Personal Category | Jacob Emerick's Blog

What's With the Big Pause?

When I first decided to create an online blog I wanted to avoid a common pitfall of many other blogs: lack updates. While there were a few empty months in 2009, it feels like a did a good job with regular posts every week or so... Until the New Year rolled around. This is the first blog post in over six months.

Starting in mid-November a few things changed that really impacted my regular blogging. The first, and most obvious one, was winter. While I do enjoy winter adventuring, driving to the Upper Peninsula through the snow to come up with fresh content for the hiking side of my blog was something I decided to avoid. That, coupled with decrease daylight and other seasonal blues, dampened my motivation to write new hiking blogs.

Another problem that I ran into was a decrease in time. Not only did I start working later hours in November at my full-time job, but I started a large contract project that ate up any free time I normally reserved for my personal site development. My site was half rewritten at this time - I was starting to implement a model-view-controller framework (that was later scrapped for my current, very awesome framework) - and I was trying to concentrate on too many independent web project at the same time.

So, to sum that all up, I simply...

• Tags:
• my site
• job

Web Development Goals

I've always been a bit of a goal- and task- orientated person. The only thing I enjoy more than making a long to do list at the beginning of a week is crossing the items off of the list one at a time. Now that I'm a 'real adult' with a full time job and puppy, I decided to create a list of goals to aim for over the next five years. Most of these goals are under the realm of self-improvement; financial security, physical fitness, etc. I wanted to post about some of the web development related goals, both to give readers an idea of where I'm expecting my web skills (and, directly, personal web sites) to head in the future and to place additional pressure on myself to continually progress on the goals.

Learn new programming languages

Over the last couple of years I've managed to teach myself most of what I know of xHTML, CSS, SQL, PHP, and Javascript. However, there are a few languages that I want to learn that I've dabbled in the past. I use some XML, mostly in the form of KML and RSS, but I don't know much about XSL and XSLT. I'd like to be able to create my own XML schemas and parsing templates to the point where I can create entire xHTML web sites using clean XML data. Another...

• Tags:
• my site
• xml

Blog Updates and Comments

This blog was started in March of 2009 during a pivotal moment of my life. I had recently been fired from Michigan Tech, my first post-college job, and was using my free time to create a website to allow me to both market and develop myself professional. With the new site's blog I hoped to discuss web development, hiking, and personal stories in a manner that was both professional and helpful for other people.

Since its creation in March the blog has already had several major looks. I first planned for it to be part of my major website, with similar layout and designs used in the blog pages as my portfolio. After working with this for several months, I soon realized that this was restricted both the opportunities for the blog's development and affecting my search engine ranking. Starting in mid-July I broke my main site into subdomains, which eventually helped the page rank for each section and allowed me to expand both the front and back end of the blog. The current look for my blog was rolled out several weeks ago, and though I already have a more object-orientated view for the backend already, I've grown quite fond of the layout.

Since the latest blog design has been rolled out I've been able to develop a few different tools more customized for a blog then my...

• Tags:
• my site

Excel Amortization Table

I recently purchased a new car - a 2006 manual Saturn Ion. As with any good car purchase I had to take out a hefty auto loan for most of the car's worth. Thanks to a large amount of student loans and a short work history, the interest on the car loan was quite bad. I began to wonder if and how I could pay less interest on the life of the loan.

There are two main options I decided to explore. First, I wondered how much increased payments would affect the life, and interest, of the loan. Second, I wanted to look at the amount I would save by refinancing the car after a year under a lower interest rate. I was also interested in the gap of my loan (the difference between the trade-in value and loan principle), which would also be the amount I would owe the bank if I totaled my new car.

The only numbers I had to do a bit of research on was the rate of depreciation and the value of my car. I did some guess and check for the depreciation, but later found out that twenty percent is pretty standard for vehicles. Also, I based all of the rows under the data tab on the life of the loan, not when the principle drops below zero (in case of refinancing or increased payments).

When I had finished the sheet, not only could I view the remaining loan amount due and experiment...

• Tags:
• saturn ion
• excel

New Job and Car

The last few weeks have been pretty busy for me. To provide a bit of back story, I've been living in Appleton, WI with my girlfriend's parents working a few different contract jobs since May of 2009. While our income was enough to cover a few bills and loan payments, freelance web development wasn't earning enough to cover moving out, so I started applying for fulltime positions in the local area.

In the beginning of August I headed out east with the Reynolds family for a wedding in Ocean City, WA. This trip involved several incredible dinners and a visit to our nation's capital on top of meeting some of Katie's extended family. Near the end of the trip I received an email about a job offer from De Pere, only twenty minutes from Appleton. SparkNET, the founding company of EzineArticles, wanted me as a web developer, a position I quickly accepted.

I've only been working at SparkNET for a few days now, but so far it seems to be a great fit. The atmosphere is very welcoming and open, and the other programmers are very good at what they do. The sites I'll be working on receive high traffic loads and are (or will be) setup in a MVC format, two areas of web programming I could use some more experience in.

Since...

• Tags:
• saturn ion
• job
• sparknet
• katie
• wisconsin
• vacation

Lake Superior Idea

One of my favorite parts of the waterfall project of summer 2008 was the planning process. Not only did I enjoy scouring topographic maps and satellite photos to find the quickest, safest, or most scenic route, but I also enjoyed achieving different goals; visiting every waterfall along Silver River or within the Keweenaw. Once the project was complete, I started looking for a new set of hiking adventures that would rival my experience.

Bryant Weathers, a student web developer at Michigan Tech, blogged about a friend of his who planned to spend a summer hiking around Lake Michigan (blog link). Unfortunately, he stopped a few hundred miles in, but this idea inspired a new project for myself - hike around Lake Superior.

This is not an adventure that I plan on tackling soon. With an estimated distinct of eighteen hundred miles, it will take me at least three months to walk around the lake. It'd be nice to have it done within the next six years, or before I'm thirty. Also, there are a number of things that I must prepare for that will take a fair amount of time.

I've never gone backpacking before, so I'd spend a summer going weekend stints in the woods. I don't plan on carrying much: a hammock tent, several...

• Tags:
• adventure
• superior hike

Future Side Projects

In my free time, I try to keep up with web development for my personal sites. Over the last year, the gem of my side work became the 'Waterfalls of the Keweenaw Area' website, a truly complete and detailed project. Due to this project, I learned more about Google Map API, KML files, and general content management then I would have by waiting for appropriate job projects. The waterfalls site involved much more than just making a website - I had to go out and collect the data (photos, directions, GPS points) manually - and now I have several ideas for future projects stacked up.

One project that is mostly completed is a Daylight Tracker. This application will print out calendars and graphs with sunrise/sunset information based on the current latitude and longitude of a user. While it's completely functional, I've decided to overhaul the frontend to utilize jQuery and JSON as an additional hurdle.

The next project on the radar is a full page Google Maps application that I can start linking my photos, hiking trips, and waterfall information to. Some interactivity might be allowed, such as commenting on hikes/photo locations or adding new points of interest as an open source experiment. Also, depending on how easy the API works with KML files, I might allow exporting/importing...

• Tags:
• my site
• jquery
• flash
• kml

Life After College

I was never worried about finding a job after college. Both degrees I undertook (physics and math) have severely limited job opportunities compared to other Michigan Tech degrees (computer sciences, engineering, etc), but I was too caught up in student life to worry about a career. Working through both high school and college, I figured that finding a good job after graduation would be easy.

The career fair options at the university always bombed for my degree (most attending businesses were only interested in engineers) and, with only weeks left, I applied for several jobs involving web development at Michigan Tech. The interview and application process was over in a short time and I had two job offers - and I took the more promising one. Little did I know that I'd be fired in ten months with even less opportunities available to me.

After being fired, I applied for several dozen jobs across the country. Not only was I excited about a brand new experience, but I wanted to leave Michigan and my university behind. With the bad economy and my limited experience, though, few employers got back to me (not many companies want to fly a web developer with less than three years experience across the nation). When my lease in Houghton ended in late April, Katie and I decided...

• Tags:
• job
• mtu
• katie

Moving to Wisconsin

After losing my job at Michigan Tech and testing out the job market in Houghton for a month, Katie and I decided that it was time to move. Several options presented themselves, including Seattle and Chicago, where friends offered free housing for several months until jobs and permanent housing could be found. We decided to move to Appleton, WI with Katie's parents after much discussion.

Over the last several years of dating Katie, we had visited her parents plenty of times both before and with Logan. Not only did we enjoy our time in Appleton, but they were very understanding of our relationship and current position. Also, even though I had applied to plenty of job opportunities across the nation, the only interviews and interested companies I had contact with where in the Milwaukee and Green Bay area. It made sense to move to a familiar location that seemed promising for a future career.

I did have some hesitations on moving to Wisconsin, mostly because I was raised in Michigan. I don't know many people or attractions within the state, and there aren't square miles of empty wilderness, like the rugged Huron Mountains or Ottawa National Forest of the Upper Peninsula, near Appleton.

These few negatives were unimportant to our immediate needs for a house and...

• Tags:
• job
• katie
• wisconsin

Getting Fired

I was hired to work for Michigan Technological University after a short, informal process immediately after graduating in the spring of 2008. Starting under the department of Auxiliary Technologies as a beginning web developer, I was the sole manager for dozens of websites and web applications. After ten months of complaint-free work, I was fired from my position in an extremely negative manner.

During my employ at Michigan Tech, I don't feel that I was the perfect employee. When a friend of mine was hospitalized after a camping accident, I took a week's worth of emergency leave after sending my boss and colleagues a brief e-mail explaining the situation. I usually showed up to work early, especially during the summer, so that I could leave early to work around the house or go hiking with my dog. There were several projects I worked on that fell behind schedule, sometimes due to my inability to keep up with a large workload. However, while I admit these shortcomings as an employee, none of them were listed as a reason for my termination.

Two of my larger projects failed during my last few months of my employment that, according to my boss, were the cause of his decision. The first one was a youth programs application that accepted online applications and payments...

• Tags:
• job
• mtu