2 Weeks before NYC!

Friday October 14th is my last day in San Diego. I'll finish up work, do the 6 hour drive up to Reedley, drop my truck off, and then get picked up/dropped off at the Fresno airport for a 5 am Saturday flight to New York. I'll arrive around 7pm EST and figure out life from there. I still don't have a job or a place lined up yet. I don't even have a warm coat. I should probably work on that.

 Overall I'm really excited, slightly nervous and even a bit stressed out. All I know for now is that after this move, I'm going to be calling NYC home for quite a few years. In terms of a career, I hate job jumping. I hate the job search and the sheer amount of work it takes to get caught up to speed in order to be a good business/data analyst. (Luckily?) I don't know anyone there so I won't have many distractions (other than the most exciting city ever!).

I think I've found some areas that I like in Astoria (Queens), Prospect Heights (Brooklyn), and Harlem (where I stayed with Jason and Carrie from Peace Corps!). Depending on what I make, I might even try to get my own studio. I know some friends from the West Coast will be visiting and I might even adopt a cat or dog! I've always wanted a Husky. The general rule of thumb is to follow the formula of: Annual Salary = Monthly Rent * 40.

I'm excited for all the things that I'll see in NY, to live in actual weather and to meet new people. The people I've met in San Diego have been amazing and it's sad even thinking about saying goodbyes. I'm staying optimistic and I hope I'm as lucky in NYC as I was in San Diego in meeting genuine people.

I just got back from a nice vacation. I went camping out in Mammoth Lakes and Yosemite, wine tasting in Napa, and eating great food in San Francisco. Tomorrow I'm putting in my notice to quit my job at the hospital. I don't have a job lined up in New York, but I think I'll try it out anyways! Until I get out there, I'll keep programming and working on my side projects. I started visiting Stackoverflow again and just got my first reputation increase! I went from 1 reputation to 26!

Edit: Added a couple pictures from the trip

Bad Economy

So I've been pretty selective on the jobs that I'm applying to. I sent about 15 in the past three weeks. I haven't heard back from any yet. Supposedly it's a tough job market and especially so if you're trying to relocate across states.

I guess I'll have to make my own job!

Quick update

1.) I started up www.williamqliu.com as a place for my web/tech projects.
2.) This past weekend I surfed in Manhattan Beach, the last time I'll be surfing for a while. I gave my board away to a friend since he moved to the West Coast and I'm going East!
3.) I started applying to jobs in NYC. I talked to my current boss and she's super supportive; my company knows that I'm looking around and I'll still be on payroll if they need me.
4.) The end of my lease is this month. Gonna couchsurf in San Diego until I can get a job in NY.
5.) Going on a road trip in the middle of September.

Learning how to code again

While working on 'Happily Ever After', I found that the scale of the project requires better coding. I've temporarily stopped work on it and I'm going through some incredible resources that have helped my code immensely. In the last week, I've reviewed topics from polymorphism to multi-threading.

For Java, I'm using Bucky's free online videos over at http://www.thenewboston.com/
For actual coding practice, I'm using a site that gives you problems and allows you to code within the web site: http://codingbat.com

The information presented in these tutorials are a thousand times better than my college experience (though to be fair, we concentrated on Assembly, an almost machine language that's more difficult than object oriented languages). Even when I learned C# or Java in college, the information was presented in a terrible manner.

I've decided that someday, I'd like to start a nonprofit site that teaches kids to code through simple, short, and fun videos of the game mechanics found in old school NES / Super NES games.

Google Fusion Tables / Earth Test

1.) Use Google Fusion Tables and import your KML file as a new table (this table contains the boundaries of your shapes). I found this free program Shp2kml (http://www.zonums.com/shp2kml.html), which takes shapefiles and converts to Google Earth KML files.

2.) Use Google Fusion Tables and import your data file (the column that determines the 'intensity' - for this example I used a sample count)

3.) Merge the Tables (for my tables I used the ZIP codes as the common column)

4.) Google Fusion Tables > Visualize > Map

5.) 'Configure Styles' > Change your bucket values (so that 0 to 1 displays as this color, 1 to 10 displays as that color, etc.)

6.) If you want to share with others or display on the web site, load the table, click on the top right 'Share', and imbed the HTML

7.) I'm trying to figure out how to display the intensity map on Google Earth. When I transfer it, I lose the bucket values.

Edit: Choropleth and Thematic mapping! Those are the keywords I was looking for. Now time to scour the Internet for a plug-in for Google Earth! :)

Computers not allowed

In a few hours I'm off camping for the weekend with friends.  I don't want to think about code or see a computer.

Updated with a couple pictures.