Growing Up

Above is a picture of a Porsche Panamera, a four-door Porsche. I knew it was a Porsche as soon as I saw the picture; it has Porsche lines and profile. It just looks fat. And the spoiler definitely needs some work before they begin production in April 2009. More pictures here.

More pictures here as well. I've uploaded nearly every picture I've taken with my digital camera to Picasa, Google's Web Albums service. All the albums are geotagged. I've also started geotagging each individual picture on Google Maps. This takes a little while, since for some reason there isn't any way to connect Picasa tagging with Google Maps tagging, at least as far as I can tell. The start of my individually tagged photos is here. Navigation can be done by clicking on the place markers or clicking on the links on the left (one link per picture).

I'm growing up.

I have a degree in Industrial Engineering and a minor in Business Administration. Four years of college are complete, and I have the diploma to show for it.

I have a full time non-summer job with the world’s largest technology distributor and a leading technology sales, marketing, and logistics company. That's a quote straight from a wikipage about the company, Ingram Micro. Initially, I'll be helping to work on this project. I leave this Sunday for a week at their corporate headquarters located in Santa Ana, CA. There I'll be training, learning about projects, and meeting people that work at the corporate headquarters. Air travel, hotel accommodations, and rental car are paid by IM.

I have a house. Well sorta. I signed all the paperwork, and put a $1000 down so far. The seller has agreed to my offer. Pictures are in the slide show in the previous post or in the album here. The house is located in Lebanon, about twenty minutes from work. Settlement is slated for June 30th. The house is 1323 square feet and semi-detached, and has three bedrooms. It has a front porch, a back deck, new roof, new furnace, and new water heater. It also has a shed in the back yard, and a detached two car garage.

I have a car. My parents gave me the Ford Taurus as one of graduation presents. I have the title in hand, though it still needs to be transferred. My parents are pretty cool. It's cause of them that I was able to have an amazing credit score, which qualified me for my home loan. They allowed me to have a checking account and bank card as an early teenager. Plus I had a credit card at a ridiculously young age.

People seemed surprised that I am graduated, have a full-time job, a car, and am buying a house. Given, I was slightly concerned that I might not have a job straight out of college (I knew I would have one eventually). And graduating was not a concern for me. The house is the next natural step in my mind, after graduating and securing a full time job.

Rent or Buy? For me the numbers plugged in were:
Monthly rent: 900
Home price: 115,500
Down payment: 5.25
Mortgage rate: 6.375
Property taxes: 1.23

The results? With the default 1% home appreciation and the 3% rent increase, I only need to live at my house four years in order to break even in terms of throwing money away on rent. Which is pretty close to my calculations that resulted in five years.

People are also concerned that I won't like my job and then I'll be stuck with this house. To which I say, many people hate their jobs. Plus I am nearly completely certain that I won't hate my job.

Industrial Engineering degree
Job
Car
House
Something else I want
Computer

Etc

30.

My House Slideshow

Done with College

As of 11:33:20 AM EST on May 6, 2008 AD, I have completed all college classwork. I am done with college.

/celebrate

Ramblings

My last semester of college is almost complete. I have done a lot in these past months I suppose. Three major projects: The Arena simulation competition, the collaborative Hershey project, and my own library work flow analysis project. Plus all the stuff for classes, such as a major group project report, individual competitive strategy report, and major group project presentation. And speaking of presentations I've done quite a few of them. Eight to be specific, all related to my three projects.

And after all that I've seriously come to realize that it's all for naught. I didn't get paid to do these projects, in fact, some cost me a little bit of money (entry fees and the like). After all these four years of learning, doing projects, gaining experience I'm not that much farther ahead in the world in terms of financial standing, political power of any sort, or in a position to apply my knowledge.

Which is what it comes down to: it's not how much you know, it's who you know.

Today I followed up on one of the jobs for which I interviewed. The position is no longer even a position. They said they'll keep me posted if it becomes a position again, but I was throughly disheartened since that was the job that I wanted the most out of anything I've interviewed so far. Right now I just want a job, even if I hate it. I'm young, and my generation is predicted to have eight to twenty careers in one's lifetime.

But back to school. I have a keyboarding final tomorrow. Bach's Minuet in G from the book of crazy easy minuets he wrote. I also have a theory test for that class on Tuesday. Finally, I have a take-home final for Geophysics due on Monday or something. I have essentially twenty-six days of nothing. I wish I could just start working full-time right now.

But speaking of back to school. Maybe I should consider going to grad school or pursuing my MBA. Who knows. I do know that it is significantly late in the application process for anything like that.

Actually, after looking around, I'm completely wrong. I could go to Drexel for example for Masters in Industrial Management or MBA. They're on a weird three semester schedule and the deadline for summer term is June 6. Though I don't really want to live in or near Philadelphia. Drexel's online MBA would cost around $41,040. Not bad. Or there's always Quality Engineering Six Sigma at Villanova.

Still, I sort of want to be done with school. I want to go work full-time and make money. I want to buy a house and buy a Porsche. But in the short-term I need to find said job (or investigate further into more school), buy double AA batteries for my Xbox controllers, and pick up my car from the shop (state inspection and emissions).

Decrease variability, increase control. Narrow scope, escalate focus. Efficiency is beauty. It's all what who you know. 30.

To do

Items to complete before the weekend:

finish bsg report
finish prelim data for arena hershey
read netflix case
finish crafting library presentation
begin crafting arena sim comp presentation
3 classes

gah.

Currently listening to Dance of the Manatee by Fair to Midland.

Five courses

Somone that goes to the same college I do (or at least to go here, some details point that she may have dropped out earlier) committed suicide on April 4, 2008. A notice was sent out via email today along with the appropiate condolances. That makes this the second suicide at my college in two years. I didn't really know either of them, though I think the most recent used to make me sandwiches in the caf. She seemed chipper enough then, but that was over two years ago.

I still need a job.

I also need to finish all these projects I've been putting off. There's my "second senior project" that I'm doing. I need to finish gathering data, run the data in simulation, compile the results, and make a pretty presentation.

I then need to finish the three projects for one class: Help write a group paper on a simulated company we ran during the semester; help research Netflix and then craft a presentation regarding its current strategy and where it should go from there; and write an individual report on a company regarding the same subject matter.

Geophysics is just a bunch of reading and one small presentation project. At least I don't have any finals except for keyboarding, which continues to go well.

This weekend was the school's Junior/Senior Dance Banquet thing. I heard it wasn't all that great; at least the food wasn't. I didn't go since it was too expensive and I knew it wasn't going to be all that great, so instead we had our own Junior/Senior in the quad. We all dressed up, had some other people over (11 total to be exact), and had a great meal. My roommates and I made a five-course meal consisting of:

1. Appetizers of stuffed mushrooms and jalepeno poppers.
2. Garden Salad
3. Choice of either Seafood Linguine (Linguine in a white-wine sauce served with topping of scallops, mussels, clams, and shrimp) OR Chicken Parmesean over linguine.
4. Dessert choice of Chocholate Cake with Peanut Butter Chocholate Icing with a vanilla pudding center OR Baked Apple Cobbler with vanilla Ice Cream
5. Coffee
   
   30.

Arena Complete

The Arena models are complete, executed, and data collected. Report and Executive Summary are complete. Models and Report have been sent.

Now I just have to wait until April 10th until I find out if I'm going to Vancouver.

Arena

This is probably going to be a disjointed post.

The Arena competition is nearing completion. Models are built and work for the most part. Now we just have to get the data and put it into the proper parts of the report. Finally, we have to make a final recommendation and write up the executive summary. It's due in approximately 26 hours.

The other Arena project is still underway and proprietary.

I have 3 reports/presentations due for one class before the end of the semester.

At least Geophysics and Keyboarding are easy. Playing the piano is relaxing.

I'm afraid that once the Arena project is done that I'm going to lose all my time management framework of mind, and I'll play video games all day. O well.

Disturbed's new song "Inside the Fire" is cool. At least in terms of vocals, rhythm, and music. The lyrics are a little foreboding. It's a song about David, the lead singer. According to interview transcripts, when he was younger his girlfriend threatened to kill herself if he broke up with her. He did so and she actually ended up killing her self. The theme of the song also speaks of the Devil telling him to do the same. Interesting, nonetheless. Link above is to Ruckus download.

I'm more philosophical at home. Perhaps it's the lack of music, lack of games, lack of work, lack of other outlets for my thoughts. Perhaps it's the presence of other philosophical people. Maybe a combination of all the above.

Is anyone really content being single? Were people in history, at the time of the Mayflower, Revolution, and so on, happy with their relationships? Obviously human experience spans generations, but the modes and speeds in which these experiences present themselves have changed drastically. One large difference that one could point to is that of arranged marriages. To have your parents ascertain the person best suited for their child before desire for a relationship event presents itself. Parents often know what's best. After all, maximize control and minimize variability, inconsistency.

Shock
Denial
Anger
Sadness
Acceptance

Since it's March Madness and all: Rebound.

As signified by the checkboxes above, I think I'm good. There stand the five stages of grief. I will admit I was definitely was looking for someone to fill the void of not having someone to call at 2am any morning if I needed to, to be completely myself around, to hug and hold, and so on and so forth. But being in a relationship is so much more than those little things. Not that the little things don't matter. "Catch the foxes for us, The little foxes that are ruining the vineyards." Ref.

Back to the topic of happiness based on relationship status. Everyone, for the most part, wants to be in a relationship. I am no different. But I've reached the point that I'm content without being so. Apparently the one month of rebound per one year of the relationship was surprisingly accurate. I don't think I have anything else to write now.

30.

Different - The Idea

Watch the movie titled "Different - The Idea" here.

Cayra

Cayra is a pretty awesome program. It allows you to quickly make "mindmaps."

• A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindmaps
  

Now I can easily make non-linear to do lists!

Cayra is free to download, though you need to have Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 installed.