So I apparently have been neglecting this blog. At this point its been something like eight months since I’ve posted. I think its time to update it because having the homepage display an awkwardly humorous story about Ashton Kutcher is only OK for short periods of time.

Why haven’t I updated? For the same reason I never post a new comic to IBTI: I neglect my own contributions to the internet. I’ve always been more of a lurker, I read and absorb information rather than posting my own comments. That, combined with how busy I’ve been over the past many months… well, I just haven’t bothered to write anything. Hopefully that will all change, but probably not too drastically.

Last semester was very busy; It was my last semester at UMass, and I was involved in a handful of courses that took a lot of time. Additionally, I was working full time, and looking for a job and a place to live following my graduation. Since my parents live in North Carolina and I wanted to stay in Boston, I didn’t have that handy option of crashing at my parents place while I sorted out my post-academic life. This left me with little time for other personal pursuits. I even tapered away from WoW, and all other video games, near the end of the semester.

By mid November things were looking pretty grim on the rest-of-my-life front. Finding a place to live was hard: First, roommates for a January lease are hard to come by. Very few people move in January, and after much searching, none of my friends were looking. This meant that I needed to find random people (Craigslist, ew), which meant it was much harder to find cool people, as well as those who might be flexible towards the other half of my problem: I didn’t have a job yet. This, as many people are aware, is something extremely difficult to do in the current job market. Contact after contact, all I received was “we’d love to hire you, but we [have a hiring freeze/aren’t looking for college grads/don’t have the money right now], sorry!” I wasn’t even turned down at interviews, because it was hard enough to find a place that was even hiring in the first place.

It all changed when Adrian hooked me up with his recruiter at Winter Wyman, Adriana Ganos (She rocks!). Everything changed in the span of 4 days. On day one, Adriana called me and said that a little old company called Research In Motion was hiring in Andover, and they would like to speak to me over the phone. I was excited, and agreed. It was scheduled for day three. On day two, I get a call from Josh Michel, who explains that he and Jack Ferris (both friends from UMass) were planning on moving into a new place in January, kind of short notice, but they needed a third roommate. Jackpot! They already had a decent place lined up for a third person, they just needed the person. I happily obliged. On day three, I spoke to Frank Judge at RIM, and that went really well. The job seemed extremely interesting, and I was excited at the prospects of working in an industry that I hadn’t yet considered yet seemed perfect: mobile software. 10 minutes after I got off the phone, I got a call from Adriana saying they wanted to schedule an interview in person, which took place the next week. On day four, I got a call from Dave at Philips, my manager from last summer, and he tells me that there was a recent change in their hiring process, and they can actually hire new college grads. I got a job offer that day.

I could write on and on about what happened over the next two weeks, but what it boils down to is this: All at once, I went from having no place to live and no job, to having an awesome apartment with two awesome roommates, and having to choose between two awesome job offers: Philips and RIM. Both were excellent, and I definitely enjoyed my work at Philips last summer. I went with RIM at no fault of Philips, simply because the actual work that I would be doing interests me more. There were a few other minor things that were in RIM’s favor as well, but there were also a lot of things that Philips offered that could have swung the decision. It was hard to choose.

Here I am, two months later, living in Somerville and I’m loving what I do.

Anyway, I’ll try to post more from now on.