Looking for grad schools

While still very busy with regular work, I now need to do some serious planning for grad school. I'm currently looking at University of Colorado Boulder and University of California San Diego. Caltech and Stanford are on my list, though those are very prestigious and probably very competitive. Most application deadlines are December 1, so I do have some time, but do need to get working.

Surprise! Graduating this year

While looking over my remaining class requirements on Thursday, I realized that I can fit them all in next semester. So I'll graduate next semester - seven months from now! This means I need to get graduate school applications or a job hunt done ASAP so that I can start next summer or fall.

App almost reached a payment threshold

Google AdMob only pays advertising revenue in chunks, once a payment threshold amount has been reached. Somehow my app earned over $30 last month alone. It's now just a couple dollars from the first threshold, so after over a year I'll almost certainly receive my first payment at the end of this month!

Lectured!

The professor for the CS class I'm on staff for is out of town, so I delivered the lecture this morning! (This class is, if I remember correctly, still the largest at the university: ~900 students.) On Friday I went over the auditorium setup with him to be as prepared as possible. This morning I arrived early to set up as much as possible backstage during the previous lecture. I struggled a bit with the audiovisual equipment (where are the plugs again?) but managed to get the display on in time. The microphone was more challenging - I got it turned on but it couldn't be heard unless I held it very close. That was unfortunate, but once I began the lecture it went along well. I realized after the end that I missed a couple extra notes I wanted to touch on, but I covered everything on the slides. Packing up also took a little longer than expected, but that was mostly done backstage out of the way of the next lecturer. Overall it could have gone smoother but I got the job done.

Time for a lot of office hours

This is the first weekend students have to work on the major semester-long project we just released. The professor is out of town for a few days, so to make sure things are going smoothly, I and some other senior course staff will be spending a lot of time in office hours tomorrow. I plan to be there for all eight hours of them.

App passes 600 users

The beginning-of-year surge has continued: my app surpassed 600 active installations this week. I recently made a change to try to fix a semi-rare crash that I can't reproduce on my own device; the update is in automated testing now.

Moved in for the new semester

After an all-day training session, I got settled into my new apartment this evening. It's quite nice. We did notice, though, that no coaxial cable was provided with the modem one of my roommates brought, so I'm doing a quick Walmart run to get it. In other news, I just tonight detected that the main hard drive in my desktop computer is in the process of failing, so I'm copying the data over to the other drive. Unexpected things, but all manageable.