Author: Mark

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Brief Thoughts on Commencement

Due to travel and being home in Minnesota all last week, this post is coming late today.

This past weekend, my girlfriend graduated from college. It was an exciting time, and she officially finished up this chapter of her life and began to look forward to the PhD program she begins in the fall. Going to commencement was exciting, having this official moment to mark the occasion. This is what I appreciate about commencement, is its role as the milestone.

I don’t think I fully appreciated my commencement in the moment. Being in a major where I didn’t know many people, it was even a little isolating to not share the entire time with my friends. Yet it is still an event I can look back at to finalize the accomplishments I had in college. It’s also the last time something like that occurs. It felt to be one of the biggest jumps into adulthood, as there were no more obvious goals set out for me, beyond survival as an adult.

I think it’s good to have times where we can celebrate ourselves, to take the moment necessary to truly reflect on what we’ve done and where we are going after the fact. I hope to be cognizant of that feeling moving forward. Although there will be no institutions to celebrate my personal accomplishments, I want to take the time to reflect regularly, acknowledge what I’ve done, then focus on moving forward.

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How I Podcast: Software

After nobody asked me to, I’ve decided to write a few posts about how I podcast. There might be an additional post where I talk about some other software I use on my computer in general, but we’ll start with podcasting because it really is the heaviest use of my computer.

In this post, I’ll focus on the software I use to record. In the next post, I’ll share some of the hardware I use. And finally, I’ll explain how I edit podcasts with the aim of having a screen recording of myself editing either OHAC or Comical Start.

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Some New Code

After playing around with Project Euler for a while, I determined I wanted to challenge my coding skills even more, but stay firmly planted in the mathematical realm in which I’m familiar. So, I’ve begun writing some code that can be used for certain mathematical objects. In particular, I’ve written a fraction class, a 2D vector class, and a complex number class. You can find the code on GitHub.

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Looking Stupid

I’ve been sitting around, trying to determine what I wanted to write for this week. I’ve had a few underwhelming posts over the past month, due to some time constraints and missed deadlines, so I’m really aiming for ideas with a bit more substance.

I try to make note of some ideas I have, whether that is quotes from books I read, ideas from podcasts, little pictures, or just something that pops into my head that I want to save for later. I was going through those notes and determined this is the right time to get to something I heard a high school girl say at a Starbucks a few months ago.

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Baseball is Back

Although I missed another Monday deadline (spring break has really gotten me in disarray), it was for good reason. My parents were visiting in San Diego, and it was fun getting to do some of the more “tourist” type places with people who had fresh eyes for the area.

But more importantly, my dad and I went to Petco Park to watch the Padres. Baseball season is finally back, and it makes me incredibly happy.

For most of my life, the start of baseball season has signaled warm weather, and just a certain reawakening for the year. Although this was much more apparent in Minnesota, even in San Diego I feel warmer weather, think of fresh cut grass, and just get this feeling of joy that not much else is able to provide. Baseball has always been magical. It’s a sport that is easy to engage with, easy to find someone to mess around with, and just has a pristine quality to it that no other sport manages to capture in my mind.