A Visitor From Cupertino

Yesterday had the honor and pleasure of hanging out with a cool Apple engineer that I briefly met last summer. Jonathan Deutsch came to Tallahassee to interview at FAMU. He was an iBuddy of Zack Mahdavi's roommate, Josh Benjamin. Of all the places in the US we are graced by Apple at this humble abode aka "Talla-Nasty". I love looking at the Campus Events on Apple's website. FAMU is crunched between unknown colleges such as MIT, Stanford and Carnegie-Mellon.

Mur and I took Jon to a restaurant right next to a giant mattress warehouse (pretty much all the good things Tallahassee has to offer is hidden between junk shops and forests) called Clusters & Hops. We had a really good meal there, with a very nice waiter (who, thankfully, was a good sport) and learned that the difference between "old" and "ancient" is about 20 years (regarding a type of wine). Jon being the more classy of us three, did the "connoisseur" thing and tasted the wine with much swishing of glass and such. I had duck slices with fois gras, top with tender asparagus and carrot with wine soaked cranberries and twists of chocolate decorating the plate. From someone who has been eating canned sardines with Louisiana Hot Sauce for the last few years, this is heaven.

Today...met with Northrup Grumman. I don't really think I want to move to Melbourne, but I can't make that judgement until I've actually been there. They're flying me over on the 3rd of March for some orientation. I will have to fill out a formal application, and meet with some engineers, possibly for a series of interviews. I will finally meet up with some of the FSU graduates who are working there now. Part of me is thinking that if I was given this job, I should just accept it and learn as much from it as possible. The other part of me is saying that I can do better. I'm trying to meet up with Dr. Baker and ask him for his advice on this. I can always count on him to be sensible.

One of my minor regrets is that I start everything late. I'm not talking about procrastinating...I just go into a field much later than other people and I take a long time to catch up. This can be applied to anything I do...music, computer science, visual art, etc. Most of my CS peers had some sort of side project going when I was barely understanding data structures. I started piano lessons formally much later than most of my music major peers. I start late and I never finish. It's a nasty habit.

Well, I shouldn't complain... The fact I have a choice is a luxury as it is.