graduated.

Depressed.

I seem to have fallen into a funk. Apparently my internship can only be extended for 30 days past the date of my graduation. So, I have a lot less time than I thought I did. It's really hard to get myself to do anything. I've been ADD and every time I start working on something, I get distracted.

I'm also sort of pessimistic about my job prospects right now. It takes a lot of effort to go job hunting. The two interviews I've done so far didn't go very well, and I'm only really interested in one of the two jobs. It will take a lot more effort on my part to find open companies. And because my internship is only going through early June, I now have a much more open schedule than I thought I did. I guess this should be a good thing, but right now it doesn't really feel like it.

I think I tend to write in my blog only when I'm depressed. It's sort of a source of comfort to splat out my worries and doubts onto a web page. But, that's not to say that my life has been terrible lately. Pretty much from around my birthday through Mother's Day (almost a month) I've had it pretty good. My birthday was wonderful. I've been very busy, in a good way.

I think my first doubts started cropping up a couple of weeks before graduation. I've had a hard time at work ever since I found out that I probably won't get hired on when my internship ends. While I was in Boston, something I had been looking forward to for over a month, I kept swinging between delight and depression. On the one hand, I enjoyed hanging out with Stirling and her relatives, meeting the Game Dev team from AZ, making friends with the guys from UT, traipsing around Boston, and riding the train. On the other hand, the competition was exhausting, and I realized that I just wasn't excited enough about our project. It caused friction in our group and made me not want to be there.

It made me realize how important it is that I not do things half-heartedly. Any time when I don't truly believe in what I'm doing, I find it incredibly hard to keep motivated. This is true for imagine cup, just as it's true for work, lately. The problem now is figuring out what I can do to become passionate about something again...

status report

So, I keep wanting to write a blog post, but feel like I have nothing to say. Graduation is looming, so there's something I can talk about. Also, I'm procrastinating at work. This can count as my lunch break.

This is my last semester at CU, and when I'm done I'll have two degrees and a minor to show for it, a GPA above 3.3, a stole, a medal, and lots of thank you notes to write. I'm starting to make plans with my family about the graduation ceremony. I want to throw a party at our house for both family and friends. We'll see how it works out.

I still need to talk to my boss about how sure he is that I'll have a job at Sun after graduation. It's been really nice not looking for jobs, but I know that will have to change pretty soon. The Just In Time internship fair is around my birthday, and ACM is hosting a mini-career fair for CS that I'm helping with.

But, mostly, I just want the semester to be over. I'm enjoying my classes fairly well but Senior Project just drains all my energy. Daniel has heard my rants about this. Come to think of it, so has Amanda... I'm definitely at the "burn out" point of the semester where I no longer want to do any work, and just sit on my ass playing video games as soon as I leave campus. This is fine for my classes, as I only have three, and have been doing fine on getting my homework and labs done. But this isn't so great for Senior Project, where I've been really uninspired to figure out what I need to work on in terms of improving our project (which feels "done" but not "good").

It's also not so great for work. Speaking of which, I need to start a batch process real quick... Ok. My performance at work has been declining as of late, and I'm not sure if it's because I'm feeling overwhelmed in other parts of my life, or if it's because I'm not enjoying it as much lately. I still enjoy doing queries for Amy every month, but it's been reduced to a few commands in my terminal. Even the creation of the zip file is in the script itself. All I do is pull it back to my computer with SFTP. Most of my work right now involves sending emails to people who want queries run. And some of them are grumpy. I also get a lot of email that I have to wade through involving bugs in our current project - which I'm not currently involved in. I've only done the tiniest bit of coding for it, and that was separate from the main part of the application.

I've been feeling more ADD lately, which means I'm having a hard time keeping track of what I'm supposed to be doing; when I can remember, I'm reluctant to sit down and tackle a problem because I can't remember what I need to do to solve it. One of my coworkers asked me to look at internationalization in python; I worked on it a little, and then gave up, because I couldn't figure out how to test my work. I started making translation files to test my hello world program, and gave up because I didn't have all the utilities I needed to create the files. I'm not seeing the whole picture, and it frustrates me.

Being ADD is fine for school; I can switch tasks, I can go do something else and come back later. It's not so great for work. I need to meet deadlines, be productive, feel productive. Even though I probably get things done at a reasonable rate, my productivity comes in bursts, and the rest of the time I just feel irritable and scummy.

Also, I have misplaced my earbuds, and so can no longer listen to music at work. This depresses me. Where did they go??

ow

I went to the doctor's yesterday. Surprisingly enough, the only thing that still hurts is my arm, where I got my tetanus shot. It feels like the flesh where the bandaid was is bruised.

That's all I really wanted to say. I think part of the reason I write blog posts so infrequently is because, for the most part, I only have one thing that I want to write about, and I could just as easily contain it into a status message.

Speaking of which, I recently joined Twitter. So far it's been a success, I should say, thanks to the firefox plugin that lets me click on the bottom of my window and type in a new status or reply to someone else's. It's similar to gmail chat in some ways. Which is the only reason why I'm still using it.

It shows me when one of my friends has a new status. Paul's seem to be the weirdest of all my friends (and I'm following Turing, go figure). I've become better friends with him over the last year. Not surprising since we're sort of forced to spend time together. (Hooray for senior project.)

It used to be that when I said "Paul" I meant a different person. But I haven't actually talked to that one in a pretty long time. I haven't seen him at SciFi, I keep ditching GameDev, and our dinner club sort of dissipated.

back to work

I really don't update very often, do I. My life seems sort of boring from inside of it. I go to school, go to work, go home, watch tv, play Tabula Rasa, sleep.

I'm enjoying the New Pornographers CD that my dad copied for me. It's been in my car for a few weeks now and there's only one song that I skip on it. When I first listened to the CD, I hated it, of course. The only way for me to find music I really love is to listen to it over and over until I like it. For some reason I rarely like my favorite songs on first listen; everything I like straight away eventually ends up forgotten. Take, for instance, Modern Life is Rubbish, my first Blur album. I bought it because it was cheap, and on first listen hated it and wished I hadn't bought it. But after a few months and repeated listens it became one of my favorite albums. Not to say that I wouldn't recommend it over Parklife.

I've also been listening to Slacker radio at work a lot. If you'd like to listen to my station: here it is.

My semi-vegetarian status seems to still be holding, for the most part. I do think it's a good thing for me to force myself to eat shrimp or fish instead of other meats, and I like shopping at Vitamin Cottage (though Daniel complains that it's full of hippies). It has led to situations where I've eaten bread pudding for dinner, however. Next time I'll go to Noodles, I swear.

In not as happy news, today was layoff day at Sun. It seems that my entire team is untouched, but one of my friends in a different team was laid off, and I don't know what to say... I just feel awful about it, but I feel like I need to wait until she says something to talk to her. I'm also sort of edgy walking around the office, because not everyone knows if they've been laid off yet, and I don't know who's staying or not. I promised Molly I would tell her if any of her friends got RIF'd, but I honestly don't know how I would know...

And, well, it looks like I might have a job after graduation. If our team gets new responsibilities after the re-org, they'll need more people, and my manager pretty much stated that he's going to request a position opening for when I graduate. Knock on wood. So, I'm actually pretty psyched about that.