Today was the first day of an uninterrupted 8 weeks of classes here at Rose-Hulman. What we sometimes refer to as the long stretch here is one week longer than it has been any of my previous years here. It’s going to feel like a long winter. I hope nobody loses their mind.

And back…

That sounds a lot more impressive when you don’t know that I’m staying less than a mile from the border. In any case, I’m in really bad shape.

I’m excited to be down in Orange Beach, AL to celebrate my Aunt and Uncle’s 40th wedding anniversary. The Midwest was a little too chilly for my tastes, so it will be nice to spend some time in a more hospitable climate. Hopefully I’ll be able to take some good photos and you can look here to find out when and where I post them.

Of all the things for me to miss about the Midwest, it’s weather is not one of them. It was a balmy (perspective, people) 55 degrees Sunday night. By Monday morning it was 16 degrees. Now I didn’t use a calculator for this, but I believe that’s a 39 degree swing in the course of a few short hours. That brings us to today, which has 10 hours of freezing rain in the forecast.

Winter… I will not be missing you.

As I sit here eating my oatmeal of solace, all I can think about is how bad of a swimmer I am.  I decided that I’d add swimming to my workout regimen as a way of stretching out and getting some low impact cardio so that I’m fresh for intramural basketball.  While it is low impact, I have absolutely no idea how to breathe in a pool.  I’m half convinced that the lifeguard was getting a pretty good laugh out of me since I had to take so many breaks to catch my breath.

On another note, go Bengals!

This one is for you Pete.

It’s been quite a long time since I’ve blogged.  This was mostly intentional since I wanted to keep my cards close to my chest while I was job searching.  As of last Tuesday, I no longer have to worry about it, yay!

I accepted a position at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, TX.  I’ll be an engineer in the Aerospace and Information Technology division developing embedded systems for aircraft communication and data management.  I was lucky to have a couple different offers to choose from, but in the end I felt that SwRI would provide the challenge and variety of work that I’m looking for to start my career.  If you’re interested in learning more check out their website http://www.swri.org/.

My job search took up a lot of my time last quarter, so I’m pleased that it’s come to an end.  My grades turned out pretty well and I’m happy with the way things turned out in general.  This quarter looks to be a lot less stressful and I’m looking forward to enjoying a lot of Intramural Basketball and free time!

I hope to be updating things a little more frequently now, let’s see if I stick to it…

…I wrote my last post.

For those of you who follow my life with extreme interest (Hi Mom!) you probably already know these things, but I’ll recap what’s happened to me over the last month.

First–and perhaps most importantly–I received a full-time offer from National Instruments.  As I’ve mentioned before, I absolutely love the company and am very excited to have received an offer.  I’ve yet to make a decision and I plan to shop around a bit to learn what else is out there.

After completing my internship at NI, my sister and I high-tailed it from Austin, TX to beautiful Terre Haute, IN so that I could begin RA training once again.  It’s been a busy couple of weeks, but I’ve had a lot of fun and have gotten to know some of my good friends better while making a lot of new friends as well.

Last night I was awarded the “Golden Chef” award for the inaugural Rose-Hulman RA Cookoff.  For this event, several of us made cheesecake and were judged by an impartial crew.  In the end, I was the victor, but that shouldn’t discredit the other cheesecakes in attendance.  All of the entries were outstanding in my opinion.  Thanks to Keldon for teaching me how to make one heck of a cheesecake.  As the “Golden Chef” I must determine the contest for the next cookoff which will take place in about a month.  Right now I’m leaning towards chip dip and also having the entrants provide the chips that best complement their dip.

August has been a good month, I hope the start of school and September go just as well.

Shameless plug for my brother and his wife: living in downtown Dayton

Today I had my interview for a full time position in the Engineering Leadership Program at National Instruments.  And by that I really mean that I had five interviews and also had to give a technical presentation.  All in all I think it went pretty well.  I was definitely worn out towards the end of the day, but I think I was able to keep my game face on.  If all goes well I’ll begin my senior year at Rose-Hulman with a job offer in hand.  It’s hard to say just how amazing that would be.  If things don’t turn out like I hope then I’ll have had a chance to speak with the recruiters about why I wasn’t given an offer which will help me prepare to pursue other job opportunities.  It’s win-win, but I definitely would like to win more and get an offer.

Austin has been a great place to live this summer and I really think I’d like to start my career here.  That being said I’d like to welcome any advice anyone has about keeping an open mind during the job search.  There’s more to consider than just location and salary, but those are definitely big factors for me.  I love the culture at NI and it’s a company with no shortage of career paths and development opportunities.  But I want to keep an open mind as I think about starting life in the “real world.”

Wish me luck…

I’ve been trying out the Media Management features of Wordpress for a couple days now in my development environment as a possible replacement for my Gallery installation.  For those of you that have viewed my photos, you know that the interface gets the job done but also leaves a lot to be desired.  I’ve found that while the interface for my readers will be improved (check it out here), the back-end administrative interface it much less powerful than I’d like it to be.

Gallery allowed me to upload files via FTP and import them into it’s database, WordPress only allows me to upload via a web interface.  WordPress include any form of image manipulation either.  I’ve come to rely on the server side image resizing feature of Gallery to manage multiple image sizes on the Web.  The real deal killer for me though is that I cannot create an album and then add multiple images at once.  Considering the amount of photos I generally take, it adds a lot of time when I have to add each file individually.

As it stands, I think I’ll stick with Gallery.  The administrative interface of WordPress simply isn’t powerful enough for the types of media I’m looking to upload and manage.  If you have any ideas or comments, don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments below.