The Further Adventures of Aaron

Washington, DC

Posted on February 25th, 2009 by Aaron.
Categories: Photos, Traveling.

Last week my company, Rosetta Stone, flew me out to their main office in Harrisonburg, VA. Harrisonburg is about two hours from Washington, DC, and as I’d never been before, Polly and I decided to spend the weekend there and see the sights. It was a pretty cool trip– but there’s so much to see there that I feel like I only scratched the surface!

4 comments.

Rosetta Stone

Posted on November 10th, 2008 by Aaron.
Categories: Uncategorized.

I got a job!

I’ll be working for Rosetta Stone, the company behind the well-known language-learning software. Although they’re based out of Virginia, they have a satellite office in Boulder that does R&D for their speech recognition engine (the part of the software that can tell if you’re pronunciation is correct or not).

I’ll be doing research, making prototypes, trying out new things. It sounds challenging, but also great fun.

After traveling the world for six months, and before that two years of not exactly an “office job”, I’ve often wondered how I would feel about returning to something “normal”. Would I dread it?

But actually, I’m excited. Some of it is the idea of having something “normal” again (Peace Corps is very…intense, and that’s a hard thing to maintain), but the nature of the job is also very exciting. Working on real-world Artificial Intelligence in a corporate r&d lab is something I’ve always wanted to do.

I start tomorrow!

7 comments.

Jobs?

Posted on October 29th, 2008 by Aaron.
Categories: Culture-shock.

So now it’s come to this: I have to find a job.

I had hoped to do some tech work for non-profits, but there’s really not that much out there. And what’s out there is either maintaining/setting-up computer systems or, at best, doing some kind of simple web page work. Not really very challenging, technically. I’m tired of being overqualified for what I’m doing.

Ironically, being “overqualified” is not really a problem in corporate-land. I’ve been out of the tech world for two years (sometimes it seems like I’ve traveled into the future– everyone has these “iphones” now!). Some recruiters look at this absence with suspicion.

“So, Peace Corps. Hmm. Yeah.”

And then there’s all the bad economic news. Even though the listings on CareerBuilder, monster, and craigslist all seem to have lots of tech jobs, it’s unnerving to see “the sky is falling!” every day in the paper.

However, given all that I still have gotten a fair number of bites. I even got a phone-interview with Google (you may have heard of them). This xkcd comic pretty much sums up what happened:

2 comments.

USA! USA! USA!

Posted on October 16th, 2008 by Aaron.
Categories: Culture-shock, Photos, Traveling.

” ‘Well,’ said Sam, ‘I’m back.’ ”

I returned to the States in August, but I’ve been a little remiss in my blogging.

Being back is still weird. The money looks strange (there’s so many new states’ quarters! and what about those funny 10s and 5s?). Driving was stressing me out at first, although I’m used to it by now.

When I went down to Louisiana to visit my family, I was just in time for Hurricane Gustav to trash Baton Rouge. We were out of power for four or five days (which was just like being in Peace Corps, really). My apologies to anyone I didn’t get to see– the hurricane made everything complicated.

Next I went on the Great American Road Trip to Colorado, which is where I’m relocating to. Being out of my country for so long made me realize that I hadn’t seen all that much of the States, so it was really a tour of iconic americana. We went through Carlsbad Caverns (ginormous caves!), Roswell (no aliens), El Morro (ancient graffitti!), the Petrified Forest (huge numbers of trees turned to stone!), Meteor Crater (also no aliens), the Grand Canyon (”what a grand canyon”), Four Corners (four states at once!), Mesa Verde (ancient cliffside cities), and the Great Sand Dunes (in Colorado? wtf?).

And now I’m in Denver. Even though its October, it’s pretty cold here, for a Southerner who spent the last two years in a tropical country.

3 comments.

New Zealand

Posted on July 25th, 2008 by Aaron.
Categories: Photos, Traveling.

And then there was New Zealand…

For those of you not up on your meteorology, it’s winter in New Zealand. I’ve been living pretty much in perpetual summer for two years in the Philippines, so I wanted to get my cold on. Well, be careful what you wish for… I had to learn to be cold again, which after a couple “oh my GOD its FREEZING in here” freakouts, some new jackets, and constantly wearing three pairs of socks, two pairs of pants, and four shirts wasn’t really all that bad.

(Incidentally, its not really that cold for people who are used to it… It was in the 40s during the day and rarely got below freezing at night. It’s just that I’m used to sweating all the time.)

We stayed on the South Island for the most part (and wouldn’t you know it, every South Islander we met said we hadn’t missed anything on the North Island anyway). It got more and more beautiful the further south we went. We did a lot of stuff– hiked the Franz-Joseph glacier, took the Transalpine Express train through the Souther Alps, rode a helicopter through the mountains to Milford Sound, and visited Mt Sunday, where Edoras the capital of Rohan in Lord of the Rings was filmed.

All in all, it was very, very cool. And cold.

6 comments.

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