Hello again everyone. As we get this planning rolling we're going to be needing addresses for people. Google Docs makes this incredibly convenient for everyone. Go to this form and just fill in the information, it will be saved into a spreadsheet, simplifying our lives.

Thanks!

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Jess and I both like Panda Express, a lot (That fact alone, Jess, is probably enough to earn you approval from Mollie and Megan). So over the last month or so, as I've been planning the proposal and ordering the ring, we've eaten our fill of Orange Chicken, and accompanying fortune cookies. The fortunes contained therein were quite apropos:

As displayed, Jess' fortunes are on the left, mine are on the right.

The day I picked out the stones and placed the order for the ring to be made:

We got these the day I flew to San Francisco for a job interview with Lawrence Livermore National Labs, also the day I approved the wax mold of the ring setting.

I had actually planned to swing by Panda Express and get some fortune cookies for our dinner the night I proposed, but I forgot with all the other things I was doing that day. But, we did go the day after, and here's what we got:

Jess particularly enjoyed "WIL". Hopefully that cookie knows something about our future that we're not aware of in regards to the "Coming into a fortune" part, that would be kind of convenient.

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Yes, you read that correctly. Jess and I are engaged. Here's the story:

Friday, March 20, 2009: On my way over to Jess's house I stopped by Campus Craft and Floral and had them fill a vase with a nice Spring floral arrangement. I gave it to Jess to celebrate the first day of Spring. That evening I cooked dinner of steak, mashed potatoes, corn, and rolls. It was very tasty. Once we cleaned up dinner it was time to head to the symphony in Salt Lake City. As some of my readers may remember, we were supposed to go to the Symphony way back in January, but instead Jess was in surgery. So, I exchanged those tickets for the Pops concert. We were a little behind schedule, but doing alright, until, at about Pleasant Grove, we realized that the tickets were still tacked to Jess's bulletin board where they had been since January! Oh Noes! We called a friend who went and grabbed them and met us just off the highway back in Provo. With tickets in hand we headed back up to Salt Lake.

We arrived at Abravanel Hall at about 8:30 (the symphony started at 8). Luckily we arrived just a few minutes before intermission and were able to go to our seats then. The first half hour had been pieces from their "Toast to Vienna Festival", so we didn't even miss any of the pops performances. The music was great and we really enjoyed the rest of the songs.

After the Symphony let out we left Abravanel Hall and I guided Jess across the street to where our horse and carriage ride were waiting. She, not knowing all the plans of the evening, was nice enough to let me guide her slightly out of the way, and caught on quick when I gestured toward the carriage and said, "I think this is our ride."

The carriage ride took us up into Memory Grove Park just East of the Capitol building. The park is in a canyon, so it only has one entrance. After reaching the top of the park, the driver let us out to walk through the park while he turned around and we could meet him back at the entrance. We walked along the path that led through the park, looking at the various memorials along the way. We paused at the Meditation Chapel where I pulled out the ring, bent down on one knee, and asked Jess to marry me. Her response was, "Absolutely."

So, with the ring now on her hand we walked through the rest of the park and hopped back onto the carriage. The driver took us back to the parking lot and let us out. I suggested that Jess call her parents, but she felt that since it was now 11:00pm, that they would already be asleep (midnight in Texas), and didn't want to wake them up. I tried to warn her, but she found out the hard way when her mom gave her an earful when she called today. Anyways, that's the bulk of the story. And, of course, you now want to see pictures of Jess and the ring:

The ring was custom made by Wilson Diamonds. It features a trellis setting ("trellis" is one of the several words used to describe the style), a princess cut diamond in the center, and pear cut sapphires on either side. It's a beautiful ring, exactly what I was hoping to put together and, with some small discussion about rings from Jess months ago, a ring Jess loves too.

The tentative plan at this point is to get married in the Boston Temple around the end of June, or beginning of July. I'll be finishing my schooling at the end of June, and thus starting work somewhere in July. So, that seems like the most convenient time to do this in terms of trying to get married, move, not worry about needing vacation time from work, etc. Now it's just a matter of working through all the details, one piece at a time.

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I had a paper accepted to IJCNN (International Joint Conference on Neural Networks). Tuesday was the deadline for "camera-ready submissions". So, I was working hard on that. The paper is basically a description of everything I've been working on for my Master's thesis. It includes some preliminary results, which aren't great, but are encouraging. I'm hoping that with some parameter tweaking we'll be able to have something fairly decent.

I know you're all dying to see the paper, so here ya go: Music Recommendation and Query-by-Content Using Self-Organizing Maps. Honestly, it should be fairly understandable to the average person, so long as you gloss over some of the more detailed descriptions. So don't be too scared to look at it.

The conference is in the middle of June, in fact it is during finals for Spring Term, in Atlanta. So it will be about the last thing I will do as part of my school career (unless I submit a final paper to a conference). I don't know yet whether I will be giving a presentation or a poster, nor have they released a schedule to let me know exactly what day I'll need to be there. They seem to be a bit not-quite-on-top-of-things.

Part of the paper includes an extremely simple Music Recommendation System. You select a seed song, and it spits out a top-ten list of "similar" songs. For example, if you wanted similar music to, say, Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No.2 - Allegro Moderato you'd get:

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Lawrence Livermore National Labs brought me out to interview with them this week. I flew out of Salt Lake on Monday afternoon and arrived at the San Jose airport. I managed to find my way to the rental car facility and picked up my car (Pontiac G6) and drove to the Googleplex to meet up with Mike. He introduced me to some of his co-workers and showed me around the main campus there. The cafeteria wasn't open however, so we headed out for dinner. First we dropped off the rental car at Mike's house and then we met a couple of his co-workers at St. John's Restaurant. I had a Bacon Swiss Burger which was quite tasty.

After dinner we just went to Mike's house and I worked on finishing the paperwork I needed. I had to fill out 6 pages of official application stuff, then another 6 pages of Background Investigation stuff, including every address I've lived at in the past 5 years, character references (who could not be the same people as my employment references, or the same people as my technical/education references (who couldn't be the same people as my employment references either)). So, if you're reading this, and not related to me, there's a chance you might get a call from LLNL Security or from the FBI asking about me.

Once I finished my paper work I decided it was time for bed. I was going to be getting up early to beat traffic and needed some sleep. And I did indeed get up early. My alarm was set for 5:30am. I got up showered, and packed up and was out of the house by about 6:10. Mike doesn't believe in having food in his house, so I was planning to grab something from McDonald's after getting to Livermore. So I fired up my GPS and headed off to Livermore, luckily I avoided the mess at the 101 - 880 interchange, where the highway was closed for much of the morning rush-hour. I actually got to Livermore in about 50 minutes, as Google estimated. Traffic wasn't bad at all. I guess the reverse-commute (as the guys at the Lab called it) really isn't that bad (most people are trying to get into the area not out of it in the morning). So I found the lab and then set off in pursuit of breakfast. I though, "Surely, there is fast food around here along this large main roads somewhere." I drove around and about for a while and ended up in a Walmart parking lot near an In-N-Out. Taking into account my remaining time and the likelihood of being able to find food without getting lost I decided to hedge my bets and dine at Walmart. I bought a pack of blueberry muffins and a thing of orange juice. It worked out fairly well for me.

Once I was filled I headed back to the Lab and went into the Badge Office. This is building outside the guard houses in which you stand in line, present identification, explain who you are, they verify you're supposed to be there, create a temporary badge for you and let you go. My contact at the lab came and met me at the badge office I followed her in to the building. At the guard posts I presented my badge and driver's license, they scrutinized the pieces of plastic and then let me go. It is important to note that these guards are not just a formality or for show. They carry side-arms (clearly displayed from their leg holsters), and pretty much have permission to use those weapons as they see fit. As one of the three facilities in the country that works with the nuclear arsenal stockpile, security is not treated lightly.

But, once through security things are pretty much as you'd expect them to be. Lots of buildings, roads, parking areas, etc. I was led into one of the many nondescript buildings and into a conference room. First I met with an HR representative. She discussed the benefits at the lab and some of the culture. Then I met with a group of 3 interviewers who asked me some technical questions and just talked to me about my experience for a bit. After them another interviewer came in from a different project. He had fairly similar questions overall. Then I had another interview with a person from another different project. He, too, asked fairly similar questions. Once we finished up with the interviews (each of the 3 was about an hour), I went out to lunch with one of the managers and the guy who I interviewed with on campus in January.

We had lunch at Casa Orozco, a Mexican restuarant in the heart of Livermore. We talked some more about the positions I was being considered for and what I thought about them. This is always tricky, since there's a very limited amount of information I can actually be told about the projects since I don't have the necessary security clearance. The projects I'd be working on require a DOE Q level security clearance, roughly comparable to a DOD Top Secret clearance.

After lunch we were done with interviews and I picked up my car and headed off. I drove over the ridge to Mountain House to check out the area (once you go over the ridge cost-of-living drops down to about Utah levels, so it's actually possible to live normally). I also drove up to Brentwood which was recommended as a popular and cheaper area to live. Then it was time to head back to the airport. I was doing alright driving around the roads, but on the way back the steady, drizzly rain decided several times to turn into torrential downpours for several minutes at a time. This is not particularly fun when you're driving on CA highways which you are unfamiliar with, in a vehicle you are unfamiliar with, with lots of traffic. That was a bit stressful, but luckily people all seemed to react mostly intelligently by slowing down, turning on headlights, and not driving quite so crazy. I have my suspicions that this is normal, but listening to the radio it seemed like every highway in the area had some kind of a wreck on it causing delays. I was lucky that there were no impediments to my arriving back at the airport with plenty of time.

I dropped off the rental car, and checked in for my flight. I arrived back in Salt Lake around 7:45 (a really strong tail-wind allowed us to arrive about 40 minutes early). Jess picked me up and we stopped at McDonald's for dinner on the way home because we were both hungry.

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The interviews went quite well. The department manager called me up on Wednesday to let me know that at the after-interview wrap-up meeting all the interviewers liked me as a candidate (a consensus is less than the norm), and that he'd be setting up some phone meetings with some of the developers on the best fit project so they could decide exactly what kind of position they wanted me in. And, unless those phone meetings were disastrous, they'd probably be putting together an offer package shortly thereafter.

I'm still waiting to hear back from Applied Signals. So hopefully I'll have at least a couple of options as to what I can do with my life once I finish school in June. I also got an automated reply from Nokia about the job postings I applied for there which say that the application process is closed and they are now reviewing applications. So perhaps I'll hear from them soon and have another avenue open.

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