My Post-Graduation Plans

This plan is somewhat in flux, of course, but I figure I'll write it down because people keep asking me what I'm going to do when I graduate. Then I try to explain my plan but it's kind of long, so I usually don't end up finishing the explanation.

September - graduation? My plan is to be done by the end of summer quarter. I recently heard that this actually means I need to be done in August so I'll need to investigate this further. But either way, there's a conference that I *might* be going to towards the end of September. (I'll find out in June if our paper got accepted).

October - Start my road trip! See a couple friends in Portland and then drive down to the bay area and hang out with friends for a couple weeks. I will hopefully do a lot of surfing in Santa Cruz. (I need to get a roof rack for my car before I start this trip).

In mid October, I have my 10 year high school reunion! Gasp - oldness! :) So, I'll drive to Phoenix in time to hit that up. Then, I will hang out with mom in Phoenix for a couple weeks. I'll see some friends, and eat for free at mom's! Good times.

For Halloween, my sister wants to go to New Orleans. I *could* drive, but going all the way across Texas would just suck. And one of the main goals of my trip is to spend as much time surfing as possible, so I don't feel that spending a lot of time in Texas would do much to further this goal. So, I'll probably fly. That should be a crazy time, and it's near my birthday so I can celebrate the big 2-8.

November - drive back to CA for more surfing. I will see some friends in San Diego, LA, and Santa Barbara. Supposedly there are lots of dolphins in San Diego, so I'll just have to surf every day there until I see some dolphins!

December - possibly just stay in CA and surf. I originally wanted to go to Cabo but I am a little wary of driving down there by myself. If I can get Sean to come down, maybe over Thanksgiving, and do the drive with me, then I'll go. I think it would be a fascinating drive, and hopefully some good surf too!

Either way, I'll go to Minnesota for Christmas, to see my dad & co. I can practice my monophthongal 'o'. And of course freeze my butt off after getting my 'wuss' on in CA.

January - go back to Costa Rica! I want to hang out down there for about 3 months, for a few reasons. One, surfing. Two, practicing my Spanish. My comprehension is fairly decent now, so I think after a few months I'd be getting by pretty well. Three, I want to eventually buy a winter home down there. This trip will allow me to see how the surf is over a longer time period, and just learn more about how things work down there.

I may possibly do a side trip to Brazil during that time as well. That'll probably depend on how my budget is going by then. I'll have a set amount of money for this trip, and when it runs out I will come home.

The job - Part of my 'master plan' is to start working part-time as a technical proof-reader. I always offer to proofread essays/theses/etc. for my friends, and I really don't mind doing it. I have no idea if there are people out there willing to pay for this sort of thing, but I'll try it and see how it goes! I am not an English major, but I think for technical papers it might be more helpful to have someone with a technical background reading it. This would be fantastic if it works, because I can have people email me their papers and I can work from anywhere!

April - come back to Seattle and find a 'real' job? Actually, this might sound silly, but one thing I'd really like to do is get a job as a recycling sorter. I surely couldn't put up with a job like that for too long, but I want to find out what happens to everything I throw in the recycling. I want to know what's a pain in the butt for people to deal with, what gets thrown away, what's the weirdest thing people try to recycle, etc. Yes, I am getting a master's degree in electrical engineering and I want to sort through other people's trash. I never said I was normal.

Monday Picture Day - Coachella

My friend Phil took this picture last weekend at Coachella. The owners of this truck were taking tailgating to a whole new level. The show was awesome - Prince looks the same as he did in the 80s! He must have been in a cryogenic freezer for the past 20 years.

Other bands I enjoyed a lot: Yelle, Goldfrapp, Flogging Molly. Favorite act that I had never heard of: Serj Tankian. He's the guy from System of a Down. His voice was really cool. Least favorite: Kraftwerk. All I can say about that band is - WTF.

A good time was had by all, and I didn't even get sunburned!

Sad -> Happy Transform

I was in a pretty bad mood up until a few minutes ago. Why? Oh, the usual.

1. I have a bunch of work/homework that I don't want to do
2. I feel lazy because I'm procrastinating on my work.
3. I feel guilty for complaining because there are millions of people in the world who are starving/getting tortured for voting the wrong way/dying of something easily curable in a first world country......

OK this list could go on and on but it's gonna get boring real fast. Anyway, even with all that negative crap floating around in my head, this song picked me up in about 3 seconds. A world that produces a song like this cannot be all bad!

Diner - Martin Sexton

If you want to try the pick-me-up, but don't want to spend the 89 cents on the mp3, check it out here:

youtube link .

It's from a Scrubs episode, but I didn't put that link on here cause the sound quality isn't as good.

Monday Picture Day - Candy Mountain

Today's picture is Candy Mountain. Because the only thing more awesome than watching Charlie the Unicorn on youtube is re-creating Candy Mountain in your dining room.

A Hypothetical Conversation

Once, just once, I would like to have a conversation that goes like this:

Amy: Hey Bob (Bob is a pretend person in my lab), how do you do X?
Bob: I don't know.
Amy: Ok, thanks.

Now if you're not an engineer you might be asking yourself why this conversation is so great. Well, if you are an engineer you may know that the real-world version of that conversation goes something like this:

Amy: Hey Bob, do you know how to do X?
Bob: Hmmmmm. (At this point it is fairly clear that Bob does not in fact know how to do X). Well, what exactly do you need X for?
Amy: Ok, I have A and I want to find B.
Bob: Ohhhhhh, okkkkkk, well if you had C and you wanted to find D, you could do Z.
Amy: Yeah... I'm not sure that's going to help....
Bob: You know, there was a guy who worked here a year ago who worked on Z. He worked on project Gamma. Have you ever read the original Frommer paper on Z?
Amy: No. (glances around room for fire escape).
Bob: Well it's interesting, because it turns out that if your data can be modeled as....... (10 minutes of explaining the Frommer paper, and how Bob later took a class from a guy who worked with Frommer, and the project he did in that class).... and so I think if you did something similar to my project it might work for you. You could just replace C with A. What are you using for A again?
Amy: A multi-variate Gaussian.
Bob: Oh. I guess that won't work then, cause A is a multi-variate Gaussian and C is a toaster. I think they might be too different. You should really email that guy Joey who used to work here, I think he'd have some great ideas for this.

Now, as you can imagine, this is not always that helpful. But we've all done it, including me, and here's why. Engineers live for one thing - explaining things to people. If someone in Zoka (I'm at Green Lake Zoka right now) were to come up to me and say, "Hey Amy, can you explain to me what a vector space is?", my face would light up like a kid on Christmas.

This is probably one of the reasons that grad school isn't working out very well for me. I don't understand most of the stuff well enough to explain it, so I never get to experience that wondrous joy of giving the long, rambling explanation.

Bastimentos

I posted about Costa Rica awhile back and then never finished describing the trip. This post is about Bastimentos, one of the islands in Bocas del Toro, Panama. We decided to take a quick trip down there since it is relatively close to Puerto Viejo. The trip is of course still quite time consuming. Over an hour on the bus to the border, scary walk across a bridge to get to Panama, paperwork on both sides, etc. Finally two water taxi rides and then we are in Bastimentos!


Here's the view on the water taxi, I thought this was the most fascinating part of our whole trip. The scenery was not only beautiful, but I was worried about getting eaten by an alligator the entire time. We did not actually see any alligators - however, I could not understand how the locals felt comfortable crusing around in their tiny wooden canoes.

The island of Bastimentos is not like anything I have ever seen. The "town" consists of one sidewalk, perhaps half a mile long, lined with houses, a couple convenience stores, and a few restaurants/bars/hostels. Most homes had at least one chicken and a dog. Girls were often playing jump rope on the sidewalk, and people were chatting - loudly, or listening to salsa/reggeton music - very loudly.

As we were exploring the town, we saw a sign for a gift shop, located "up in the hill". Of course we follwed the sign, and soon were trekking along a narrow, muddy path. We started to wonder if we had passed it, and we asked one girl who told us there was no such store. But signs appeared periodically so curiousity pushed us on. A little while later, as we were getting to the edge of civilization, we asked another woman. She said yes, there is a store about 10 minutes away. Some of our party wanted to turn back, but I was determined to get my shopping on! So we continued our very muddy hike through the jungle.



After a few more minutes, we saw a beautiful wooden building. Was this the gift shop? No, it was a thai restaurant! We ate there later and it was delicious and beautiful. This is the view from our table - pretty neat! Anyway, we did finally get to that gift shop, and of course I bought a few souveniers! But the most important thing I bought was a brownie. It was the best brownie I have ever eaten. The shop was owned and run by a Scottish woman and her Argentinian husband. They had the most adorable little boy, who may very well grow up to be the only white boy on earth who is fluent in the creole langauge of Bastimentos.

On our second day in Bastimentos, we did what tourists come to the Bocas del Toro to do - snorkel! A water taxi took us to "Hospital Point", supposedly the best place to snorkel in Bastimentos.



The snorkeling was fun, although I will admit it wasn't my favorite snorkeling experience of all time. The water was a little bit wavy, so I was often getting pushed around by waves instead of vegging out and staring at fish. Also our rental snorkel gear was not exactly super awesome. The googles were just really old and cheap and didn't fit that well. However - the scenary of the island itself was amazing! After some snorkeling we sat around on a grassy knoll and just basked in the sun, looking at the beautiful water and jungle. The little lawn we were perched on was actually just outside of some privately owned residence. I really wonder who lives there - it's quite remote. I bet their house is beautiful but I think I would get bored living there.

The next day we headed back to Costa Rica. On our way back to the mainland, we had a 90 minute water taxi layover in Bocas, the main city of Bocas del Toro. I ate a platefull of bacon that was so greasy it melted in my mouth, and french toast - all with the some of the best-tasting coffee ever! Mmmmm. I didn't get to figure out what 'real' Panama food is, but I loved how they do American food.

Monday Picture Day

This is the dam in Apache Lake, AZ. I just looked it up and apparently it's called Horse Mesa dam. I went wake-boarding here two summers ago - it was awesome!

I need some girl friends

For the past 8 or 9 years, I have made fewer and fewer female friends, as most of my friends come from the electrical engineering realm. I have always had fun hanging out with the guys - BSing, drinking, making raunchy jokes. I felt that I fit into that scene quite well and it was a lot of fun. But throughout undergrad that side of my social life was always balanced by a few close girl friends. I could go out dancing with my sister, Irene, Cecily, and Cristina and it was a ton of fun!

Can you go out dancing with a group of guys? Well, the technical answer is yes. But it will generally suck. You will often see 3 or 4 girls dancing in a circle on the dance floor, but have you ever seen 3 or 4 guys doing this? Maybe at Neighbors (a gay bar).

Anyway, since I've moved to Seattle I've pretty much hung out with guys. All my guy friends are great and fun to hang out with, but I miss my ladies! In the past few days I've really been noticing this lack of girls a lot. On Thursday I looked around my class, which has over 20 people in it, and realized that there are only two girls in the class. And last night I was out at the bars with a group of 6 guys. I'm trying to throw a big party in May and I am so worried that it will end up being a total sausage-fest. :(

I feel like I barely even know how to talk to girls anymore. What do they talk about? Make-up? Hair? Is it OK to make a joke that has the word "hoes" in it when you're talking to girls?

I think there is a solution to this one - I just need to try harder. I do have one girlfriend here who is in the MBA program, and yesterday I went to her MBA happy hour thing. I talked to a couple girls there and it was really fun! Another thing I need to do is find something non-work-related that's interesting about myself that I can talk about. I usually try to ask the person I'm talking to a lot of questions, because I don't want the conversation to be focused on me. But, I think a lot of girls do that, so if you have two people trying not to talk about themselves it's hard to keep a conversation going. Work is usually one of the first topics that comes up, but when I tell girls (non-engineering girls of course) that I'm in electrical engineering, they kind of go, "Oh that sounds hard," and it basically kills the conversation. Guys on the other hand are often fairly interested in it, which could be another reason why I end up spending more time talking to guys.

Lending Club Update #3

I recently got this important announcement from the Lending Club:

Lending Club has started a process to register, with the appropriate securities authorities, promissory notes that may be offered and sold to lenders through our site in the future. Until we complete the registration process, we will not accept new lender registrations or allow new commitments from existing lenders. We will continue to service all previously funded loans during this period, and lenders will be able to access their accounts, monitor their portfolios, and withdraw available funds without changes.

The borrowing side of our site will remain generally unaffected by this registration process; borrowers can continue to apply for loans and new loans posted after April 7, 2008, will be funded and held only by Lending Club.

Until the registration process is completed, the company will undergo a quiet period and will not be able to respond to press and other inquiries about Lending Club or the registration process during that time.

I'm not sure what the upshot is here. It sounds vaguely positive, in the sense that perhaps promissory notes are a good thing? Yet also sounds negative because it gives the impression that Lending Club had been naughty in not doing this originally. If anyone knows more about the pros/cons/legalities of promissory notes, fill me in!

Unity in Diversity

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to this youtube video. She says this was a really popular video in the 80s in India. The title "mile sur mera tumhara" means if your music and my music mix, it's our music. I think that's a really nice sentiment.

By the way, as heartwarming as that message is, I couldn't help laughing a tiny bit at the awesome 80's synthesizer sounds and the nice "turn the page" bell chimes! :)

Banana Azul

Sean & I just got back from our spring break trip to Costa Rica! We went to Puerto Viejo, and stayed in a beautiful hotel called Banana Azul. Before I left, I was telling my mom about the hotel, and the Canadian guy Colin who runs it. She said, "Oh, is Colin your friend or Sean's friend?" And I said, "Neither. I just read his blog."

Wouldn't that be funny if we could speak hyperlink? Anyway, the hotel was just as amazing as I'd dreamed!! It's funny how having high expectations can be really good or really bad. Sometimes when I go surfing and have a hard day where I don't catch any waves (or ding my board! wahh!) I get pretty disappointed because I was expecting some really high amount of fun. But for Costa Rica, my expectations worked for me instead of against... I had been dreaming about the place ever since I started reading Colin's blog last summer, and it was honestly better than I'd imagined. I think for me, if I want to love something, I'll love it!


Here's me arriving at the hotel after about 24 hours of traveling! (Seattle -> Houston, Houston -> San Jose airport, bus to San Jose, taxi to another bus station, bus to Puerto Viejo). Later on in our trip, I realized that I didn't give enough appreciation to how luxurious our bathroom was. I didn't get a picture of it but there's a great one here.



Here's Sean at the entrance to the hotel the next morning. We spent most of our time in Puerto Viejo riding bikes into town, checking out different surf spots, and eating. The food was good although it's mostly ex-pat-owned restaurants (i.e. bsaically American food). Apparently Costa Rica food consists of very plain rice and beans. My favorite delicacy was a homemade chocolate truffle that had chili powder in it, which I got at Echo Books .

Lending Club Update #2

While I was gone last week (Costa Rica - pics coming soon) I started receiving my first payments from my Lending Club loans.

I have gotten payments from 19 loans so far, and all of them have been on time! So, I've gotten $10.96 in principal, and $4.78 in interest! If the rest of my loans make their first payment on time, I will start scaling up my lending. It looks like my early retirement plan is well underway!

Sign up for Lending Club here.