www.davynextdoor.com

Wow, it’s been nearly 2 months since I last posted from California… here’s what’s up with me in Raleigh:

My internship with Cisco was overall amazing.  It was the clincher that has convinced me that going to graduate school for a physics PhD is not for me and, in fact, physics for me in general will probably come to a screeching halt once I graduate in May 2009.  Instead I am excited to accept a job offer that Cisco graciously extended my way.  Yes, it looks like my immediate future has been decided and I will be working for Cisco starting September 2009.  Where oh where will this be?  San Francisco!  Rock!  Another great thing about this is that since I won’t be starting until September I have all of next Summer to do something epic.  Where oh where should I go?

As far as training goes, things were looking really good this Summer with running but I ran out of enthusiasm quickly after my 18 miler and couldn’t keep it up until November.  I peaked too early.  I may still try for March… not sure yet.  My next race is Saturday, October 4th and it’ll be my first Olympic distance triathlon.  1500 meter swim followed by a 24 mile bike ride topped off with a 10k (6.2 mile) run.  I’ve been trying hard to get back into some sort of reasonable swimming shape after not swimming since May.

As far as awesome things go:  I just bought an electronic drum set.  Don’t know what an electronic drum set is or just want to know more about this one?  I highly recommend their video on the DM5 pro kit I got.  Check it out here.

There she is, although not in full glory without the double bass drum pedal.  I haven’t owned or even really played a drum set for 6 years so I must admit I am completely stoked.

Japanese.  My way of going about studying Japanese has been a little odd and consisted of stages where I concentrate mostly on one thing.  I spent my entire year in Japan attempting to learn how to speak, having embarrassingly little knowledge of how to read or write.  When I came back to America I spent the next few months learning the meanings of and how to write the 2000 kanji to read Japanese.  At this point I still couldn’t read anything as I didn’t know how to combine the characters to make actual words yet, or what the Japanese readings of the characters even were.  I started adding words to Anki, an amazing flashcard program, and spending all of my time memorizing these vocabulary words.  I had an advantage over a total beginner now in that I could understand and write the kanji and I had some grasp on spoken Japanese so there were connections happening in my brain instead of having to start from scratch.

After doing this for about a year, I’ve gotten about 3500 words added total and have all 2000 kanji included in at least one word.  So now it’s time to move past the rote memorization crap (sort of) and get to what I’ve wanted all along: reading.  Moe was nice enough to recommend a variety of books for my reading pleasure.  I add words I don’t know to Anki.  It’s pretty exciting finally being able to read a book and easy to do on buses and in between class.