Runner's High

As mentioned in Halloween Letter 2009, I had internship interviews at State Farm and Principal. I guess I never provided an update? Well… I ended up getting internship offers from both companies. In the end I chose Principal because I got a great feeling from the interview. My interviewers were very engaging and cared a lot about my interests and finding the right fit for my Computer Science and Accounting majors. There was also the bonus of being in the same city as Shawn and three hours from my family, as opposed to being ronery in Bloomington, IL.

The summer was a lot of fun. I stayed with Shawn in his apartment in West Des Moines, which saved me a lot of money and kept me out of the ghetto (my dad’s concern). Stepping into our apartment, it looked like we were living a life of luxury. We put our 40″ Samsung TVs side-by-side in the living room, which made it fun playing Call of Duty together and allowed us to do separate things. The problem with having two near-identical TVs side-by-side is that they also share the same remote control signal. We had to use strategic remote control positioning to get the desired TV turned on/off or to change volume/channels. Much to my surprise, having both TVs in the living room worked out fine hearing-wise, though my movie or TV show would sometimes get drowned out by Shawn getting angry over his microphone while playing video games.

The downside to living in West Des Moines is the commute, which takes about twenty minutes, plus time spent walking from the parking ramp into work. I rode the DART to downtown Des Moines every day, which saved me gas money and also allowed me to avoid incompetent drivers during rush hour. Did I mention I got in a car accident outside of Des Moines last April? I got rear-ended and pushed into the car in front of me on I-35. I moved to Des Moines shortly after my accident, so it was a relief knowing I wouldn’t have to drive through busy traffic every day.

My internship at Principal was with the Web team in Individual Life IT. Prior to the summer, I had not had any experience with web applications, so I was looking forward to learning something new and cool. This team primarily supports Java web applications, so I was also excited about getting to work with Java. My primary project over the summer was to add some business and technical changes to a web application used by their Accounting department. Though my tasks didn’t require accounting knowledge, it was helpful to know basic terminology when working with business partners. The projects I worked on this summer gave me a lot of experience with troubleshooting. Getting a local workspace set up for a new project almost always has problems to be resolved, and it’s not always apparent what the underlying problem is. Overall my internship was a great experience. At my final review, my leader and mentor offered me a full-time position on the Web team after graduation. I accepted a few weeks ago, and can’t wait to graduate and start a new chapter. Already having a job lined up certainly takes a lot of stress off my super-senior year.

Over the summer, I did some other things to occupy my time. I signed up for the Dam to Dam 20k road race about a month before the race was scheduled. Without putting a lot of thought into it, I wrote down an estimated finish time of 1:40. This was just over an eight minute mile pace. This pace would be fine if I were coming off a cross country or track season, but I hadn’t run consistently for months. After stressing about it, I decided to get as much training in as possible and just enjoy the race. The weather was stormy and cool the day of the race, which increased my confidence. I don’t run well in high heat or humidity, so I was willing to take the rain if it meant a cool temperature. Over the course of the 12.4 miles, I was amazed at how fast the miles go when you’re running in a huge pack of people. This was my first road race ever, excluding a small hometown 5k. I had a great run and ended up finishing in 1:39. I was very pleased with beating my goal time, especially since the farthest I have ever ran is 10 miles, and I hadn’t ran that far in a month. After the race, I stopped running consistently, but I’ve been getting back into it now that school has started again.

My summer was also filled with weddings. I had my first opportunity to be a bridesmaid when my best friend from high school got married towards the end of July. The bachelorette party for this wedding consisted of floating down the Maquoketa River, then going out on the town in Dubuque. This was both a great and horrible weekend. Floating down the river was a lot of fun, until my sunburns started to surface later that night. This made for a painful experience while out on the town, and pretty much ruined my 4th of July weekend. I spent most of the 4th of July laying on my couch because it hurt to walk. The worst part came a few days later, when my skin started to peel. What looked like normal peeling revealed itself to be borderline second degree burns. My legs healed within a few days, but my stomach and feet were raw. The burning/tingling of my skin kept me from sleeping for more than a couple hours at a time, so I drove to an Urgent Care clinic in desperation. After being lectured about wearing sunscreen from a lady who looked like she belonged on Real Housewives of West Des Moines, a friendly nurse applied burn cream to my skin and dressed it in surgical dressings. I will also note that the snooty physician’s assistant measured me at 5’5. I have not been measured at less than 5’7 since freshman year of high school. I had to reapply the burn cream and redress my burns for a few days, at which point my skin started to finally heal. Moral of the story: put on sunscreen early and often, even on areas you want to tan… It was a lapse of judgment on my part, but I have since forgiven myself. Kelsey’s bachelorette party was a lot of firsts for me. I choked down my first full can of beer (nasty) and had my first shot. Much thanks to Kelsey for the 21st birthday party I never had.

I thought it was about time I post an updated account of the trials and tribulations I have faced configuring Black Velvet. I originally wanted my computer to dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu. I knew I would primarily use the Ubuntu partition, but I needed Windows to play the Sims 3 (and to run other applications, of course!…) I also wanted my computer to have a RAID5 array, since I bought three identical 500GB hard drives and my motherboard supports RAID5. After installing Windows XP on Black Velvet, I attempted to install Ubuntu Jaunty Jackelope. Unfortunately, the partitioner did not recognize my RAID array. After a lot of struggling, desire to have a working computer took over and I settled on temporarily using Windows XP as a single boot.

A summer of playing the Sims 3 and half a semester later… I decided it was time to tame this beast. I gave installing Ubuntu onto a RAID5 another go. Note: Details here may be a little fuzzy, as I hopelessly switched between Karmic/Jaunty, Live/Alternate Install CDs. I found a handy article on setting up FakeRAID, which was helpful, but ultimately didn’t do the trick because it seems that my (fake) RAID controller and Ubuntu don’t play nicely for RAID5. Eventually I settled on having a RAID mirror for my Ubuntu partition and no redundancy for Windows 7. This made things a lot smoother. I was able to use my actual RAID controller, which only has 2 SATA ports, as opposed to the multiple built-in SATA ports that are “capable of RAID 5”. Using my motherboard’s hardware(ish) RAID controller came with some perks, such as naming my RAID array. I chose to name it TOAD.

Setting up the Windows 7 dual-boot was actually pretty simple, once I found the right information for how to do it. I had to edit menu.lst to include the following information:

title Windows 7
root (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

When it seemed that things were finally going to work out, I ran into another gotcha. This one was mostly my mistake, though. When I upgraded from Jaunty to Karmic Koala, it asked me what I wanted to do with menu.lst, as the upgrade had modified it. I mistakenly chose not to overwrite. When I went to reboot, my new kernel was not listed in GRUB and inaccessible. Note that this was all in hindsight- at the time I had no idea why GRUB was not updated. I may have ended up re-installing Jaunty, but this time overwriting menu.lst when upgrading to Karmic.

The last major struggle with achieving my setup was…. a degraded array! Shortly after I got the dual-boot working, my RAID array was reported to be degraded. I began to question whether it was a hardware issue. I was almost convinced one of my hard drives was bad when I realized that my RAID array worked fine and dandy running Windows XP in the summer. I also drew the conclusion that I had used Jaunty for a week or so (before upgrading to Karmic), and the array didn’t degrade. I determined it must be some type of issue between Karmic Koala and my RAID array, and have since been using Jaunty Jackelope without any issues. I am hoping that the next long-term support version of Ubuntu will not cause my array to degrade, but only time will tell.

It’s nice to see my computer finally functioning the way I want it to. It seems like I have experienced more than my fair share of problems, but I guess it’s experience and builds my troubleshooting skills. Sadly, as much as I went through to get Windows on Black Velvet, I rarely use it. I don’t even have the Sims 3 installed currently… but I blame school on that one. Hopefully this summer I can get back to using Black Velvet as my primary machine.

For those not familiar with accounting, a 401(k) is a type of defined contribution plan. Why is this the title of my blog post? Because I just learned about it in Income Tax this week, and I have officially retired from the collegiate running scene. Since I finished up my fourth season of cross country this fall, I am out of eligibility for that sport. I still have a couple seasons of indoor and outdoor track left, but I chose not to finish those out.

My primary reason is that I am too busy with my double majors and life in general to fully enjoy it. I have noticed that each year being part of the team gets a little more stressful than the last, mostly because of increased busyness. Any time something meant to be fun turns into a chore, you know it’s time to stop (especially when you’re a busy college student). It was my goal at the beginning of the year to finish out cross country, as that has always been my favorite sport. I like track, but I have never loved it. There’s something about running in circles for miles that loses appeal as you get older.

Although I am done competing for UNI, I will continue to run. I have taken the last few weeks off, but I will probably start to run more consistently during Christmas break. When I first decided not to do track, I thought it would be difficult; however, I have really enjoyed the flexibility. One of my first runs after my decision was like a breath of fresh air. It was fun! I didn’t care what pace I was running, nor did I have a distance I thought I needed to go. In the future, I’m sure I will do 5ks, half-marathons, and maybe eventually a marathon, but only if I’m having fun.

The semester is well under way, so I thought I would give everyone (the three or so people who read this) an update on what I’ve been up to. In summary: class, cross country, work. Class is going pretty well. I’m in Real-Time Embedded Systems this semester, so I have been spending a decent amount of time working with my team on that. As the semester progresses, I will be spending an insane amount of time on the project. I may need to invest in a sleeping bag for the Train Lab. I am also taking Income Tax for my Accounting major. Those two classes are my primary focus. On the side, I’m taking Music of our Time, which is proving to be quite interesting. I lack any kind of musical abilities or knowledge, so I am learning a lot and becoming exposed to some good music along the way. My new discovery is Bob Dylan. I really like “Blowin’ in the Wind”. My two other classes, Legal & Social Environment of Business and Operations Management, are some of the general business classes I have to take. I have done a minimal amount of work in those two classes thus far, and my test grades last week showed it! I need to kick it in gear a little, or maybe just open the textbook.

Cross country has been… interesting. I did the most training I’ve ever done in the summer, but yet have struggled more this season than ever (except maybe my freshman year). Allergies have been a potential cause, but maybe attitude also. At a Division I school, I am a mediocre/middle-of-the-pack runner. Because I am fully aware of this, I let myself feel inferior, especially on a team with new, talented athletes. Our team is huge this year, and by huge, I mean we have 17 girls on our team. This season has just been different, and I can’t quite put my finger on why. I will also note my best friend transferred to Iowa for pharmacy school, so the atmosphere has totally changed for me. We used to sing, quote Grey’s Anatomy, and laugh at jokes no one else understood while on an OD (over distance) run or warm-up. I would say things have improved the past two weeks, especially with the change in weather. I am looking forward to upcoming 6K races, most notably the Bradley Classic on October 16. I have learned the last couple seasons that longer races tend to be my best. The last couple days I have been fighting with tendonitis in my shin. I’m hoping I can recover from this in a day or two. More to come on cross country later….

Work. I’ve been keeping busy working as a ResNet Lead again this year. This is starting to feel like a Christmas letter… anyways, I attended the Fall Career Fair at UNI, and ended up with internship interviews at State Farm and Principal. I have a second interview with State Farm on October 18-19 in Bloomington, IL. I haven’t heard from Principal since my first interview, but word has it that they are still accepting applications through the end of this week. I’m really hoping for internship offers from both companies, but I will be happy interning at either place.

And… that’s all for now. Enjoy!

This is coming a little late, as it is now mid-September, but I’ve been busy with school and cross country starting once again. I haven’t blogged in a while, and this was next up in my queue of blog topics.

For the majority of the summer, I resided in Cedar Falls. I subleased a duplex, along with two other random roommates. I didn’t get to know the other roommates much, as none of us were around much during the day. The duplex was very nice and cheap, too. I definitely hit the jackpot! Living in Cedar Falls helped me stay motivated with running as well. With only 5 or so routes at home, all of which involve gravel roads, I tend to lose motivation.

By skipping UNI’s Fall Career Fair, I kind of missed the boat with getting an internship for the summer. The crappy economy did not help either. However, all was not lost. My ResNet connections gave me an opportunity to work full-time for UNI’s ITS-Network Services department doing programming. My summer project was writing code to interact with Active Directory through LDAP to provision users. One of the most important lessons I learned is that Google is a programmer’s best friend. I was not familiar with LDAP or Active Directory going into the summer, other than knowing Active Directory is what is used for the labs on campus. I also learned a couple new programming languages- Perl and PowerShell. I ended up using Perl to implement the project, and really enjoyed the abilities it gave me compared to Java, which was my previous language of choice. Overall, I gained a lot of programming experience from this job. Unfortunately, between my class schedule, cross country, and working for ResNet during the school year, I didn’t have enough time available to continue working on my project through the fall, so Shawn has taken over the project once again.

I also went on vacation to Amarillo, Texas this summer. My sisters once again qualified for national gymnastics, and this year the location was Amarillo. I don’t remember how the girls placed, but they did alright. In my opinion, “nationals” was kind of a joke. It was the most unrepresented national meet I have been to yet. A vast majority of the gymnasts in the USTA (United States Tumbling Assocation) are from the Midwest, and many families are not willing to make the trip to far away locations. Amarillo was… interesting. It was perhaps one of our most laidback vacations because there was so little to do. The highlights of the trip were spending an entire day hiking the Palo Duro Canyon and getting caught up in a dust storm while visiting Cadillac Ranch, ten Cadillacs buried nose-down into a field. We also ate at the Big Texan, which is famous for offering a free 72 oz steak if consumed in 1 hour, or else $72. In addition to the steak, participants must eat the side salad, baked potato, shrimp, roll, etc. Unfortunately no one attempted while we were there.

I also spent several weekends in Des Moines this summer to visit Shawn. I attended my first I-Cubs game with Shawn and his sister’s family. I also attended a wedding in Ames for one of my former teammates. I have really taken a liking to Des Moines, other than the monotonous two-hour drive, which is good because Shawn will be working full-time for Principal starting around January. When I wasn’t in Des Moines, I was back at home visiting my family or staying with my sister in Hiawatha. I spent maybe two weekends in Cedar Falls. Contrary to my initial beliefs, Cedar Falls is actually quite boring in the summer. No one is around!

On a sad note, my summer concluded with my beloved silver dollars dying. While I had lost one or two due to freak accidents (flipping out of the tank, getting stuck in a tank ornament), I had owned the majority of the remaining silver dollars since my freshman year of college. I left them at home for the summer since there wasn’t enough room for the 55 gallon in my duplex. My fish died after my sister cleaned their tank. The cause of death is unknown, but I think it can be attributed to contaminated water of some sort. The only survivor, other than some black skirt tetras I don’t care for, was my plecostamus that I have had for three or so years. On the bright side, I have my 55 gallon tank up and running again at UNI, with a nice assortment of plecostamus (plecostami?), silver dollars, red-tailed sharks, tiger barbs, and a blood parrot cichlid. The circle of life.

I have decided to name my blog postings after song titles or random lyrics from songs, since it seems like that is what I have naturally done with past posts (except for my first blog). So this blog title comes from “I Get Weak” by Belinda Carlisle. The reason for this title is I HAVE MONO! BOO!! I went to the Student Health Clinic yesterday, and after a strep test came out negative they decided to run a blood test, which indicated mono. When the doctor told me the diagnosis, I was relieved. I had an absolutely horrible race on Friday at Iowa State, and I couldn’t figure out why. I ran 11:34, which would have been very embarrassing for a 3000 meter time in high school. I have felt generally tired the last week or two, so knowing there was a reason for feeling like crap was kind of comforting.

So… I am finished with indoor. I am missing out on the UNI Dome Open this Saturday and Conference at UNI the next weekend. After my race at Iowa State, I kind of lost any hope for having a good season. My best time in the 3K this season was 10:52, which I was content with, but anticipated improving as the meets progressed. I won’t be able to run for probably three to four weeks, though the doctor said I could try the stationary bike after two.

I am taking the rest of this week off from school and work for sure, and will see how I feel next week. I got an extension on a programming assignment due Friday, but I have another programming assignment and a speech due next week. I had also planned on going to the career fair, but whether I end up going to that is to be determined.

I bought tickets last winter for the Celine Dion concert that was scheduled for October 30th in Minneapolis. Unfortunately, half an hour after I ordered the tickets I realized we would most likely be leaving for conference cross country the next day. I ended up selling my tickets in August (for an $8 profit) which was a good decision, as we ended up leaving the day of the concert. About a month ago, I decided to check TicketMaster, I’m not really sure why, and saw Celine Dion was performing again in Minneapolis on December 18th. I ordered the cheapest tickets, which were located about as high up as you could go. After some investigating, I found out the concert scheduled in October had been postponed due to some kind of throat infection. Fate? I think so!!

Anyways, my friend Andrea and I roadtripped to Minneapolis on Thursday for the concert. I started to regret going to the concert because of the weather forecast and also driving through Minneapolis during rush hour. I was even stressed about the concert waiting in line to get into the arena. But that all changed when we had our tickets scanned. The scanner beeped and the guy told us we would have to go to guest services. I was thinking it was just my luck that our printed off tickets were defective in some way. The guy said we were probably being relocated. After weaving back through hundreds of people waiting in line, we got to guest services. The lady asked us if we were big Celine Dion fans. We said we were, but not over-the-top or obsessive. She then asked us if we were big enough fans to be on the floor- Andrea and I looked at each other and nodded excitedly. Our mangy printed off tickets were then exchanged for two beautiful silver tickets. I think I had a look of utter shock on my face the whole time before the concert started.

I wasn’t sure if Celine would have an opener since she is the greatest female singer of all time, but she had a guy named Gordon who plays at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas perform for about thirty minutes. He did imitations of other musicians, which was pretty funny but I wanted Celine to perform so we could get back before the snow hit. She started the show off with “I Drove All Night”, which seemed really fitting since we had driven 3 1/2 hours to see her and would be driving all night on the way back to Cedar Falls. The next song she played was “Taking Chances”, one of my favorites of her newer songs. It was pretty obvious how much she enjoys performing. After just about every song where she had a really high and long vocal, she would pump her fists in the air like she had just scored a touchdown or something. She played “My Heart Will Go On” as her encore, which was amazing.

After the concert we drove around Minneapolis for half an hour trying to get on the right road. We even took a scenic drive along the river for a few miles until we realized that was not going to get us anywhere. We finally got on 35-W South, and since it hadn’t started snowing yet, our only concern was staying awake. After driving for about an hour, it was like we crossed a boundary between no snow and snow everywhere. It wasn’t bad at first, but close to the Iowa border it began to drift and turn the interstate into one lane. We poked along at about 40 mph behind a vehicle in front of us. When we got in Iowa, we ended up behind a snow plow. Though it was pretty safe behind the snow plow, we were driving less than 30 mph and at that rate would not be home until 5:00 am, and the blowing snow was starting to affect our depth perception and attentiveness. We made a really good decision and stayed at Country Inn & Suites right next to the Diamond Jo Casino. We drove about an hour and a half the next day and finally made it back to Cedar Falls around noon.

Even with the crappy weather, this was probably about the best experience in my life so far. I think Andrea had a lot of fun too. If nothing else we enjoyed jamming out in her car for 7 hours.

So I decided to make a blog because apparently it’s the cool thing to do, and I’m trying to write a paper about Dante’s Inferno. It’s only two pages long double-spaced, but right now that is equivalent to me trying to write a 10 page paper. I currently have the attention span of a dead person, and at about the worst possible time as finals are next Monday. I am going to blame it on a recent re-addiction to pop, gummy worms, and other sugary things. I also had a really fun weekend and don’t care to do anything not fun at the moment. I have five tests spread out Monday through Wednesday and then I’m done. Wednesday night I am doing something fun, to be determined, because on Thursday I’m roadtripping with Andrea to Minneapolis to watch Celine Dion, the greatest female singer of all time, perform! We may gamble a little too since I’m legal in Minnesota. Friday I am heading back to the big city of Aurora where I will have absolutely nothing to do and will enjoy every minute of it… for a few days anyways. I’ll be venturing back to CF to check on my fish, run workouts on the indoor track, hang out with friends, and keep my sanity. Anyways, back to reality……