Team 242 Ride Begins
Made it down to Westby, WI where we will leave bright and early tomorrow morning on the 2006 Wisconsin Adventure ride. I will be riding with Team 242 for 4 days, covering about 350 miles through LaCrosse, Eau Claire, and on to Wausau and Stevens Point. I’m excited to begin and a little nervous about riding more miles than I have at a single time for 4 days in a row. My butt hurts already just thinking about it!
The weather forecast looks excellent. Sunny and low chances for rain. It may get a little hot at midday with highs in the low 80s, but overall I don’t think we could ask for better weather.
So far I’ve raised about $700 for the American Heart Association and hope to reach my goal of $1,000 yet this summer. Although I’m proud of the money we’ve raised, I’m even more excited to enjoy the ride and share our story with the people we meet. I’ll try to update everyday but we probably won’t have Internet access very frequently. Wish me luck and see you on the otherside.
The Next Big Thing
A few months ago I made some posts about my quest to go to graduate school and haven’t really said much about it since. I put a lot of work into applications to various schools and this spring I traveled to see several campuses. Over the past few months I’ve had several major decisions to make and to say the least they haven’t been easy. The exciting news is that I’ve made a final decision to attend Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh this fall. The masters program I intend to complete is a one-year professional masters in human computer interaction (HCI), a program within the School of Computer Science. The most significant factor in this decision was the impression CMU and it’s reputation made on me. When I visited for the HCI program’s open house, I was very impressed with the interdisciplinary approach and professional focus of the program. The reputation of CMU in computer science is also well-known, as it consistently ranks #1 in the U.S. for computer science graduate programs (PhD; masters programs aren’t normally ranked). This ranking didn’t mean much to me at first, but once I experienced campus and met some professors it reinforced my impressions of CMU. I decided that it was simply an opportunity too good to pass up.
HCI is an aspect of software engineering I’ve always been very interested in. I believe that the hardest parts of building software is getting the product right and understanding customer needs and wishes. If you can’t do this, even having the brightest programmers and testers in the world won’t make your product successful. HCI is only a small piece of this, but I think it is the most fun and exciting piece. Personally, I have enjoyed the work I’ve done on the “front-end” of software projects and this has led me to pursue a formal education in HCI. At this point I’m not sure where it will lead, but that is part of the exhilaration. In addition to getting a master’s degree, my goals for returning to school are:
- Learn the core concepts of HCI, especially related to the development process.
- Push my limits in working with people. Regain my presentation skills and become more extroverted.
- Get to know lots of really cool and smart people and feed off their original ideas.
So what this all means is that I’ll be leaving my current job at BAE Systems this August to move out to Pittsburgh. It won’t be easy because I’ll be leaving a lot of friends behind but I know that new opportunities await me at CMU.
Bocce Up North
I spent this past weekend up north in Wisconsin at my friend Darrel’s cabin. If you haven’t lived in Wisconsin you probably don’t know what “up north” means. Basically, if you say “I’m going up north,” it means you are driving north for some period of time until you reach a lake or campground. Activities while up north usually consists of fishing, swimming, playing games, eating and almost always drinking. This weekend it was too cold to even think about swimming but we did everything else.
Friday night and Saturday were spent playing games which included a bar-games tournament and outdoor extreme bocce. Extreme bocce is our version of the traditional Italian lawn bowling game in which you can throw the pea pretty much anywhere you want. Needless to say it makes for some interesting situations. At one point we lost two balls under the deck but after some creative carpentry we managed to retrieve them.
The only downside to the weekend was the long drive but I suppose if it was close going up north just wouldn’t be as enjoyable.