My resume is in the mail to IDEO!! :) Just barely though...I called the post office and they said that they would be open until 5:30 and I get there at 3:05 and they are closing. But I'm like, "I really want to get this mailed today" and the guy let me get in line :) Maybe he thought it was a college application or something, but regardless, he let me mail it! So now I wait...and wait...and hope :)

Have a Happy New Year everyone!!

Not much new here. I've been working on my resume and cover letter for IDEO. Hopefully I'll get that off sometime this week. I'm really excited about the possibilities of working for a place like that. It's too bad that they're not really hiring right now. Still, I think I have a pretty good shot with a lot of the experience I have from my masters thesis and working at Motorola this year. We'll see how it goes.

I had a good conversation at lunch today with another friend from work that just confirmed again that I really do need to get away from Motorola. There's just so much wrong with the labs there right now, and no hope of getting better anytime soon. So we'll see where this next year takes me!

For those interested in what an un-turkey looks like .... Pic 1 and Pic 2

Merry Christmas everyone!! I had a great Christmas up with my family and got a nice pair of vegan shoes - Now everyone keeps asking, "What's so un-vegan about shoes?" Well, vegan shoes have no leather or animal-made glues. They're really nice :) And I got to see a bunch of relatives too, so that's always fun!

Pictures of the un-turkey are coming soon, but they're on my cousin's camera because mine is currently broken :(

I hope everyone had a great Christmas!!

So there's Mad Cow in the states now. Makes me glad to not have eaten any meat in the last two years. Speaking of which, for all of you who joined me on my Tofurky adventure at Thanksgiving, for Christmas it's going to be the "un-Turkey." Before you laugh, check out the box.

So today was a good day. I talked to a lot of people about the idea of moving to CA, and got a lot of good responses. All were in favor of me moving as long as I came back for Cubs games :) On a more serious side though, I met someone at the MIT Chicago Holiday Party that has a connection at IDEO Palo Alto, so maybe this little dream can really become a reality. We'll see! Seeing a bunch of current students and new admits made me really miss the environment of MIT though. All the more reason to head out west! It didn't give me much hope that all the non-finance, non-architect people at the party all said that chicago is not the place for anyone who wants a challenging tech job with a ton of other highly motivated great engineers...a friend from work told me the same thing today as well. Too bad I didn't know that a year ago!!

A final note: It's 3 days until Christmas!! I hope everyone reading this has a safe travel where ever they are going! :)

Any Cubs fan *has* to check this out :)

So here's my first "real" blog post. I've been reading The Art of Innovation which is basically a book on how IDEO works. If you haven't heard of them, they're this big design firm that started in Palo Alto - follow the link. Anyway, it's leading me to realize how much my job at Motorola really isn't what I want to be doing. Although they aspire to some of these IDEO innovation ideals, it's no where near what IDEO, and countless other Silicon Valley companies, are doing every single day.

So I got this whole "moving to CA" idea about a month ago when Moto sent me out to Mountain View to transfer some code. I just really saw how great (both technically and as really nice people) everyone out there was. It was a feeling I don't get in Chicago. Especially the technical greatness. It's something I miss a lot about MIT and something that I really want back. And from what I've seen in the labs at Motorola, it's not something I'm going to find there. And man, you can't beat the selection of veggie restaurants in the bay area, something Chicago is painfully lacking in :)

So anyway, I'm going to get back to this IDEO book and see what else they have to say. In the mean time...CA, yea or nay?

Hey! Welcome to my blog! :) We'll see what this turns into, but for now, I'll just say that you can expect to find some links, random musings, maybe some poetry, and random info about what I'm up to. Feel free to comment!