that I thought were impossible have suddenly resurfaced and actual progress has been made! It's a race just trying to write everything down coherently so I don't forget it.

On a more relaxing note, Seattle is really nice, but our living arrangements often leave something to be desired. We live in a nice enough apartment that is subsidized, but it is right around the corner from a noisy club. Most of the time its not an issue, but the last three weeks Sunday morning has been rough. At 2:00am, which I presume is when the club closes, we have seen 20-40 people in the parking lot just below our window pumpin up there favorite music and just generally being as loud as they can be. The first time I was actually dialing the cops when they suddenly went quite. I guess somebody else got to it before I did, but this is just ridiculous.

Well I think I'll leave it at that for now, I may try and get in some entries on actual material soon, like what I am doing in Ruby right now and my new installation of ubuntu dapper. Pretty cool stuff.

What paths we take

I've been reminiscing lately as to how I got where I am. In full detail it would take more than few volumes to describe, but if I just stick to employment (which is what I have been occupied with lately) it is pretty concise. I started working when I was 14. If your worried about that being too young, don't worry, it was just doing cleaning for my father's business. I cleaned through jr high and high school, until the business got so big that my father finally had to let us go and hire professional cleaners. At that point, I found my self 18 and unemployed with the whole world of opportunity in front of me. So naturally, I took the first opportunity I could find as a Cutco knife salesman.

I was horrible. I think I had one large order over the four months I was employed with them. I probably spent more on gas than I got back from them. Still, it helped me get over my fears of meeting new people and I did get a really nice set of knives from it (which I still today). After that summer, I started college and was again finding myself in search of employment. Hence began my call center phase as I call it.

Minus a two year mission in Japan, this phase lasted 3 years and covered 3 companies. DirecTV, 1800Contacts, and a surveying company. There are a lot of better things I can think of than phone work, but it was bringing in the money. I had enough that I was able to get an engagement ring for my wife and support us through our first year of marriage. After that, I was ready to stop talking to all the stupid people who call in and try some manual labor.

Over the next 2 years, I tried a short stint with a thrift store (sorting and fixing donations). This wasn't all that bad, but the environment just wasn't what I was looking for, so I then moved onto a creamery. This was actually a pretty fun job. I was the ice cream guy, so I had to set up the pumps and pipes when they were making the ice cream, and I got to pull it all down and clean it when they were done. This was by far the most physically intensive job I have ever had. Everyday when I was finished I was drenched in sweat. I think I lost about 20 pounds during the stint, and I only quit when I got in a car accident (my first and only) that my wife and I though was partly due to how tired I was from school and work. After that I went back to my Dad's company and helped do laundry with my wife. We also had moved into my parents house, so money wasn't that big of an issue and I was able to concentrate on school for a few semesters.

This all came to a halt when my wife got pregnant. Realizing that I had a family to support now, I called in a favor from a friend and got my first computer related job as a web developer. This was great. I was making money doing something I enjoy, and gaining invaluable experience in the process. I was only doing basic HTML and JavaScript, but during the year I worked there I managed to get in on some more involved projects and picked up php and coldFusion as a result. This combined with my schooling in Computer Engineering landed me my current job as a real programmer for a small start up company. Finally my skills were put to good use. I was learning anything and everything that had to do with my position and actually still did a lot of web development for the company as well. It has been about a year now, and I think it's precisely because of my experience here that I was able to get an offer from Amazon.

Things are looking good. There are only three weeks until we leave for Seattle, but we can hardly wait. Who would have thought that a knife salesman would end up doing engineering for Amazon.com. That's the beauty of education and determination. With a little bit of good luck and hard work, you can get the opportunities you're looking for and live life how you want. Life is good.

Bits and pieces

I've been thinking the last couple of days, about where my life is heading, and how exciting everything is getting. It seems to me that life is like a puzzle to which you don't know what the final picture is, but you have to keep trying to fit pieces in anyway. Around high school or college, you begin to realize that there isn't just one piece for any given any location, but an infinite number of pieces for all locations that will ultimately affect what your final picture looks like. For the last few months, I had been floundering. I had a vague idea of what I wanted to put in the puzzle, but nothing seemed to fit. So I just kept trying different pieces until something fit, and it was a big piece. Finally I can see a little of what the final picture will look like, and from what I can see, it's awesome! Perseverance is the key. It may take you a million tries to find the right piece that suits you, but it is out there, and you can't give up until you find it.

I'm not sure where this post came from, but I'm in a really good mood these last few days and it looks like I'm going to be having a little more free time soon, so maybe I can do the site overhaul I've been planning for the last year. It's probably not going to be as drastic as I thought before, but something will change for sure.

Finally an offer!

It seems like these last two semester's have gone by extremely fast for us. What with job applications flying all around, interviews here and there, and my regular school and work schedules, I barely have time to think anymore. After going to interview with Microsoft in Seattle, and spending a few days there at their expense, they decided they didn't want me and I moved on. I then interviewed with Amazon.com and more recently with IBM. While I was getting the interviews I wanted (I must have done something right on my resume), I was beginning to think that I would be sticking around in Utah for the summer. Well, last week Amazon.com contacted me to offer me an internship over the summer in Seattle. YEA!!!! I still may hear something from IBM, but I think we are pretty much set on Amazon at this point. Part of that comes from the fact that we (Mako and I), both wanted to live in Seattle for a while, and the rest probably comes from the incredible amount of money they are offering me. I'm bound legally to not say how much, but as an hourly rate it's well over twice what I make now.

Needless to say we are extremely excited for the opportunity, especially Mako who is dying to get closer to the sea and away from all this dry air. I still have another year till I graduate, but if they offer me a full time position after graduation we are thinking we might try out Seattle for a couple of years. Now I can finally relax and enjoy the rest of the school year without worrying about where we are going to be in the summer or finding a good job opportunity.