So we’ve begun week six. Writing has proved difficult recently, as I’ve been getting up roughly the same time as the girls and have been unable to focus on writing until later in the day, after my day seems to have filled up with tasks. Saturday marked the first real bit of restlessness I’ve felt since we started the lockdown, a bit of ennui and listlessness about what to do.
We’ve rearranged the room over the garage. My wife’s desk is setup and she’s able to telework. I took one of my old workstations and set it up for Elder. I tried using Wine for the first time, but had trouble with some fonts and wound up wiping it an installing Windows 10. I’m hoping she’ll take interest in computer art or music production, but she’s mainly interested in playing Roblox. I gave her a free pass yesterday and asked her what she wanted to learn about. She said “music”, so I threw on a YouTube video lesson for children.
She’s been accepted by the gifted program and will be going to the city’s gifted center for third grade. Her teacher called me Sunday to ask if I would be interested in letting her be part of a small group in the class that would be doing more advanced math, and of course I said yes. I’ve managed to get her to do piano without too much fuss, but I haven’t pushed too much. I can’t say for sure, but it seems that there’s been fewer tantrums.
We’ve discovered Amazon Music and that it has Trolls and Disney music, so the girls have been playing that a lot.
I’m in the midst of my final exam for my numerical methods class, and have been getting my solvers working. Right now the Gaussian elimination is the only one working, and I’ve got 3 more days to get the others working. The professor wants us to generate surface plots in Excel, of all things, and to turn those in for our answers. Since all the solvers are supposed to return the same results, I could just turn in the answers I’ve generated thus far, but I still need to turn the solvers in for assignment credit. The problem here is that I’ve built a large build and test suite in CLion, and my professor just wants a single CPP file that he can run in CodeBlocks. I’ve painted myself into a corner, but I’m not concerned with grades since I think the professor is going to grade on a massive curve.
One of the graduation requirements is financial aid counseling, and I got the first look at my student aid totals in a long time: over fifty-seven thousand dollars. There seems to be some discrepancies that I’ll need to review, but this is obviously a lot more than I was expecting. I hurt myself by taking cash payouts for personal expenses. These went to pay credit cards, and quite a bit to bitcoin. I’ve already accrued five grand in interest charges. It puts my post-graduation plans in a bit more context. The status quo will not hold.
I’ve got until next year before I’m expected to start paying these loans back, but the interest is well over four percent, so the first thing I’ll be looking to do is refinance.
I’ve decided that I need a proper professional presence online, so I’ve registered a few domains and started setting up a new CV site. This blog will remain separate for now, but I’ve started reposting some articles on Medium, and will be linking to my Github repo on it. I’ll worry about the ramifications of a recruiter seeing my Tweets and blog posts later. For now, the only thing that comes up when you Google my real name is my political work, so I’ve got to work on changing that.
I’ve also started trying to use LinkedIn more. There are a lot of jobs for software developers and engineers lately. About twenty new ones a day. I’m not saying I can take my pick, but there’s been about one or two each time I look that I’d be interested in. Not that I would necessarily be qualified for, but once I get through my exam and independent study requirements, I’ll be finishing up my resume and applying to some. Not that I really have any desire to work for another firm full time, but I doubt I would turn down an eighty thousand dollar a year position right now.
Or would I?