davemclain.com

Before talking about how i’m gonna survive the end, i’m gonna plug Southwest. Southwest is awesome, Southwest is amazing. American Airlines once charged me to move my flight off of a sold out flght near Christmas to a three quarters full flight a week earlier. Southwest is letting me move to a flight 3 days earlier, that’s non stop rather than a layover in Denver. And they’re giving me 20 dollars to do it! Southwest Airlines, i salute you.

Thanksgiving has past and so now i stand looking out across 2 weeks of academic insanity. It’s less than it normally is because i’m only taking 12 hours. The difference between 4 classes and 5 is profound. Anyway, something happens to me around this time and i suddenly go from being completely unconcerned about all things academic to being real intense about getting all the points necessary to bump my GPA. Turns out that critical time was tonight. I’ve got Excel spreadsheets telling me that I actually need to do the last finance assignment and probably get a 90 on the final to get an A, but that since the final is the very last thing on the list i can safely spend more of my time trying to figure out what on earth is going on in CS 337. Luckily the same sheet tells me that by some freak accident (and an absurd curve on test 2) i actually have a 90% in the class. Management is a wash (read a B) and i just want it to end, but it’s got a bunch of useless busy work that i need to do before it can finally stop wasting my time. I shudder to think that there are some people who take that class and think “hmm i think that i would like to study these things in more depth and perhaps make it into a career”. If you are one of those people, i hope you get to apply knowledge of the Abilene paradox in your life, i really do, but if you ever tell me a story about it, i’m gonna hit you in the face.

In conclusion, here’s my life.

The Cal hat is about to make it’s return

It’s official, i’m going to be going back to the Seattle area this summer. For those of you who read this space over the summer, that’s probably somewhere between ridiculous and inconcievable. Basically it boils down to a question of long term decisions, that i know the decision to go back is the right one for my career. Also, i have a price sheet for buying my happiness for periods between 1 week and 6 months. Microsoft was almost spot on in their bid. Note to NI, IBM, Freescale, AMD, and anybody else in Austin, it’s cheaper to keep me here.

I now feel almost no academic obligations, which is definitely a bad thing. The reasoning goes as follows, nothing i do academically will affect my position at Microsoft. This has been empirically proven by a friend who withdrew entirely and was still allowed to work. I’m not planning on failing anything or withdrawing certainly, but i don’t exactly feel pressure to get a 4.0. Furthermore, i’ve gotten the general impression that with two large software development internships on my resume, my GPA doesn’t need to be pulling nearly as much as it did to get me where i am now. Finally, with 4 semesters of coursework, plus the haul that i had coming in, my GPA is doing fine without me. This is not to say that i’m not continuing on in my education. In my classes right now i’m in the uncommon position of not really being on the border of any of my classes, i’ve got reasonably strong A’s in 3 classes (depending on this last finance test) and a B that isn’t going back up to 4 points unless i devote my very existance to management.

I really, really want to start my own company. Working at ACM has given me some insight into the space of software tailored to hedge funds, but looking around the internet, the problem space seems pretty saturated with reasonably mature products. I don’t doubt that myself and some of my friends could outcode the others in the space, but it’s hard to take a well coded 0.5 up against some pretty good 3.0s and several poorly coded 8.0s, it doesn’t look like it’d be that easy to get a killer app over the competition. Unfortunately, looking at that didn’t give me any new direction to go in. If you’re reading this, and there’s some really bad software that you have to use that you hate, tell me about it.

Mountain Biking results in pain. i knew this, but it still seems like a surprise everytime. If the next time you meet me i only have my right hand, it’s because i finally became fed up with my left hand involuntarily locking my front wheel in the middle of technical descents. I should have endo’d like 6 times.

Harry Potter movie is the best one yet.

I slept 15 hours last night, down at 6:30 for a nap b/c i had only gotten 2.5 the night before. Fully expected that somebody would call me on a friday night and wake me up resulting in fun. I was wrong and when i woke up it was still dark so i just laid in bed falling asleep again. When i finally woke up permanently the clock read 9:30. It’s the most ridiculous thing that’s happened to me recently.