vlion - a pursuit of the ineffable

It's saturday morning, two weeks and a day since the wedding. The Wife has slept in, as is her wont. The day is amazingly gorgeous, only a few clouds in the sky. The cats have come in and out a bit, and the birds are ... twittering. Or chirping.

I've been pushing around thoughts about a Sudoku solver/generator. My current randomized implementation is hideously inefficient. Feh. I want to get my understanding of backtracking significantly better: my understanding from this is going to guide the core of an automated stock trading system I want to put together.

I have some other ideas for coding going, including some iPhone apps and a webapp, but the stock trader seems the most interesting right now. Probably the least lucrative to start out with...

The iphone apps I want to write in Lisp. Objective C makes me want to barf, it's like "C with gotchas", and XCore is hands-down the worst IDE I've had this misfortune to use. Plus the online help, outside of Apple forums and StackOverflow, seems to be entirely full of copy and paste posers. Yuck. I figure that I will put together an iPhone framework for Embedded Common Lisp and use that for the webapp. I'd like to release the framework, but I'm not sure how the open source licences play with Apple. Worst case will be BSD, I suppose (rather prefer AGPL3, all things considered... )

The webapp I've slated to work on in the fall; it may or may not pan out. It essentially would be a website generator /combined/ with playing website guy for small businesses. I think that it might be able to work for the late adopter crowd. I've seen some tremendously horrid small business websites. Wordpress and Drupal just look too yick for me to want to go there, so I am fussing with other solutions. Of course my geek solution is to write my own, but NIH might not be the best idea (or is it? It's always considered a bad idea to outsource your core business idea). Possibly a fork of a simple CMS? I don't know.

Long term, I don't want to be working for a large/midsize company, that's for sure. I'm in it now, and I appreciate the resources at my disposal, but the amount of leverage you get in those companies is heavily contrained by politics and how close you are to the guy on the top of the money-making chain. Kind of a pain being at the lower end of the monkey pole.... I anticiapte small business/startups to be my natural home, if not outright self-employed. However, startups live in only a few areas, and small businesses are more hit and miss in terms of wanting to hire a software engineer. Self employment, that'd be rad: but someone has to want to hire me.

Ah well. Ah well. Keep on keepin' on, as I once heard.

Dawn at 4:30 am. That's north Idaho. I'm up to see it, because I woke up at 3:30am. The room feels too hot. Pity. I am mad with excitement, the gears in my head are absolutely spinning. But I quietly do chores. The Girlfriend is sleeping in the spare room; I can't put away dishes at 5am. Frustrating.

Today is the day I am switched over from 'intern' to 'regular, full-time, employee' at Local Engineering Firm[*]. I will have the New Employee orientation at 8 sharp. Strange, since I've been working as Intern for a year, but, then, okay. Whatever.

Four-thirty is quiet. No is up except me and some looney birds. Five thirty is quiet, too. I make pancakes. Chores are worked on...

My arms are sunburnt from the bicycle ride yesterday, some 18 miles. They hurt to the touch. The clear and lucid light of early morning when no humans are up still hangs around, and the door is open. I have a white-collar job. Possibly the first real white-collar job my family has ever had. I'm not sure about my grandpa's brother. Never met him.

Benefits? What? Decisions! They are a maze. I don't know that retirement is something that's needed. Why not have your fun during your life, instead of waiting until you are mostly dead? I'm confused. But it helps in taxation management? COBRA? Health Care? My family's never needed it.

I look forward to going to work and doing a good job. This is it. I've spent nearly nine years(less 1 interim year) as a student now, and my Master's is nearly done.

This is the goal, then - a small apartment while I pay off my bills, and a small desk in a corner in a corporation. Two weeks vacation(for the first two years, three weeks afterwards). All this in exchange for -

- money. Freedom from debt. Ability to not have to go out and work in the cold and the heat like my father, even when it's -10F or +95F - or worse. Ability to send my children to college so -

- they can do this too?

Ability to buy a farm. Ability to work with thinking people. Ability to make a difference in the world in a very meaningful sense. The Firm is a very good company in genuinely meaningful ways. We believe in quality. We believe in making products that positively affect the lives of millions across the globe - and we do. I have a chance as a software engineer involved in testing to ensure that certain critical infrastructure areas are more reliable than otherwise.

But, I'm totally in that Awkward Post-College Moment.

[*] Firm name is not to be named, ever.

I'm travelling right now; in north New Mexico.

It's bleak country. Not much here at this time of year, just dried grass and green trees. Spring hasn't come to San Miguel county. It's poor here too - I have not seen any signs of wealth outside of New Mexico Highlands University. Many, many, many people are in trailers. Not particularly dilapidated and horrible trailers like I see in trailer parks where I come from, but just...trailers. Dirt streets. State highways that are between 1.5 and 1 lanes on a mountain. Old buildings abandoned. Dogs sleeping on empty streets. The ditch for water is a groove in the middle of the road. Potholes in every street. Grass succeeding in its struggle against asphalt in places. I think this area has been depopulated. The poverty in the living places isn't the sort of redneck- or student-trashed poverty I am familiar with in my life. This is a sort of poverty that is simply living with less money. The sort of poverty that doesn't get an asphalt drive, but keeps things neat anyway.

The altitude agrees with me - it is near the altitude I lived at from 7 to 18 years of age. It feels like home. Driving up winding roads and seeing the 40-degree steep slopes with brush and trees on them is home. The poor living reminds me of when I was very little; 4? 5? 6?, and living in North Carolina. We'd go to businesses that worked out of homes, because people didn't have offices. It was a more rural way of life, but also a poorer one.

My dad made $14K per year when I was that age; he was paid well for his industry in that place and time (late 80s). We lived in a trailer in a former plantation - the family of the plantation owner was the family that rented out the trailer. There was a post office and about 5 homes nearby. Behind us were tobacco fields and corn fields; down the road in one direction was a swamp with spanish moss hanging off the trees; in the other direction was a river, which we would boat about upon, and occasionally catch 'croaker' fish. When we wanted a treat, we would get chicken necks from the Piggly-Wiggly (a grocery story), and catch up crabs with them. That was good eating. But the socio-economic strata I lived in was not so different from this county.

There's a profoundly deep sense of having come home. It's not home. It's a cheap motel room in north New Mexico, thousands of miles away from home. People mostly speak Spanish here and I have not seen one comic book store or computer geek store. There is all of one bookstore in this town. I don't fit in, really. But part of me, the part of me that loves trees and hunting and hiking, the part of me that isn't rich and will never fit in with the even moderately well-off - that part of me feels good here. I could 'get back to nature', buy a plot of land and learn how to farm enough to live off of.

I've been caught between the hunter and the programmer for a decade now. I wonder if I'll ever resolve this conflict. If there's a resolution possible.

Today is a work day; spent the weekend at the Girlfriend's parents place. quite pleasent.

But, today is a work day. I have to grade pages on a wiki. Don't do it if you can help it, it's hard to grade and internet-based class stuff is just icky.

I also have to evaluate several processors for my master's project and then, I'll put up a page so I can 'publish' out the results to mein professors.

In the Personal Project pipe:

I will also find/write a latex2pdf web page so I can do a fast turn-around on latex work.

I also want to set up an aggregator to watch monthly money-market/CD rates on a weekly basis. I don't fancy having to remember to check the rates daily. Much rather have a notification weekly of rate changes.

Plus I need to get some budget software and use it.

I also have a slew of upgrades to do to my Mac. It's pretty much time for Snow Leopard. And another gig of ram.

I've also started grinding on an 'article tagging' system similar in concept to EndNote et al, but command-line interface for greater flexibility. I've written it in C++ so far, perhaps I should work with a different language. C++ with the STL is pretty productive.

*looks over his todo list* Time to get cracking.