thenike

Coming back to Livejournal.

My poor poor live journal! I know I have neglected you but now I shall return, or at least attempt to return to sharing the details, both the interesting and mundane, of my life! Oh and random thoughts on various subject matters and blah blah blah.

So three big changes in my life.

One, Eric and I are now engaged! After a couple of weeks of me apparently “being Chandler” and speaking despairingly and feeling very disappointed about marriage in general after/while many of our friends either entered divorce proceedings, broke up after multi-year relationships, or quickly jumped back into a long term relationships (ie serial monogamist) Eric proposed while we were on vacation in Cambria. Now all the siblings in my family got engaged in the central coast of California. One sister got engaged by the elephant seals (there is a joke in there that me and my other sister didn’t dare touch in front of anyone else but each other), the other at a winery (LUSH), and me in a beach house. The area up there really is beautiful so it is not really that surprising that such things happen. Anyways, the date isn’t set yet but it will be sometime in 2011 as my sister is getting married in 2010.

Second. My 2.5 years at Smiths Detection is coming to a close. Our corporate entity has decided to completely close the Pasadena office. Exactly what the motivation was behind this can only be guessed. According to the financials, our site although was not profitable last year it did not lose money and the over all performance of the company is quite good. But April 2nd is my last day at Smiths. I get a severance and a good luck pat on the back on my way out the door. This is obnoxious because I had a BUNCH of projects/experiments that I was either in the middle of or about to start. For one, the materials testing that I was going to do for Reg P. from UCI. Untimely I am still going to do the experiments for him in my free time. They were already approved and it cost the company nothing to do the tests. Initially it might have been an interesting material for my company to integrate into our products but now, hopefully it will get Reg and his student a paper or two (hopefully with my name somewhere on there too!) So other than an internally funded R&D project I am in the middle of, everything else is getting shelved indefinitely. Unfortunately I could not even pick them up again in grad school to try to get a paper or two out of the ideas because they, and all the other IP I created here, belong to Smiths.

And that brings us to the third. I made the decision that I am going to go back to graduate school this spring. Or at least try my damnedest. I am applying to a bunch of places (in CA, TX, MD, WA, MI, and IL) and being very vigilant to make sure EVERYTHING gets submitted. I already caught one mistake made by the UCI registrar. They forgot to send out two transcripts. Luckily I have plenty of time to correct such mistakes. What this means for me an Eric? Well we will still stay together (obviously) everything else is going to be negotiated when I get accepted into schools and make my decision.

Anyways, I need to get back to work. Today and for the next week I am writing reports. Yay… (stab me, please!)

chrisamaphone

• Bang!, a western-shootout-themed card game with mafia- (or happyville-) style character roles and some clever mechanics involving distance from players based on your position in the circle.
  
• Antike, a resource-based strategy game with a deceptive surface similarity to risk. deceptive because if you actually attack people a lot, particularly early on, you will not do very well; it's a lot more about trying to set up the most effective feedback loops to get you lots and lots of resources (and tangentially expand your domain, but that's also largely to generate more resources). winning is based on reaching a certain number of goals which include "have a lot of boats", "research something before anyone else", "have a lot of land", and "have a lot of temples".
  
• Drunter & Drüber, a silly game of mercilessly building roads over buildings, except for the particular ones you care about, which are secret, oh and except for outhouses, which are important and must be voted upon.