The complete flatline on this blog means I’ve obviously been a little busy lately. The good news is that I’m pretty much done with my UCLA Extension certificate program – I’m taking one last JavaScript class right now, but everything else is done.

The bad news is that in order to actually get someone to hire me, I need to start writing applications that will easily indicate to people who are doing the hiring, “See, I know what I’m doing even though I have no professional experience with this!”

This is, as you might imagine, a little time-consuming.

I also have been working on a bunch of other projects, including updating Designated Nerd, my tech consulting/programming website, which is going to get a lot crazier in the months to come. Lots of back-end stuff I need to work on, but we’ll see how it all goes.

I’ll probably post a bit more here when I’ve got some real, published projects to show off, or when something colossally awesome/stupid happens to me.

But for now, I’m just going to have to put up the “PARDON OUR DUST” banner.

A few brief snippets from the last couple weeks:

I can ski!

I briefly tried to ski six months after I hurt my ankle and was in such intense, stabbing pain I had to come down after two runs. I hadn’t skied since I had the surgery to fix my ankle almost four years ago, and I was really afraid that with everything this stupid ankle has taken away from me, it was going to take this too.

Since the NU ski trip was at Tahoe this year and a lot of my friends were going (well, in theory – in practice almost half our group got stuck in Chicago due to the blizzard), lift tickets were included, and ski rentals were seriously discounted, I decided to give it a shot. I tried to mentally prepare myself for never being able to ski again, but I’m not going to lie, the thought of not being able to do something I’ve been doing since I was two made me really, really upset.

About five seconds into my first run, I felt a huge burden lift off my shoulders. My ankle was fine. I felt like I’d never stopped skiing. I don’t think I’ve been that happy in a long, long time.

Now all I have to do is start making enough money to be able to afford to go skiing on a regular basis. Also: Probably start weightlifting to get my knees in better shape more than a month before I ski, because sweet god my patellar tendons are STILL mad at me for that one.

School suddenly got to be a lot more work.

My Android programming class is a ton of work (which is good, because I feel like I’m actually learning something in it). I’ve got a group project in another class where I’m doing about 50%-80% of the work in a given week because most everyone else a) is too consumed with their jobs b) doesn’t give a shit or c) both. Going to Tahoe for four days and getting approximately nothing accomplished didn’t help, and I wound up with all my midterms on the same week about a week after I got back. What also didn’t help was…

My damn computer went insane on me.

Kernel panics (complete system crashes, akin to the Windows Blue Screen of Death) galore, to the point where I was getting them hourly by the end of the debacle. I wound up having to drag it to the Apple Store to get a hardware issue ruled out. The good news is that it wasn’t the hardware, the bad news was that it meant I had to completely reinstall my operating system and then reimport all my files, which was a giant, time-consuming pain in the ass.

The biggest downside of it was that it happened right in the middle of my midterm week, so I wound up taking some time where I probably should have been studying and dealing with this horseshit. I’m getting my Database Management midterm back tonight, and I have a feeling I booted a couple questions I probably wouldn’t have if I’d been focused on studying and not on desperately trying to resuscitate my computer.

I’m probably going to have to replace my laptop sometime in the next few months – it’s clearly on its last legs, even with the fresh OS install. The good news is that I was expecting to need to take 4 classes next quarter and I only actually have to take 1, so all the money that I’m saving on classes is basically going to go directly into the New Computer Fund.

Overall though, despite being ridiculously busy, things have been going pretty well. As long as I can make it through the next couple weeks before my group project is due, then I think I’ll survive.

Remember this? Yeah, that’s going out the window.

That entire plan was predicated on the idea that I would be able to get into UCLA classes through a process known as “concurrent enrollment” – basically, a loophole that allows non-UCLA students who are willing to be last in line and willing to pay for it to take UCLA classes.

The problem with this plan is that it was doable two years ago, before the entire University of California system underwent several draconian rounds of budget cuts, and class sizes were compressed to the point that they’re having trouble even getting all their undergrads through the classes they need in the first year.

The budget cuts are going all the way down to the community college level – this article is just one indication of how bad it’s gotten.

Which of course makes reading articles about the asshat head of UC having the system rent him a $13,000/month house when they already own a fucking mansion for the express purpose of housing him a little more galling than usual.

Anyway, after talking to some people and getting answers ranging from “It is literally impossible” to “It is technically possible, but you will basically need to get permission from the dean of the school of Engineering every time you want to wipe your nose,” I had to step back for a minute.

What was my goal in going back to school? Was it just to get an MS? Or was it mostly to get in and out of school with as much knowledge as possible as quickly as possible?

Frankly, while I still want and will probably need an MS in the long term, it was the latter. So I’ve switched tracks a little bit.

Now, instead of a fairly brutal all-academia learning method, I’ve chosen a still fairly brutal, but much more practical schedule. Instead of “Calculus of Several Variables” I will be taking things like “Fundamentals of Programming Using Java: Hands-On”.

Basically, the idea behind this is to get myself back out into the workforce for a couple years to gain the professional experience equivalent of a bachelor’s in comp sci, and then go back and apply for MS programs.

There’s a lot of good and a lot of bad with this, but I think in the end, the good outweighs the bad. The best part is that one of my first classes is going to be iPhone/iPad programming, something that I really want to learn and have a lot of ideas for.

Also, it gives me an excuse to buy an iPad. Hooray, rationalization!

There’s going to be some pretty compressed learning though – I basically will have a week after my summer classes finish to learn C, and then I’ll be learning several languages at once each quarter for the rest of the year. I can do it, but it’s going to be pretty nuts.

The other thing that’s going to be a little weird is the schedule: Instead of having a normal school schedule, I’ll basically be attending night school.

This program is done through UCLA’s Extension program (for those that went to NU, basically their equivalent of the School of Continuing Education), and it’s mostly geared towards professionals, so all the classes are around 6:30-9:30 pm, one night a week each.

This will be good later in the year when I try to go for an internship, but for now it’s going to be pretty weird.

I think the thing that gives me the most confidence is the across the board reassurance I got that a) I’m not the only person going through this right now and b) professional experience will probably make my grad school application stand out more than just more academic experience.

The other good thing is that this summer hasn’t been as useless as I’d initially thought when I first started contemplating this switch. Part of my reluctance to switch tracks was the thought “Well, I’ve just wasted three months of extremely hard work and a large sum of money.”

I’ve done extremely well in all of my classes, and since these are basically the only serious science and math courses I’ve taken at the collegiate level, they’ll be something for me to point to on admissions applications and say “See, when I’m not a 19 year old fucking around, I can actually excel at high level science and math classes!”

So anyway, we’ll see where this all leads me. I feel like given my options right now, this is definitely the best one, and I think it could lead to some really, really interesting opportunities for me in both the short and long-term.

Been meaning to post this xkcd somewhere because it rings so true, but hadn’t gotten around to it because I’m so damn tired.

Between Chaplin being doped up on painkillers for a kidney issue and me being massively sleep-deprived, I’m not sure which one of us is going to become convinced he can talk first.

I’m a little fried.

This calc class I’m taking is significantly more difficult than the last one (mostly due to the professor, for reasons which I’m saving for what will be a rather caustic evaluation), and the physics class, which I knew was going to be hard, is pretty damn hard.

I’m basically taking the equivalent of an 18 credit quarter right now (normal courseload at UCLA is recommended to be 16 credits), and I think I will be doing that for much of the next year.

I’m also extremely rusty at much of the algebra and have always been terrible at trigonometry, and physics and calc are full of both, so it’s taking me significantly longer than the professors claim it will to do all the homework.

So yeah, been nice knowing all of you, I’ll be here in my room doing homework until approximately June.

That’s almost the worst thing about all this: My roommate is out of the country for ten days and I have spent a total of about two hours in the living room, most of it doing calc homework. The rest of the time is in my bedroom, on the computer or doing calc/physics homework.

Also, I’d like to note that whoever came up with trig integrals can go fuck themselves. The formulas are so complicated I can’t even type them (the last four here are good examples of what I’m dealing with), and they make me want to beat my head against the wall until I see gray matter.

I’m hoping that this will get a little bit easier in the fall when I’m at least interested in SOME of the classes I’m taking and will see a longer-term purpose than “I just have to get as high a grade as possible in this stupid class” to what I’ll be doing.

In the meantime, I’ll be studying, working out, eating, and sleeping, in that order of priority, chanting over and over again, “It’s just a year. It’s just a year. It’s just a year.”

When I took the GRE, I signed up for the “search service” that allows the testing board to send my info to various graduate schools so they can attempt to recruit me and/or offer me scholarships. Which is fine with me, since if someone wants to offer me free grad school, I’m all ears.

I got a basic “Check out our program!” email this evening from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. It might have been intriguing had I not thought to take a look at the weather forecast for Lincoln for the next few days:

I realize I’ve been spoiled by living in Southern California for six years, but I think even when I lived in Chicago I would have looked at that forecast and thought, “Perhaps they should have waited until spring to send out recruiting emails.”

Until I was about 21, I thought I was going to be a rock star.

Until I was 28, I thought I was going to make movies and TV for a living.

Until I was ____, I thought I was going to be a professional computer nerd.

—

Life has taken a lot of twists and turns for me since the writers’ strike of 2007-2008. Since that strike began on November 5, 2007, I have spent almost twelve of these last 24 months unemployed.

Part of that was the strike. Part of that was my decision to move into the production line and out of working directly for producers, which is an inherently more volatile career path.

But much of it has been the way the bottom has absolutely fallen out of filming in L.A. The combination of the strike starting a rearrangement of the way the business works and the economy in general going down the tubes has contributed to a precipitous drop in filming here. There’s just no work.

I realized a couple months ago as I was making my bajillionth phone call looking for work that I have not received one phone call back since June. June was also my last interview, for a job I had locked down until an actor decided to put in a good word for his niece, and then she had it locked down.

I’ve offered to take PA jobs again, but they’re not looking to take someone with as much experience in higher-up jobs as I have. In some cases, they think it’s because I think I’m above the scut work (which I don’t, I wouldn’t be applying for a PA job if I did), and in some cases, it seems they think I’ll outshine them (with the people who are insecure enough to actually worry about this, that might be a more valid concern).

Everywhere I look in terms of what my skills can get me in the entertainment business, I either see jobs that are so severely overworked and underpaid that I would rather work at Starbucks again than take them, because at least at Starbucks I would get health insurance, or nothing at all.

And frankly, the way things are going right now with the economy and the out-of-state filming incentives and the studios and networks freaking the fuck out about every last penny, I don’t see that scenario changing in the next 18-24 months at the absolute earliest.

Sometimes, you just wake up and realize that the universe is trying to tell you something. And the universe is telling me it’s time to do something else with my life.

—

And now, a brief comic interlude:

Click to enlarge.

From Amazing Super Powers.

—

I’ve always been a pop-culture nerd, but I wasn’t a serious computer nerd until the last 3-4 years. I learned some HTML programming in college, and really enjoyed it, but the complete time-sink that is working in entertainment pulled me off the track that would have kept me learning more about programming.

While the primary technical things that I’ve done in the last few years have involved technical troubleshooting and working as an ad-hoc IT Guy, what I really want to learn about is how to make computers do what I want them to.

And to do that, I need to learn how to program. I need to learn about architecture and C++ and the vagaries of programming for different platforms. I really want to learn how to take some ideas I have for programs and turn them into reality, from start to finish.

This, however, will require a fair amount of school. Right now I’m on step 0.1, taking some very basic classes at the community college level, trying to figure out exactly where my interests take me in terms of how I want to program.

My ultimate goal is a Masters’ in Computer Science. I’m in the middle of a choose-your-own-adventure bit of figuring out how that’s going to happen, but I do know that I’m sure as shit not going back to school just to get a second Bachelor’s.

I’m putting together an application to Stanford to start next fall, since a) they have an extraordinarily strong program and b) they are one of the only well-respected Graduate-level CS programs that will actually accept people who don’t have a CS undergrad background as long as they’re willing to learn.

It’s an extremely competitive program, so I have a fairly comprehensive backup plan standing by. I’ll get into it at some point down the road if need be.

If I do somehow manage to get into Stanford, however, I expect to hear a lot of this [note: mp3 link].

—

I’ve talked to a fair number of you guys about all this in differing degrees of depth, but I felt like I really needed to try and bring everything together in one place, almost more for my own purposes than to try and clarify it for everyone else.

I certainly won’t say I’m never working in entertainment again. If someone offered me a job right now that would help me keep my union health insurance even a bit longer, I’d take it in a second. But I don’t see my future in production anymore, and that’s where things have changed.

This is a path that’s been slowly coalescing over the last few months, and has picked up a lot of steam since about Labor day, when I finally accepted that I probably wouldn’t work in entertainment for much of the rest of the year.

It took a long time for the pieces to come together well enough for me to see them, but once they did, my way forward became much, much clearer. I’ve got a plan, or really a bunch of plans all leading in the same direction.

Now all I have to do is try and figure out how to get there from here.

I have found that the quickest way to get me to do something I’ve wanted to do but have been putting off for a while is to give me something else that I absolutely have to do, but I really don’t want to do.

Example: I’ve been meaning to organize, reduce, and clean up my financial records for some time. I had a giant pile on my living room chair that piled up for over a year of old bills and other things I needed to keep, I had a filing cabinet full of stuff I mostly no longer needed, and I had a couple binders full of stuff that could be pruned significantly.

I have been unemployed for seven months, yet just in the last few days have I actually managed to make real progress in going through all this stuff. I shredded an entire trash bag worth of shit between last night and this morning (well, this afternoon, since last night I broke my old shredder and had to get a new one this morning).

And why am I finally making progress? Because I have to study for the GREs. Yes, because I have something else that I really, really don’t want to do (ie. relearn a whole shitload of math), this thing that I’ve been meaning to do but is kind of a pain in the ass suddenly becomes a much more attractive option.

I may not be getting done what needs to get done sooner, but I’m getting SOMETHING done, dammit.