Whoa! Is this thing on?! Remember how we said we would post regularly to keep you all updated on our lives in California? Yeah… we may have dropped that ball on that one. Well, we are making a new attempt to go on more adventures which means we will have a lot more to share… hopefully. Without further adieu, here is what has been going on.
School:
When we last posted, I was applying to schools. Well, surprise surprise, I got in to two. Penn State and University of Illinois Springfield (UIS) both being online. Now, long story short, my credits transferred poorly at Penn State (I would have started as a Freshmen with about 20 credit hours) and I was able to start at UIS as a Senior. I am now almost done with my first semester at UIS. I am taking 2 computer science classes (Operating Systems and Foundations of Computer Science). I will have only 2 real programming assignments total for both classes by the end of the semester, both for Operating Systems. For those curious, I am creating a shell, written in C, implementing a few made-up commands and using execvp() to implement the others in a child process using fork(). Foundations is a lot of the basics and has been mostly review from past classes I have taken. My one assignment was using Scratch, a pseudo programming tool for middle school aged students. I am also taking an Oral Communications class where I have to videotape myself making speeches, upload them, and allow my classmates to comment on it. Watching yourself give a speech isn’t really a confidence booster, to say the least. Finally, I am taking two classes that fulfill what UIS calls ECCE credits. ECCE stands for Engaged Citizenship Common Experience and there are 10 required credit hours from 3 of 4 subgroups. I am currently taking a 1 credit required course called the Speaker Series where I watch people give lectures (1-2 hours long) about various topics that matter in the world. A few examples of speeches I have seen are “Sex Trafficking in Illinois,” “The HealthSouth Fraud: A case of Ethical Malpractice,” and “What’s Wrong with White Talk?” I watch these lectures, make a post to a forum, and now I have to write a paper for it by the end of the semester. The other ECCE class I am taking is called Wired Perspectives which discusses the digital divide and the technological difference between first and third world nations.
I am registers for classes this summer (English 102… required, and another ECCE course titled Crisis in Environmental Health). I am petitioning the school for a few more of the transfer credits to be accepted which would allow me to graduate this coming fall. I have been feeling positive about that happening and I should hear back within the next few weeks if they have been accepted. Assuming I will graduate in the fall, I have registered for Programming Languages (a CS major level course), C# and .Net (a CS elective), my Software Engineering Capstone, and the last ECCE class Sex, Gender, and Pop Culture.
I have been happy with my choice to change schools (again) because it turns out I am graduating sooner than if I had stayed at Western and it’s cheaper. While it is definitely an adjustment to online versus face-to-face I think I am getting the hang of it.
I have been filling out a lot of applications for internships for this summer but have yet to hear back. If I don’t have one this summer, I will try for the fall as well. I am not feeling hopeful about an internship at this point and I am figuring out how I could take a few more classes this summer and work a bit too. I am going to talk to the office of our apartment complex to see if there is somewhere I could post my information for babysitting.
That’s it for me on the school front. If you know anyone in the area who wants to hire a software engineering intern let me know.
As for a summary of what we have been up to…
October: Our last posting…
November: After that post, my mom flew down to visit me for my birthday. We went out for a nice dinner with Oliver before she and I went to Honeymoon Bay for a few days. Note: if you want to visit Honeymoon Bay, just know there is a fog horn that goes off every 8 seconds. We could see the horn from our hotel window. I had a great time visiting her and she kindly reminded me that 25 is quickly approaching. November was fairly relaxed. I continued to get myself set up for school, Oliver and I spent a fair amount of time with his cousin Steve and his wife Holly. Thanksgiving was a whirlwind. We spent time with Oliver’s Dad and Stepmoms family as well as both sides of mine. When we got back to San Jose, Oliver’s Mom and Stepdad came to visit for a few days which was wonderful.
December: Paul and Shannon got here Wednesday after Thanksgiving. Since Oliver was working, I got to spend some great one-on-one time with them. We went for walks and explored, I took them to Santa Cruz for the day, and just spent some great time together. While they visited, we had dinner with Steve and Holly one night and Oliver’s friend Connor came over from Santa Cruz for dinner another. It was a wonderful time. They continued on to the San Francisco for a few days after visiting us. After they left, Oliver and I spent some time play catch-up. I got the finishing touches of my school stuff in order, Oliver worked, I did my best to coordinate getting gifts sent to the various places they needed to go so we wouldn’t have to carry all our presents onto the plane, then what seemed like no time at all, we were on the plane again. We were in Seattle for about 10 days and visited with family. I was thrilled that we got a white Christmas on Whidbey and we loved being able to see so many family members but sad about those we missed seeing. Right before we left, Steve and Holly welcomed their son Sterling into the world and so coming home we were looking forward to meeting him.
January: Our big New Year’s celebration was drinking some champagne and watching T.V. until it was acceptable to got to sleep at 12:01 am. I made the trip down to Santa Barbara to visit my cousins and meet my oldest cousin Tim’s baby, Evelyn, who is absolutely perfect. After the 10 hour round trip drive, I started up my classes. It has definitely been an adjustment because online school is so very different but I was feeling good. For Oliver’s birthday I tried my best to make a special dinner. A family friend, Nora, stopped by for dinner one night and we got to catch up for a while which was wonderful. About a week after, my parents came down in their Airstream. We met them in Carmel (outside of Monterey) and stayed in a cabin at the park they put the R.V. We had a great time celebrating Oliver’s birthday (the 24th) and my mom’s birthday (the 25th). It was beautiful and great to see them.
February: From what I recall, February was mellow. For Valentines day Oliver and I stayed in and had a nice dinner. We started playing pool, bocce ball, and ping pong in the complex and continued to enjoy the pool. I guess that it is such an oddity for people to swim in the winter that people have actually taken pictures of us! The full story is best given in person. The Friday after Valentine’s day Oliver and I went to a fancy, Michelin star restaurant that we had a gift certificate to, Adega. It was good but our minds weren’t blown. The rest of the month was mostly homework. We got together with friends Lucas and Xueer. We went to the Computer Museum here which was incredible. We spent over 3 hours just to get through it, skipping over most of it.
March: My parents headed back north from their adventure and we met them in Point Reyes. So far, it was my favorite place I have been here. It was absolutely beautiful, we had some great meals, and Oliver and I stayed in an Airbnb walking distance from the Airstream. We will attach pictures at the end. The next week I was on break, but I spent it doing school work and errands. I did give myself a couple of relaxation days. The next weekend, we flew up to Bellingham. Oliver’s friend Zane was graduating from Western and we thought it would be a nice opportunity to get to see people we haven’t been able to see on past visits. Oliver’s family friends Pat and Robin we very kind to house us and it was wonderful getting to see them and catch up a little. From Friday till Sunday, I planned to see at least 7 people/groups of people, 4 of them in Seattle. Unfortunately, when I went to drive my rental car down to Seattle for the day, it was snowing just north of Mount Vernon and while I feel comfortable driving in snow, the rental car wasn’t handling it well and between that and how exhausted I was, I felt it safest to not make the trip. I was really sad to miss seeing people and I was planning to surprise my pseudo mom Nora at her birthday party but as my mom put it, she wanted to see me but more importantly, she wanted to see me again. I ended up spending most of the day with Pat and Robin’s daughter, Sam, and I am so appreciative that she was willing to keep me company and it was fun getting to know one of Oliver’s life-long friends. Unfortunately, we when returned home, Oliver had a cold and while taking care of him, I caught it too. We spent the next week to recuperate.
April: Once we were better, we were able to get together with Steve, Holly, and meet baby Sterling, who is adorable and perfect as well. We brought dinner and had a wonderful evening playing games. I continued to work on school stuff and spent a while struggling to register for all of my remaining classes. Oliver had a training at work which allowed him to work form home for a few days. We have decided to try and adventure more over the weekends which brings us to now. Oliver is going to go over what we have been up to this weekend.
Sorry if I left anything/anyone out. It has been a whirlwind and everything is getting mushed together. Overall, we are doing well. I have definitely been stressed that past few weeks. Between school, my looming graduation, which I guess isn’t a guarantee in Fall, and the realization that I will probably not get an internship, which then causes me to panic that I won’t be employed when I finally do graduate. But the good news is that it is sunny, beautiful, and a balmy 80 degrees here. Oliver and I are beginning to explore more which has been a lot of fun, we are looking forward to go on adventures and try and post about what cool stuff we are doing here at least once a month. To wrap up this essay, we are happy, healthy, continuing to adjust and explore, and doing our best to convince the world that we are adults.
Maybe someday I will stop having the sudden realizations that I am in California and not Washington. We love and miss everyone.
Hannah
Hello all,
Hannah is surely (but don't call her that) telling y'all of our anecdotes and adventures. Which means I am left to tell you about my job. But no one wants to hear about my job. It's high tech, but yet amazing how low level it really is. I write in C (created in 1971) implementing the SCSI protocol (standardizedin 1986) and the Fibre Channel protocol (created in 1988). Oh how technology improves...I had a computer science teacher in college who famously would say that nothing has been invented in computer science since we landed on the moon. I have a whole spiel about that, but I'll skip it.
So instead of the work stuff (I will add a bit at the bottom for the interested reader because I can't help myself) I'll share my own take on our myriad advertures down in San Jose land.
San Jose is a lot bigger than Indianola. And it is noticeable. Sometimes it is the sixteen EPA superfund (superfun?) sites in Silicon Valley that reminds me. Sometimes it is the 2,000 people who showed up to take a hike just outside the city. But always it is the traffic. Not exactly the same as rush hour on Bond road...but I digress. There are good things about living in a city, I'm just waiting for someone to point them out to me. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, I don't like reality, but it's still the only decent place to get a meal.
Speaking of meals, actually I've decided I don't want to take this segue. But here we are, anyway. What to do, what to do (I'm starting to wonder how many of you really read my section of the website). All work and no play makes Oliver a dull boy (I might have done that on a previous posting, but oh well. It deserves a second homage. I had a friend who had a crappy Spanish teacher in high school and so on tests he would write the first sentence of a paragraph in Spanish and the last, and everything inbetween he would write, All work and no play makes Dylan a dull boy. He got an A in the class. Ah...education). Anyhow, here we are, you and I dear reader, in the midst of a clusterf*** of a paragraph. Let's try and ride this out until the next one begins. Sometimes stream of consciousness writing is exactly what it sounds like.
San Jose is sunny. It does have that going for it. It is almost laughable how good eleven months of sun can make you feel. It is no surprise to me that there are so many startups here, because it is just darn hard to not feel optimistic in the sun. Of course, it is starting to get to be 80 degrees most days and will only continue to get hotter, so I will have to contend with that.
This is by far the hardest website post to write because it has been the longest since the last one. I know Hannah is giving a thorough description of everything we did over the past 5 months or so since we last updated (and it is certainly more coherent than this) so I am somewhat at a loss as to what to talk about. Maybe if we post again soon I'll have a small enough sample size to work with.
I guess I can give some more work details, everyone's favorite. I have said previously that I work on firmware and drivers. For most people, I find, this means next to nothing. So I can clarify the difference between the two and what they mean. Firmware runs on specialized hardware. For example, the software running on your printer is firmware. The printer is not a general computing machine, it is specialized. It only prints. Therefore, it needs software to be able to make it print (or a lot of hardware). This software is dubbed the firmware. You generally want to print something from your computer, right? But somehow your computer has to talk to the printer. This is where the driver comes in. The driver is software on your computer that talks to the firmware. Your computer can't know what language the printer is speaking, so the driver interprets everything and does your bidding when it relates to the printer. In short, the driver runs on your computer and talks to the firmware, which runs on a device. Almost every device you plug in has firmware running on it and has a corresponding driver on your computer. There is a driver for your USB connections, a driver for your WiFi adapter, your ethernet adapter, even for your power modules. The vast majority of an operating system is in fact drivers for running different pieces of hardware. So that is exactly what I do. I write drivers that talk to the firmware on my hardware. I also write the firmware that talks to my driver. Fascinating, I know...
In other news, I found out about a philanthropic group called TEALS. I don't know what it stands for. But I am incredibly excited about it. I get a certain number of hours per year that I get paid for doing volunteer work, so I have decided to dedicate that to TEALS. TEALS' mission is to bring computer science classes to high schools around the nation. Currently, 60% of U.S. high schools don't offer a computer science class. Furthermore, there is no degree for teaching computer science. What computer science teachers do is get a degree for teaching math or science and then get a certification for teaching technical classes. In addition, when computer science classes are offered at a high school, the teachers who start teaching them often have no technical background whatsoever. So, in response to this, TEALS was formed (and is hugely supported by Microsoft Philanthropies) to help create C.S. classes in high schools. They encourage schools to create C.S. classes (Intro to C.S., based on a U.C. Berkeley class; A.P. Computer Science A; and A.P. Computer Science B) and they provide a team of 4 - 5 software engineers who teach the class. At the same time, they also teach the teacher how to teach C.S. TEALS provides the curriculum, the labs, the quizzes, and the tests, but allows you to modify them as you wish. After the teacher has learned how to and feels confident in teaching C.S. (generally after 1 - 2 years), they begin teaching the class and TEALS volunteers assist them in various ways from helping grading to running labs to guest lecturing. TEALS also supports rural high schools that don't have access to nearby software engineers by having software engineers teach those classrooms virtually. Next year, when I would start, TEALS will support 500 high schools across the nation. I have applied, but have to interview to see if I am a good candidate. I am very, very excited for this. I truly love teaching and I am excited by the prospect of getting to teach in a high school classroom without having to get teaching degrees and certificates. Also, keeping my day job is greatly appreciated. Also, I appreciate what TEALS is doing because it feels more meaningful than a coding summer camp, since it establishes programs and teaches teachers. The teach a man to fish principle...(and he will buy a stupid hat). But honestly my excitement is far more selfish for the prospect of getting to teach.
That's all I've really got, without delving into more on work. Hannah is covering the stuff we did together. I have enjoyed all our adventures down here and I am excited for all the rest. We are working on projects (none of which I will announce because then I would actually have to finish them at some point) and gearing up to go hiking and backpacking. I'll post some pictures of us that will hopefully be interesting to look at. Otherwise I'll just say, this is water.
Good night, and good luck.
Oliver
Addendum:
Today we went to Moffett Airfield and to a museum there where a bunch of old army and navy guys hang out and give tours. One guy, a Vietnam vet, was giving a tour of their aircraft and saw a boy on crutches and he looked at him and said, "Oh. So you know what pain is."
Then he turned around and walked away.
Then there was this box in there, maybe 4' x 6' x 4' and it said it was used during Vietnam with the 7th Psychological Warfare Unit and this guy showed up and he said he spent 3 years in Vietnam working 10 - 12 hour days in that box. It has no windows and he locked himself in. It weighs 2 tons and had to be driven around by truck. It had to be moved every 4 hours or if the enemy got within 3 miles, because it was susceptible to mortar fire. He said he pushed that out to 5 miles though, because the way they got him out was sending a helicopter in, which would pick up the steel box and fly it to the base. Then, without slowing down, it would drop him so he would hit the ground, bounce, and rolling end over end. There are no seatbelts in that thing and he said it hurt like hell. So he pushed it so he only got evac'ed if the enemy was within 5 miles. His job was to sit on ridges (this thing had a 10' high, 5" diameter antenna on it) and intercept enemy communications and record them. If they got too interested in a particular location, say a bridge or something, he would send guys over there and play VCR tapes of tanks driving over it, 10 or 12 twelve times. They would think a tank battalion was coming across and so send a whole bunch of troops and antitank weapons. He would then have his guys litter the enemy side of the bridge with land mines, antipersonnel mines, and other traps. As soon as they got out, he would call in airstrikes on the other side of the bridge and blow them to kingdom come. He said he did this at least once a day for 3 years. But his whole job was sitting in this box in the jungle, listening to communications and fooling the enemy. He said there was more but it was all classified and he couldn't talk about it.