Wednesday, July 6, 2011

My Life Lately

I've been meaning to make a video about all of the stuff that's gone on in my life of late, but I've been meaning to do it for so long without actually doing it that I figured it might just be best to write a blog post about it all just to get things off my chest, then maybe bring things up in the vlog when I get back to it. Some of this will likely be familiar to you already.

If you'll recall, I posted a video back in January called Why the YouTube Home Page Sucks, which is exactly what it says on the tin. As a result of that video, two Google employees contacted me. The first was an engineer who looked up my name, saw that I had applied to Google back in October, and offered to send my CV around to Google and YouTube for another go. The second was a recruiter who made a similar offer.

After speaking with a (rather rude) engineer at YouTube, I was shifted into the Google hiring process and put in contact with another recruiter. After two technical interviews, they started giving me interviews for projects. I interviewed for an internship working on Translate, then for one working on Groups. At this point they were running out of things to interview me for, so I was transferred over to a Google Ventures recruiter.

Google Ventures is an internal venture capital program whereby Google employees can launch startups with financial backing from the company. I interviewed with a company by the name of Wingu, which is working on a platform for collaborative scientific research. Unfortunately they chose not to hire me either, and at this point no other Google Ventures companies were looking. So I was out of luck.

Or so it would seem. Out of the blue, my good friend Kevin was contacted about his pixel art by a game startup in California called Bit24, which is in IGN's incubator program for game companies. I jokingly told him to put in a good word for me as a programmer, which he did, and now I've got a summer job.

While all of this was going on, I was dealing with some other issues. From the end of February to the middle of April, I had a hot Asian boyfriend, who is quite possibly the sweetest and most genuine person I know, and who unfortunately is also way more serious and over-the-top romantic than I can handle. I like simplicity; gifts and dressing up and dining out and all that can be good sparingly, but for the most part they make me feel awkward and guilty, because I'm simply not going to reciprocate to nearly equal degree.

Earlier in the year I had been living in the dorms at RIT, and at the beginning of spring quarter I moved to an off-campus apartment. Doing so made me realise how much I missed spending time with my roommates Cam, Brian, and the other Brian, and the girl who lived across the hall, Maggie. And apparently my absence also made her realise how much she cared for me. We both had boyfriends when all of this started to surface, but ultimately I don't think we ever stood a chance of doing the "right" thing when the actual right thing was staring us in the face.

So now Maggie and I are involved, and it's very open and simple and I really couldn't ask for anything better. She is not my girlfriend and I am not her boyfriend: we have the capacity to be committed without imposing obligations, and we are mature enough to live with the fact that we cannot tell each other what to do. I think all relationships stand to benefit from this sort of arrangement.

As for personal projects, I've been working on a game, a programming language, a novel, and a musical that I intend to release in installments on YouTube. I've got several vlog ideas in the works, and I've been cleaning and reorganising my bedroom in order to have a good space to work in.

I spent last weekend at my acquaintance's lake house in upstate New York, enjoying beautiful weather, good friends, good food, and constant swimming. It was made all the better by seeing Maggie for the first time in six-odd weeks. Later this month I'll be going to New York again for a wedding, then heading to Cape Cod toward the end of the month to stay at a friend's beach house, and finally returning to New Hampshire for August.

Now, having got all this out in the open, perhaps I'll feel better about doing a vlog like I ought to.