Inspired Intuition

The weather outside is positively… frightful! It’s basically a tease of “here’s some snow… but there’s no reason it should be cold enough for any of it to stick to the ground and roads so just keep dreaming of that snow day that you should have had students!” What a waste! Regardless, it is extremely wet and just plain not fun outside right now. Hopefully the rest of this week will be nicer, considering that I think it’s supposed to get back up into the 50′s and 60′s again.

So I am SICK of GT Housing. They really did not do a very good job of taking care of us during the course of the past year, and enough is enough. I’m now looking for an off-campus apartment to share with my roommate for the Fall and Spring semesters. The plan is for a 2-man apartment that is near Tech and hopefully relatively well furnished. We should be able to get our hands on a deal that is relatively cheap, and are aiming at about 700-775 per month per person including utilities. A more complete list of what we want in an apartment presently:

• Furnishings: we are college students and hence don’t have to desire to go out and get furnishings only to move it in the next 12 months from the signing of the lease.
• Washer and Dryer: we aren’t going to a laundromat under any circumstance, if the washer and dryer isn’t at least in the apartment complex then you can forget it, but most of the floor plans that we’ve seen so far include washer and dryer in most 2-man apartments.
• Parking: if we can’t park at the apartment, what’s the point?
• Safety: being able to safely take a walk outside is a no-brainer.
• A kitchen with dishwasher, stove, oven, and fridge: without these we wouldn’t eat, end of story!
• Bathroom per bedroom in the apartment: we have no problem with sharing a bathroom at present, but boy would having one to ourselves be nice!
• A balcony that we can sit on: 2 reasons for this, we would be ensured not to be on the first floor, the most commonly broken into floor in most apartment complexes, and we would not have to walk out of the building to enjoy some fresh air.

Some bonuses

• Being able to have pets: I would love to be able to have a pet in my apartment, my girlfriend wants to get me a kitty for my birthday (which I would LOVE), but if we find a sweet deal on a nice place with the only stipulation being no pets, we might just have to take it.
• Having a shuttle/bus to and from Tech would be great!
• Being within a shorter driving distance is preferred.
• Being to the east of Tech would put us closer to Agnes Scott, which would be a big bonus for both of us since we are both dating Agnes women.

This week we are going to do some apartment shopping and will be making some calls. We are also going to try a site called promove.com. It looks pretty cool, but we don’t have all the details about how to actually utilize their services. Should this list change, I’ll post accordingly.

So I realize it has been a little while since I have blogged and that is a direct result of the title (not really the snow part because that is giving me time to post this) and a few other things that have been going on in my life.

First, snow! It’s actually snowing in Atlanta… I am shocked! I don’t think we have gotten this kind of snow in a good long while, especially not in February (at least not close to the start of the month). I always remember it actually getting around to snowing in Georgia about when you would least expect it (start of March for example). It is really pretty outside, and there is actually enough for Tech to call school for the rest of today and for a group of people to be working on building an igloo outside. So that would make it like 2-3 inches, right? Well, that’s what they have predicted at least. We’ll see how accurate that is. Either way, landscaping/groundskeeping is going to be mad about this because snow always means that the quad gets WRECKED between the frequent sledding (attempts) and generally trying to scoop up the snow which results in grabbing lots of grass usually.

Snow also seems to bring out the WORST in Georgia drivers. I swear, they are absolutely terrible when it snows because they have no experience with it for one thing. It degrades to people trying to drive like they would normally (way too aggressively) and ending up wrecking or just in general panicking in some manner, causing Georgia roads to look like this:

In other areas, since I have been slacking on my blog, I was wrong about my Super Bowl predictions. The Colts and Peyton Manning never really looked quite as sharp as they have the rest of the season, especially towards the end of the game. Just goes to prove the statement “any given Sunday.”

Following the Super Bowl, I unfortunately ended up getting VERY sick. Between the hours of 1 AM and 9:30 AM on Monday, I was either barfing into a toilet or waiting for the next round to start while lying in bed clutching my stomach. It was extremely NOT fun! To boot, I caught whatever it was from my grandmother (grandparents were supposed to be over for the end of last week and ended up being over for the majority of the weekend) and then my mom caught it from me. Whatever it was, it is no fun to have nothing left in your body to throw up and still be leaning over a toilet.

So that explains the absence on Monday, and Friday was spent going from school to home with the family and grandparents. Overall, I have been pretty busy. I do however have some future blog posts planned, so expect to see me return to my original timeframe for posting.

The only other new thing that has been going on as of late is that I am “officially” not returning to GTRI this summer and hence will definitely be in the DC area. I have completed my application for Neustar per their HR department’s needs and my resum? has been entered into MITRE’s system for a potential job with them in information security. Also, I found out GTRI has an office in the DC area, so I have enquired as to what it does, but haven’t heard back yet. I also, just last night, applied to a job that I most likely won’t be getting out in California. It is a PHP/Rails Hacker full-time position. I read through the desired work experience and expertise information and couldn’t keep myself from applying to a job that seemed to describe me and my own professional experiences. If it weren’t a full-time position, I would likely be more serious about considering it. We’ll see what happens, I figured it was worth a shot to just send my application and see what happens. The company is TechCrunch, who is essentially a start-up news site that’s still a start-up themselves. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a listing that I saw for information security, so that isn’t really a consideration there anyways.