The World Needs More Ninjas

Contrary to rumors that may be flying on the Internets, we haven’t retired from blogging. We’ve just been very busy taking care of other stuff. So, here’s what’s been happening in a nutshell.

The biggest news is that I finally accepted a job. I’ll be going to work for Cisco as a software engineer starting January 17. The position is based at their Research Triangle Park location in North Carolina. So, this was huge blessing to us to be able to find a job in the southeast. I ended up deciding between this and a postdoc offer from Dartmouth, a research scientist offer from Telcordia, and an offer from NIST (actually a re-offer from my interview in the spring since they had an unexpected death in their group). I plan to write more details about the decision in the future.

Related to this, I deposited my dissertation on Friday. Done. Finis. The End. A great feeling Also, as you might be able to tell by the previous link, I moved my research homepage to a new domain. I also decided to try a little Google AdSense on the new page to see if it will cover the cost of the hosting since I’m no longer using the school’s servers. Thus far, I’ve been very pleased with the host for that site, A Small Orange. They seem to have a lot better reliability and performance than Dreamhost…but, of course, you get a lot less storage and bandwidth for the price.

So, this weekend, Leigh Ann flew down to Raleigh to do some house hunting. Leaving me to…da da da…load all our stuff for the upcoming move. We spent pretty much all our free time the past week packing and ended up with like 55 boxes plus your standard array of furniture. We’re trying out a Pod for this move to avoid having to unload into a storage facility in Raleigh and then reload another truck whenever we are ready to move in to a house.

While not a necessary condition, I think that it is a sufficient condition of a true friend if they help you move. So, I’d like to give a big shout out to Ben, Andrew and Allison, and Andy for helping me. It took us about five hours, but we got the whole apartment moved and packed in the Pod.

We’ll be leaving Champaign for good this upcoming Friday to stay with Leigh Ann’s parents for Christmas and until we find a place to live in North Carolina.