Goal 35: Shelves

This actually conclude all the goals that I completed on my first day zero goal list. I will be following up with an entirely new list though!

Goal 35: Build an awesome storage solution

Annie and I have been building a little home in Mountain View, CA. With that includes many, many books of an English PhD student. But all those books need somewhere to go! So I made some shelves.

This was my first serious endeavor using a router, and now it's one of my favorite tools

Cut up all the wood at Radicand  

And then assembled them and finished them in my backyard.

And voila!

Not nearly enough storage, I've since followed up with a second set of shelves.

But I'm gunna need more soon...

Status: Ready to start making things

Goals 56 and 57: Food and Drink

Goal 56: Consume something older than I am

This one is an important one to do sooner rather than later, because it only gets more difficult and more expensive as time goes on...I guess there was an opportunity here to knock out both 56 and 57 with the same something?

Without breaking the bank, and without disclosing my age here, I found 30yr old Krohn Port at my local Bevmo. I don't remember what we were celebrating, maybe the end of finals? Not sure...but my roommates and I celebrated with some drink that had been around longer than my body.

I saw the Krohn factory(?) when I was in Porto.

It was an aged tawny port, and was a delicious blend of maple syrup and deep red wine.

My roommates Sebastian and Dylan

Goal 57: Consume something that costs more than $100

My perception of things have changed quite a bit since I wrote the goals (that's a given, I suppose). $100 is still expensive for something you consume, right? Well it is for me.

On my second trip to China I was with some friends and we went out to a nice place on the Shanghai Bund called The Roosevelt. I wanted to take advantage of the group I was with, and I wanted to celebrate with ordering something I wouldn't normally, so I shared a $300 tomahawk steak with two colleagues--certainly the most expensive thing I had ever ordered.

Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures before we started eating it...and unfortunately this picture isn't very good at all.

The steak was delicious, but I must say that it did not meet my expectations. Not this, nor anything else since that I've paid greater than $100 for, have I found to be worth the difference in price from a more palatably priced item.

Skybridge Shanghai

Status: Satisfied

Goal 78: Thanksgiving in Central America

Annie and I have been on many wonderful adventures in the last few years. One of the first ones we went on was to El Salvador and Guatemala in Central America. We had been talking nonchalantly about a trip over Thanksgiving break for some time, but for one reason or another plans never congealed...until the Friday before Thanksgiving week when we booked flights into El Salvador for less than 24hrs later, and flights out of Guatemala, with no hotels or travel arrangements in between.

We arrived in San Salvador, El Salvador and made our way to a hostel we booked at the airport. The first day we found that street markets were all over, and that people don't generally walk ANYWHERE at night because the civil war is still fresh in everyone's mind--which is to say that people wouldn't say it's dangerous to walk, they would just strongly recommend against it.

Our first stop was to take a chicken bus out to the coast where we would take a surfing "lesson" and hang out on the beach.

Then we took busses across the country out along the "Ruta de las Flores" (roughly Route of the Flowers) stopping to take a hike out to see waterfalls and some fancy flowery restaurants.

We stayed in remarkable little hostels the entire time, and found El Salvador quite a lovely country. People were very apparently religious, and there were churches everywhere. All the chicken busses had bible quotes written all over, and there was endless religious imagery.

A lovely hostel we stayed in for our last night in El Salvador

It was also apparent that no one had any money. People drink water out of bags (instead of bottles) and even the nice areas of town were small and normal. There were no large buildings, no financial districts, no rich neighborhoods.

We took a chicken bus to the Guatemalan border and walked across to pick up another bus to Antigua, Guatemala.

The old buildings ranged from old, to VERY old

We once again found ourselves in a very unique little hostel that was basically in the heart of Antigua and was run by a very kind gentleman. We would set up here to take a trip out to lake Atitlan.

Skybridge Antigua

After about a 3.5hr chicken bus ride out to the lake, we found out we could actually boat across it to some of the tiny towns, and I'm not one to pass up a boat ride.

Goal 78: Go to an undeveloped Village

Now I've been debating with myself as to whether this should really count or not. In the end, my gut says that this is really what I was looking for (even if it wasn't what I was imagining when I wrote the goal).

This little town overlooks the double volcanos of Lake Atitlan

The town was only reachable by boat, and most of the homes were built of simple materials with no power or utilities. We walked all around it to see how people were living in this isolated spot without modern convenience.

We talked to some children who were hanging out

One of the most amazing things about it was just how beautiful the view was. It's really no wonder people would set up here.

Basically the entire town can be seen here

Next we took an overnight sleeper bus to Tikal in northern Guatemala. Theses Mayan ruins were beautiful and expansive with many towers and a huge plaza area.

A raccoon-type animal meanders about 

From the top of one of the towers you can see the rainforest with a couple other towers peeking out

Status: Happy to remember

Goals 9 and 46: Recognition

Working hard sometimes lends itself to accomplishments that are out there for others to witness. I'll cover a couple times that was the case for me.

Goal 9: Get published

This one is a little short from the strong form of the goal because I was published in conference proceedings. I'm not picky. I managed to scoop up three conference paper acceptances in my last year at Stanford in three different fields.

The first was an international collaboration with some Finnish researchers who were looking into process and information flows while I was looking at how metadata reflected those flows. It was accepted and published in Aalto University's CO-CREATE 2013 proceedings, and was called "Collaboration and contracts in Integrated Project Delivery – Exploring the roles of owners and architects" and I had five co-authors.

Figure 1: Figure 3 from the paper

The second (in acceptance timeline) was a related paper diving deeper into the possibility of using metadata to determine issues with information flow. This time in a more prestigious worldwide civil engineering conference, CIB W78. The paper is called "Automatic Alert System: Improving Information Management on Construction Projects," and is so prestigious you can't even view it without being registered.

The final (and most fun) paper was published at IDEMI 2013 (Porto University), and was called "Using a "Dark Horse" Prototype to Manage Innovative Teams," based on the Dark Horse Prototype that we use as a teaching tool for the ME310 curriculum. The other two TA authors and myself were able to fly out to Porto, Portugal to present this paper.

Flying into Porto seeing the characteristic red roofs

We took a train out to the vineyard towns.

All around there was fabulous tile on all the buildings.

Some of the tile came together to make a beautiful piece of street art.

Mos to the tile was just patterns.

Goal 46: Create something that gets patented

I actually thought I would get this one sooner based on some work I did in undergrad...and then maybe on some I did in grad school...but actually, I had to wait until I was working at Apple...well, two years after that. My first design patent was published in June of this year. Ok, so maybe it's true my name isn't even associated with that at all, but that's ok, I know I created that design.

What a beautiful object

Skybridge Porto

Status: Pleased

Goals 82, 22, and 24: Work, work, work

This is going to be annoyingly short...

Goal 82: Learn to use ANSYS effectively

So I used to work at Sandia National Labs doing wind turbine modeling, including ANSYS simulations. I think that counts...even if nowadays maybe I don't remember so much.

Unrelated to my ANSYS work, an SNL colleague and I won a design competition while I worked there.

Goal 22: Eliminate All Debt
Goal 24: Become completely self sufficient on all of my bills

These is similar, and it could be argued that I'm not self-sufficient on all of my bills. But I'm effectively there after holding down a job for a couple years.

Status: Wanting to clear the backlog

Goals 4 and 15: Traveling After Grad School and before Apple

This post is going up many hours after the previous post. Some might call that a gap in time. Well, I have some more goals completed. Yes it's true that some of these were completed past the deadline, but I'm going to be embarking on a whole new list of goals, and I can't just put these on since they're already done.

Goal 4: Go to Hawaii

Right after I graduated from Stanford I went to Maui, Hawaii for a week. Oddly enough there is no "welcome to Hawaii" sign, so you'll just have to believe me. We went for a sail.

Blue ocean and mountain islands.

We went for a snorkel and walked around the island towns. Chilled on beaches, some nude.

We went for a climb and a drive.

Climbing the middle mountains.

 And ended up doing a full island-round. Seeing the whole island included dessert, forest, mountains, islands, neighborhoods, small cities, sugar cane, and lots of ocean. It was a great trip.

Pools of Hana were probably my favorite with waterfall jumping and a beautiful drive.

Goal 15: Go to Alaska

It was getting to be my final weeks before starting my job at Apple. I had lots of different plans after graduating (such as the above trip to Hawaii), and I wanted to do a road trip up north to see my family in Oregon and see the places I hadn't been to in a while.

I started by hauling it through Oregon all the way to Seattle, where I would meet up with my old best friend Eric. We went crabbing, collected hay, and rented a boat to see seals and cause trouble with.

Eric under the Tacoma Narrows Bridge

Gathering hay for the farm.

After deciding I wasn't going to be able to drive all the way to Alaska, I decided to purchase a plane ticket to Alaska for 2 days at the airport. And so I went. To Alaska

Make that 49 states checked off my list.

I rented a car (Subaru), which was basically the only decision, and commenced driving across the state starting in Anchorage. I headed towards Denali.

I came across a birch tree syrup farm. Bought some syrup. Who knew?

I found some canoes that weren't locked up, so I took a lovely little boat ride around a lake. 

I drove out west through mountains to a more isolated town that had a cruise I could take to go see some glaciers.

Because the cruise was more out of the way, we got to see some remote glaciers, and even found ourselves in a sperm whale feeding frenzy.

I continued to drive around and see endless beauty. 

Skybridge Anchorage

Status: Wishing I had more energy to write this entry about a very awesome few weeks.