New Blog and Big News...

Welcome to my blog. Once upon a time, I used to write a long letter to all my friends, print out many copies and mail them so that people knew what I was thinking and what I was up to. It turns out, I was just ahead of my time. Connect Michael's Massive Missive to the internet... and, presto, it's a blog.

I held off starting this until I finally had some news on the job front. It was certainly the first thought on my mind and often the first question asked of me. Any brilliant philosophical treatises will have to wait until after the major news.

Kelly and I are moving to San Jose, California!

After a long and drawn out job search, I will be building and testing robots for a living. Many thanks to Michael and Niels for helping make it happen. I am alternately excited and scared by the prospect of how much there is to learn. One of the engineers that I interviewed with put it very well... "In academic engineering , you design something such that under the right circumstances it works properly. In 'real' engineering, you design something such that if one of the million ways the circumstances can be wrong happens, you have decided what the device will do."

The hardest part of all of this will be leaving Dayton. I love this city. I love all of my friends and family here. I love our old, drafty, one-more-things-needs-to-be fixed house. I never thought I would be headed back to the land of $2 per square foot rent. It will be better this time. A fun and challenging job and a beautiful wife will make it much more pleasant than grad school was.

I am bittersweet about leaving academia. I love teaching and (I think) I am good at it. I doubt that I have taught my last class, but when I come back to it I will be a better teacher for the years spent working as an engineer. And all of that is so far down the road as to be "vapor-planning". Ask me or my wife five years ago where we would be today, and we would be miles off the mark.

Operation Move has been in the tentative planning stages for a little while, but now we put it into action. Kelly, dog and I hit the road on April 24th, arrive in California on April 27th, and I go to work on April 28th. Kelly flies back to Dayton to finish classes and sell the house. She will rejoin us in June. If you know anyone who would like to buy a nice, historic home on a beautiful boulevard let us know.

I think that covers the most important stuff. Please keep checking this site for updates on progress and more ramblings on what I am thinking.