Personal Category | Jacob Emerick's Blog

20 Jan '12

Opening a New Chapter of Hiking

I was soaked. It was mid-morning, and I was following Bluff Creek downstream trying to find Rock Bluff Falls. The rain had finally stopped a few hours ago, but the twelve hours before that had been a steady downpour. Now the sun was slowly heating the woods into a steaming sauna. Everything around me was dripping, each step stirring more mosquitos and raining more water down on me. One slow mile of wet, mud, and insects was all I could take. I turned back towards the road and my car.

My adventures in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan started just over three years ago. I was living in Houghton and had a simple plan - I wanted to visit every waterfall in the area. This definition was a bit fluid but enough to fill a solid ten months of exploring. Living and working in Houghton meant that I could easily hit up several falls on weekday evenings. Hiking three to four days a week got me in great shape, and the simple goal of finding and documenting waterfalls was enough to keep me moving.

Young Logan at Rice Lake

Once I moved to ...

8 Jan '12

Another New Year

Snap. Where did 2011 go?

Yup, last year was a bit busy. I've barely mentioned this on here, but I now work at DealerFire in Oshkosh. We mostly create custom websites for automotive dealerships, but there's a good mix of digital marketing, social media, and app development mixed up in there too. I'm the director of the production department, so I'm in charge of the majority of new products that go out the door. Last year that was about 200 websites. That's four sites launching every week. So yeah, 2011 was pretty dog gone busy.

There's been a lot going on outside of my job as well. I finally proposed to Katie Reynolds after five years of dating - we're going to get married in August! We also attended two big family weddings this year, one from each side, and got to make a lot of new introductions. Not everything has been good - there was far too many funerals and sad happenings for that. Overall 2011 has made me thankful for my friends and family as well as the time we have together.

So, what's the plan for 2012? What ...

15 Aug '11

Jake and Katie are Engaged!

Katie and I met over five years ago at Houghton. We working together for one of Michigan Tech's summer youth programs. After a few months of spending 18+ hours a day with each other we fell in love and started dating in early August (or late July, the dates/definitions were a bit fuzzy back then). There was never really any question about where our relationship would end up as the years passed but it was still a big moment when I asked her to marry me this June.

One of our first dates involved driving out near Skanee and looking for the Mouth of Huron. While we failed to find the beach that afternoon we had a great time at Lower Silver Falls. We spent over an hour climbing around the rocks, enjoying the cool water, and taking lots of cool pictures. Since then Katie and I try to stop by this waterfall every time we drive past; whether we have a picnic or just splash around the lower drop, Lower Silver Falls is one of our favorite spots in the Upper Peninsula.

Jake and Katie at Lower Silver Falls

I had purchased the ring ...

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katie
wedding

2 Jan '11

2011 New Year's Resolutions

It's that time of year again... When people realize that they've eaten too much food, spent too much money, or just haven't been overly productive over the holidays and decided to make firm New Year's Resolutions. I'm no exception to this annual tradition and have made a few commitments of my own for 2011.

Start working out

Original, eh? I am a pretty skinny guy (been hovering around 'underweight' for as long as I could spell the word), but working all day in front of a computer is not very conducive to a fit body. A few hiking-related knee injuries deter me from a daily run, but I do plan on exercising (standard push-ups and crunches) on a regular basis.
Goal: Be able to do 50 push-ups and 80 crunches in a single setting.

Finish my side projects

I've been working to get all of my sites under my MVC over the past year and feel pretty good about the progress I've made. While there is still the waterfall and hiking map sites that still use old school PHP, there is also a lot of cool features I've added to my ...

11 Nov '10

Katie and Jake 2010 Move

Katie and I lived with her parents from the summer of 2009. After I lost my job at Michigan Tech they graciously opened up their doors for us until I could get a solid income again. What we hoped would be a several-month period grew to 18 months, since my SparkNET job wasn't enough to afford moving out. I finally got a solid job at DealerFire over the summer with enough income for us to seriously look at moving out on our own.

Living room in our Wheatfield duplex

It was hard to find a place in our price range that was still suitable for two adults and their pets. We spent much of September and October looking at different duplexes in Menasha and Oshkosh, turning one down after another because of location (active train tracks in the back yard is a definite no) or condition (sagging floors is another red flag). We finally got lucky with a place in Appleton - a last minute cancellation, landlord who loves dogs, and decent price for rent all aligned for a small, but relatively modern, duplex on Wheatfield.

Moving happened ...

23 Sep '10

Jake Meets a Bear (and Cub)

A few weeks ago, on an early morning hike in the Upper Peninsula, I met a bear cub and his mother. I've seen a lot of wildlife while wandering through the woods up there, including wolves, porcupines, and more grouse than I care to count, but this was the first bear I've seen outside of the car or zoo. Needless to say, this was a pretty intense experience.

Bear and Cub on Southern Blind 35 Hills

I was circling back on a loop that took me down Blind 35 near Big Bay and up some of the southern hills (a hike that I'll cover at a later time). My main goal was to get a sweeping view of the Huron Mountain Club and the mouth of Salmon Trout River, which I finally obtained on a rocky outcropping a few hundred yards from the road. I could see down to Conway Point and over at the bumps of the Keweenaw far off in the distance. Tired from the climb, I sat down after taking some pictures and rested in the waking sun.

Looking northwest from southern Blind 35 Hills

After a few minutes I noticed some movement a few dozen feet below me. The ...

26 Jun '10

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 ...

Tags:
job
my site

28 Nov '09

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 ...

Tags:
my site
xml

28 Sep '09

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 ...

Tags:
my site

13 Sep '09

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 ...