College -> Real World

Well, long story short, I've completed 18 years of school and am now off to the real world. I graduated from Stanford three weeks ago, and I start work on Monday.

So what have I been up to in the interim you ask?

Apartment

I've moved into an apartment near downtown Palo Alto. The location is pretty nice, and the rent is not too bad. Here are some pictures:

Finances

I've also started paying off some students loans. I have roughly $20,000 that needs to be returned at some point. Even though no payments are due until December, the juice is running (yikes!), so I'm trying to pay down the principle as much as I can. My goal is to get it all done by Jan 1, 2012.

I've also begun putting rungs down for a "cd ladder." A cd ladder works as follows (I'll use 12-month cds as an example): every month for 12 months, you put $x.xx in a 12 month cd. When each matures, you simply open another 12 month cd with those funds.

A 12 month cd gets a better rate than shorter term certificates of deposit, but you have to promise not to touch the money for a longer period of time (like, you know, 12 months). Anyways, once you've done this for 12 months you have a cd maturing every month but at a higher interest rate than if you had a 1 month cd. It's a nice way to set up an emergency fund that can still draw good interest. Ally.com gives some pretty solid rates (imo), plus they have some bizarre vehicles where you can withdraw early without penalty, so I've decided they've earned the honor of becoming my bank of choice.

Random Web Stuff

Since I'm going to start work shortly for a company that's on the web, I figured I would brush up on some html/css/php/mysql stuff. So I've been working on some short little projects to try to keep my brain from atrophying.

Well, that's what I've been up to. Someday I'll get the hang of this blogging thing and post more than just updates.

May Projects

My past lamentations over boredom are about to be resolved... with a vengeance. This month I have not one, but two, major projects to complete for my spring quarter classes. They're pretty cool, though, so I thought I'd give a brief overview.

CS315a - Parallel Computer Architecture and Programming

For this class, I'll be working with two others to code and parallelize an Item Response Theory based program. Props go out to Andy for introducing me to the idea, and for pointing me towards several white papers to get us started.

CS343 - Advanced Topics in Compilers

For this class, I'll be working with one partner to create a test-case generator. I'm pretty excited about this project, as it allows me to get my hands dirty inside a compiler and could prove to be pretty useful (hopefully). The idea is pretty simple. Let's say you have the following block of code:

foo(int a, int b) {

if( a < 10 )

//do something

} else {

if( b != 0)

//meant to do something, but instead causes a runtime crash

else

//do something

}

}

My program would create three input test cases: foo(1,0); foo(11,1); foo(11,0); These can then be run by the user, knowing that they likely get X% path coverage on their code. It should be pretty sweet.