Austin Hanson

Wow, what a year.

It’s been a while since my last post and I apologize for that. When school gets a rolling things just keep piling on my to-do list and posting on my blog gets moved to the back burner. For those of you who’ve been using Growlbook, that was another thing that got pushed to the side and I don’t think I’ll be working on it any more. I only made it because I wanted facebook notifications without having the page open but my purchase of the Motorola Droid solved that problem. If you’re interested in picking up development let me know, I’ll ship you the source.

I think that covers “old business”, on to the new stuff.

I got a Droid a while ago and wow – what a great investment. So far, that little investment has netted me around $2500 – who’d have known mobile applications were so…flourishing. If you don’t know, I developed Droidbox, ERS (Event Ringtone Syncer), Texts From Last Night (TFLN) and a few others. I’ve a few other ideas I’m throwing around, including a facebook applications since I’ve yet to find something that does it well. I’ve also gotten involved with a company as the sole developer of something that might very well be huge – I hope it is anyway. That project will most likely steal much if not all of my free time this summer but will be well worth it.

With Droidbox has come a slew of unexpected fortunes, including a number of tech sector contacts in some really large companies that might prove really useful later on in life. I’m a bit disappointed that I was unable to stir interest in Dropbox themselves, either as a buyer of Droidbox or as a possible employer. In fact, I think a lot less of them with their complete lack of response of which I speculate is a result of my degree coming from South Dakota State University and not an “upper tier” university as they request on their website. Good for them I guess, they appear to have done just fine in getting an android developer who has made a subpar duplicate of my Dropbox client. Yeah, I’m bitter but I’ll survive – I’m in a great position with Sencore and don’t think anything with Dropbox would have changed.

My android escapades also gave me the opportunity to learn a ton about advertising. I made a Redbox application that listed promotional codes for free movies and added ad’s (served by AdMob) and saw instant revenue. Things have quieted down now, since Redbox caught on and changed how their codes worked (sorry ) and now the application is useless (despite still netting me ~$70 a month), but the experience has given me a new look on applications and how to monetize them.

I think I’ve done enough rambling. I’m pumped for this summer because I’m at a completely difference place then I was at last year. I feel like I’ve learned so much and have made so much progress in “life” in the past 9 months and am excited to see where things will go.

I started the weekend off by sleeping in until around 1pm and then making my way across town to test drive a Cobalt. I drove it around a bit and determined it wasn’t all that bad; the acceleration seemed fine and I wasn’t cramped for my height (6′3″). I’ll admit, things were looking good for the Cobalt right up until a few hours ago when I started totaling up my school loans.

As they say, “ignorance is bliss,” and it was definitely nice while it lasted. It would seem FAFSA can really add up and I’m in a position where I can no longer convince myself that a car is worth digging further down into the steep hole I’m already in. Needless to say, I’ve lived well in my loan-fueled, fantasy world for a good four years now and it’s time I worked a little (lot) to clear things up.

Goodbye new car fantasy and hello to working during the school year.

What a week, what a week indeed.

It started off fairly slow with Monday, just going through the motions. Tuesday, a good friend of mine left for Italy and I spent a majority of the morning talking with her via txt’s while she waited at the airport in Atlanta (no, I didn’t skirt my job, I actually got a ton done throughout the day). Thursday I got some sun playing Kickball for my company’s team. It was our first game, ever, and we got annihilated but I had a great time scoring one of our two runs and am looking forward to next week. During the day Thursday and today I labored away at rewriting object models for one of my two projects at work and spent the afternoon replacing the old models. I ended up having to strip out a lot of working code just to be able to test the functionality of the objects. They did work as expected though, so next week will entail a ton of work in uncommenting code and refactoring it to work with the newer, better objects.

Today was probably the most mentally drained I’ve felt in a long time. One never thinks about how complicated a parallel thread job queueing system is until threads prevent each other from breaking out of wait/sleep states to die like good little threads… I probably should have just used ThreadPool but …that’s enough techno-babble for tonight I guess, moving on to car hunting!

As much as I’ve enjoyed driving my Dodge Caravan around these past few months, and the Dodge Spirit before that, and lets not forget the Dodge Dynasty (I don’t have a Dodge thing…seriously, these were just my options at the time…), I’ve started searching for a new car – not new as in something new to me but an actual new car. So far, a weeks worth of research, occurring mostly between the hours of 9pm and 12pm, turned up three vehicles which fit into my budget and look somewhat sporty: the Chevrolet Cobalt (Coupe), the Pontiac G5 and the Mitsubishi Eclipse.

Andrew suggested I also look at the similarly priced Ford Focus and Nissan Versa:

I know what you’re thinking by the way, and no, I don’t have a thing for red. In my opinion, the best looking car out of those five is the Eclipse (duh!) but apparently, it’s performance is a bit underwhelming.

Buying a Mitsubishi Eclipse has always been an exercise in sacrifice. Many other cars offer better performance, more utility, and a lower price, but if the Eclipse’s styling is to your taste, none of that matters. For performance sake, the V6 is necessary, but it badly impacts the balance in a car that already suffers from sketchy handling.

CarGurus.com

A bit disconcerting, especially considering I’ve driven older Eclipses and I was always pleased with their performance. In fact, I rode in one, many years ago, on a trip from Sioux Falls to Omaha which lasted just shy of two hours. We did slow down to 90 mph through Sioux City but anything less than that and the smell would have been unbearable .

CarGurus also speaks ill of the Cobalt and G5…calling the G5 a rebranded Cobalt and stating they both

…offer little in the way of refinement, engine performance, or cabin storage.

CarGurus.com

Awesome, there goes 3 of the 5 cars I’ve found so far…well, not really, but this will definitely affect any decisions I make. Tomorrow I plan on test driving each myself so I can get first hand knowledge on their control, power, and comfort. I also intend to spend a lot more time researching cars, paging through blogs and review sites, etc so hopefully I’ll be able to expand upon these brief reviews and give some insight into the right car for me (and maybe for you…).

I suppose everyone, at some point in their life, will have a first blog post; provided they have a blog to begin with. I’ve toyed with what to do with my named domain for quite some time and I guess it’s pretty obvious as to what I decided. Sure, I’ll serve my resume on here, and maybe information on school projects, personal projects, etc. as I had originally intended but I’ll also try to blog regularly. About what though…

Not quite sure what I’ll blog about; I don’t intend to make it a journal-esque blog, more so because I don’t want to share that much information with random people on the internet. I also won’t use this as a feed for technical information since I already have something setup for that (Yes, it is “technically” a blog but no were near as personal as this, therefore it doesn’t count ). So, your guess is as good as mine as to where this blog will lead to. To be honest, the future is better when it’s unknown.

If anything, this blog will provide me with a place to talk and give me a reason to write. Albeit not the kind of writing I want to do (I have numerous ideas floating around in my head for books), it still is writing nonetheless.