I just got done biking 26.2 miles.  Yes, that is precisely one marathon of bicycling.  Which crunches out to just over 1300 Calories, as CaloriesPerHour kindly tells me. 

I also made an air conditioner today.  I got a robust fan, 20 feet of vinyl tubing, and some zip ties at Fred Meyer last night to perform the deed.  I coiled the middle-section of the vinyl tubing around the back of the fan in a spiral fashion, draped one end out over the balcony, and dipped the other end into a 25 gallon plastic tote.  (I duct-taped that end of the tubing to a can of Clam Chowder I had sitting around so that it would stay at the bottom.)  I then filled the tote with cold water (I play with ice water tomorrow, as I filled a bunch of bottles that were sitting in my recycling with water and stuck them in the freezer to serve as reusable ice cubes), started a siphon off the end of the balcony, and voila!  I have a water-cooling-aided fan/makeshift air conditioner.  It actually works, too, believe it or not.  So I don't have to start the siphon again, I stuffed the end of a plastic coat hanger into the outside end of the tubing to plug it up.  I'm not sure I conceptualized the physics exactly correctly, but I believe that it will start again once I pull the plug back out.

Today I also did some work for Jack over at TrackMy--I'm just about done with my projects with him, which wraps up a nice 3-week stint for this summer.  Unfortunately, yesterday I discovered that he wanted all of my coding over the last two weeks to be in Visual Basic, whereas I had done it all in C#.  It proved to be somewhat of a boo-boo all-in-all, and three hours of non-billed time later I had ~2000 lines fixed up all nice and tidy for him.  VB is so weird. 

I ate at Little Thai twice today.  I guess I'm making up for having not been there for two weeks while I was in Spokane.  I'm fairly confident they slip some traces of some kind of addictive substance into their pahd/phad/pud Thai.  Oh, it turns out I'm designing a website for them.  I was concerned they would want a supreme discount (which would explain partly why they went through me) but they agreed to mostly professional rates, which is pretty cool.  I say mostly, because they want to convert part of it into food trade.  I haven't talked to them about whether they would do full menu price for that trade or whether it would have some kind of discount, but I don't mind that option since I eat there so darn much anyways.

By Tim's request, I'm posting the personal statement I wrote for potential admission to Computer Science.  I'm concerned that it might be a touch pompous or braggy.  Oh well, if they think so, I guess I just won't get in.  My GPA isn't horrendous, by the way--in fact, I think it's quite good (although it has been declining consistently every quarter...)  I get the sense they don't like anything lower than like a 3.7, and it's a little bit lower than that, for reference. 

I have tasted many varieties of success and failures in my life, but those marked by unorthodoxy are those which I have held most dear, those from which I have learned the greatest lessons, and those from which I have felt the greatest rewards and consequences.  Indeed, unorthodoxy is a prevalent theme in my life, affecting every facet from friendship to free time, to academics, to professional endeavors.   I have found that since I was very young, I have never done anything just because everyone else seems to be doing it or because someone says to do it.  I have always taken most information and perceptions with a grain of salt so to speak, and in so conceptualizing everything instead of simply assimilating everything, I have found instrumental advantages in achieving many tasks.  For example, when architecting software for businesses and clients, I do not think on the level necessarily of existing design schemas, but on the level of creating an optimized schema that specifically suits the needs of that client.  By not embedding myself in orthodoxy, I am able to abstract myself from the project and generate a user interface that is natural, human and new, or tiers of back-end logic that are reasonable and scalable for a specific project and not the kind of solution that can be pulled out of a book.  I believe this is where the greatest creativity lies:  in not necessarily ignoring that which is standard, but in not making that the first source of reference—doubting that the status quo is ideal is the first step towards achieving progress.

Experience has shown me that I am fortunate in the realm of being able to set and achieve goals.  When I was in the fourth grade, one of our school district’s high school valedictorians came to speak to our class.  I decided right then that I was going to be a valedictorian when I graduated from high school, and eight years later I achieved that goal.  When I was in seventh grade and first took the SAT, I decided that by the time I was done with high school I was going to get a perfect score, and four years later, I did.  When I ‘came out of the closet’ in 11^th grade and began to feel hostility from some classmates and even teachers (Spokane is somewhat more conservative than Seattle) I decided that I would start a student-run Gay-Straight Alliance, and by the end of the next year, the club was meeting weekly with over 50 members.  Along with these achievements came such perks as various scholarships for college and all sorts of other academic and professional offers.  I was recognized as the top student in Spokane County separately in the areas of Math and English through the Spokane Scholars program and I received sizeable monetary grants for those distinctions.  The United States Government awarded me with a distinction as one of the top 550 students in the nation through the Presidential Scholars program.  I accepted the full-ride offer from the state of Washington through the Washington Scholars program for the University of Washington, and at the same time I began exploring part-time work with software engineering companies. 

As I have been going to college, my goals have begun to change.  Looking back at transcripts exhibiting eight straight years of 4.0’s, I decided that I was going to seek greater balance in my life:  in addition to concentrating on academics, I would divide myself into developing professional, social, and spiritual aspects of myself as well.  I have found invaluable founts of knowledge and learning in these realms:  even though my college GPA has been proceeding to be less than might perhaps be the ideal for admission to the school of Computer Science, I hope that holistic consideration can be given to these other areas of my development.  Consider, for example, that I have worked my way professionally over the last two years to the point of earning $50.00 per hour working as a software developer and architect for NASDAQ, or that I consistently work out to keep healthy and to keep my body in good shape, or that I have close-knit circles of friends who are present to give and share emotional and tangible support at any time.  I know how to work hard, and I know how to have fun.  I know how to sit down face-to-face and work out projects with CEOs of multi-million dollar companies, and I know how to plan a bike ride and a picnic with friends.  I understand that this admissions process is selecting students for admission to an academic program, so I understand the logic in selecting students based on academic prowess, but I feel that over the last many years I had demonstrated my abilities to achieve academically.  Now I am working on my abilities to achieve in life, and I very firmly believe that life success lies in balance, not in focusing solely on one facet of development.  Even if developing these other areas will ultimately impact my ability, for example, to gain admission to the University of Washington College of Computer Science and Engineering, I will have no regrets that I have diversified my efforts, because I can already feel the better effects on my overall well-being compared to when my efforts were purely academic. 

My future goals professionally speaking are firmly aimed toward entrepreneurial activities.  I intend to start a business by the time I am done with college—I am keeping notebooks of ideas that I generate almost daily for inventions and business ideas, waiting for one that seems apt enough in which to begin investing years of my life.  I already have business connections in place ready to be investors, partners, and employees.  As I am so steeped currently in the area of computer science, I expect that the knowledge gained from the school of Computer Science and Engineering could be instrumental in these endeavors.  One more point of interest here is that my first priority in what I would like to gain from this school is the knowledge, and that secondary to that is the degree.  I do not want the degree in order to get a job; I want the knowledge so that I can fortify my abilities to succeed independently.  This, to me, is what education really is at its very core:  not to be able to reiterate what a teacher has taught or a book has instructed, but to be able to take that knowledge and to create something new from it.

 Oh, one more thing:  Today is Happy Nine Months for Tim and Me! <3