Wednesday, March 11, 2009

At a crossroad

Whee... FINALLY done with grad school!

Now what?

>.>

My original thinking was that after I graduated that I'd buy a new car, find a new job with my new skills and start on my plan for world domination. Well, with the world in such a mess, I'm not sure i'd want to spend money in buying a new car. Jobs are hard enough to come by with unemployment coming up to 10% that I'd rather not search at the moment since I know that if I were hiring, I'd lowball any possible offer at this time. As for world domination, well, that's on the back burner at the moment since I'd rather take over a world that is in decent shape.

So... I guess the question is... what do I do now? So far, I've been compiling a list of possible things to do with my suddenly large amount of free time:
- Catch up on my huge backlog of games >.>
- Catch up on my even larger backlog of anime @.@;;;
- Start up one of my old hobbies
- Pick up a NEW hobby that I've always wanted to
- Take a much needed vacation
- Reorganize my room
- Start considering serious investments in the market
- Figure out alternate investment strategies
- Investigate other places to live, consider moving to them
- Look into doing more programming, iPhone App development

Quite a list! How about some detail...

Fun stuff
Let's see... game wise, I have the following on my "to be completed list"... that is, I've bought it, but still haven't finished, or in some cases, haven't even started playing!
- Star Ocean 4, Valkyrja Chronicles, LittleBigPlanet, Street Fighter IV, Resident Evil 5

Anime wise... I don't think I can name the whole list >.> I have a 1TB external drive that is 3/4 full I think... just some of the highlights off the top of my head are:
- Maria-holic, Marimite, Akikan, Skip Beat and tons more
... plus I have this entire season of Terminator: Sarah Conner Chronicles to catch up on.

Hobby wise... I haven't been scuba diving in over 3 years at this point. I'm definitely out of touch with the latest standards, and my equipment needs servicing before I can get back into the water! Still, might be fun to go out and maybe start teaching again.

On the other hand, we have new hobbies! On the list are... race/driving school, flying lessons, skydiving lessons... all expensive and requiring time. Holding me back is mainly the cost, though for the first one it's also not having a car that can handle a track at this time.

Vacation wise... looks like I might end up being dragged to Asia with my parents. I promised them that I'd go on another trip with them sometime, and now that school is out, I'm running out of ideas... oh well, at least I'd be able to make a stop in Japan too! Personally, I'm considering taking a trip over to the east coast. I've never been to New York before and I'm curious about life in the big city!

Not-so-fun stuff
My room desperately needs a "re-org", as does my closet... Too many old things lying around that need to be tossed out or replaced. My computers need some cleanup too, old programs that I never use, and all my school stuff can go away now!

Investments... or lack thereof. Back when I started school, I figured that I wouldn't have much time to pay attention to investments, so I put everything into relatively safe index funds. Well, the market crash hasn't been too good on things, and luckily I took action early last year when I figured that things would fall apart, so I'm not completely broke. However, right now is a good time to get back into the market, as long as you know the right investments... probably need to spend a few days to figure this out and a re-entry strategy. CDs were a good idea back in August, but CD rates have fallen significantly since then.

Alternate investments... free time = time to investigate other forms of income? I think it's time to execute a few of the ideas for alternate/passive income I had in my previous blog post. Have a few friends and former classmates who also have some interest, so maybe it's time to get a partnership going here!

Other places to live... now, while I love the SF Bay Area, it's a crazy place to live! Housing prices are still through the roof, everything is spread out, there is no public transportation... I dunno... I like driving, but I hate commuting. I actually love cities, but I don't like suburbs... This area seems to have the worst parts of a city (commuting, pollution, high stress) and the worst parts of suburbs (spread out, no USEFUL public transport, have to drive everywhere) at the same time! I don't have any real roots here, so maybe it's time to consider another city, or even another country!

Programming/iPhone development! One of the things about being a "professional" programmer is that I hate working on large projects where you have to collaborate and rely on another programmer... I'd rather do everything myself, so I enjoy writing little self-contained programs and scripts. I've been watching the whole iPhone App Store closely... might be fun to put together something and see how well it sells! Now the bigger question is... what kind of app can I come up with? >.>


So... looks like lots to do even though school is out :) At least my FFXI schedule has pretty much stabilized to only be committed for Monday, Wednesday and Saturday nights, with optional excursions on Thursday and Sunday.

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