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Autumn 2008 Planning

My Amazon manager keeps asking me if I’ve changed my mind about grad school. But I haven’t, of course. For what can Amazon do to compare to these classes that are looking particularly interesting?

CSE 490H (3) — Distributed Systems (Ed Lazowska)
CSE 505 (3) — Programming Language Concepts (Dan Grossman)
CSE 564 (3) — Security and Privacy (Tadayoshi Kohno)
CSE 573 (3) — Artificial Intelligence I (Dan Weld)
CSE 519 (1) — CSE Current Research
CSE 520 (1) — CSE Colloquium

I think I’m expected to pair that down to 3 “real” courses. Ha!

Seafair Triathlon 2008

The results!

Place 647 740 756
Name Luis Balanzategui Ryan McElroy Kunlun Ouyang
Age 26 25 25
Sex M M M
Overall Time 1:29:28 1:31:57 1:32:15
Div Place 54 56 57
Swim Time 0:14:42 0:16:54 0:14:57
Place 374 738 408
Bike Tran Time 3:22 2:34 4:27
Bike Time 0:40:29 0:39:08 0:42:43
Place 642 504 873
Run Tran Time 1:42 1:25 2:17
Overall Pl After Bike 534 515 791
Run Time 0:29:13 0:31:55 0:27:50
Place 961 1177 815
City & State Mill Creek, WA Bellevue, WA Seattle, WA

Seattle To Portland 2008

Overall
Trip Distance: 206.8 miles
Riding Time: 13:05 hours:minutes
Average Speed: 15.8 miles per hour
Max Speed: 38.7 miles per hour

First Day
Start Location: E1 Montlake Parking Lot, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Riding Time: 9:46 hours:minutes
Riding Distance: 152.5 miles
Average Speed: 15.6 miles per hour
Stop location: Longview, WA (Many Thanks to Quincy!)

Second Day
Riding Time: 3:01 hours:minutes
Riding Distance: 54.3 miles
Average Speed: 17.96 miles per hour
Stop location: Holladay Park (sp?), outside the Llyod Center, Portland, OR

Three Weekends

This weekend: Family Reunion, Independence Day, Fireworks

Next weekend: Seattle to Portland bike ride

Third weekend: Seafair triathlon

In the meantime: Biking to work, swimming in a wetsuit, running around Greenlake

Hello from Amazon

More than a million things to learn. Exciting and overwhelming!

Amazonian Dreams

Tomorrow is my first day at Amazon.com and my first day at a new job in over four years. As always with a new job, there is a bit of trepidation, but there is also a good bit of excitement about the new opportunities and challenges that I’ll encounter.

Orientation starts at 10:00am.

Recreate, Recently

Yesterday: 50-mile bike ride with Theo. From my place to Marymoor down to I-90, across the bridge, and back. The  ride left me destroyed; I really have a long ways to go before STP.

Thursday: 35-mile bike ride with Theo, tooling around Seattle and checking out Amazon.com’s headquarters. I start Monday!

Wednesday: Worked out with Kunlun at the IMA. My muscles were still sore from last time; he certainly is causing something to happen :-)

Tuesday: Worked out with Kunlun at the IMA. Lots of upper-body exercises followed by swimming lessons. I already know how to swim, but apparently there’s a lot to be said for good form as well. My hair was so long that it covered my eyes when swimming properly, so I got it cut.