Personal Category | Jacob Emerick's Blog

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, ...

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

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 ...

• Tags:
• adventure
• north country trail
• 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 ...

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

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 ...

• Tags:
• job
• katie
• mtu

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 ...

• 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 ...

• Tags:
• job
• mtu

Blog Introduction

After introducing myself in the first post, I feel that the next logical step is to introduce the blog. While most blogs aim for a single theme, I'm hoping to use this one for three different themes: programming, hiking, and personal. These will likely change in the future as my needs and interests develop, but they seem pretty solid for the next few years.

As I am a web developer, I feel that it's only right to devote most of the blog entries to web programming with both interesting programming experiences and light tutorials. While I do have quite a few languages under my belt already, I am constantly looking to optimize my skills and learn more, so this topic should be fairly dynamic and varied.

Hiking is a more recent interest of mine, but one that I thoroughly enjoy. While I have spent a lot of time looking for waterfalls in the Keweenaw Area, I also climb mountains and seek out interesting historic locations. With the recent gift of a GPS unit, I plan on providing images, descriptions, and KML/GPX waypoints of some of the more ...

• Tags:
• introduction

My Introduction

Hello, world.

My name is Jacob Emerick, and I am a web application developer and graphic designer. I also enjoy the outdoors, a good challenge, and learning opportunities.

Though I was born in Camp Pendleton, CA, most of my childhood was spent in a small farming community in Michigan called Port Hope. My parents are former Marines, so I was brought up in a fairly strict family environment where hard work was expected. I flip-flopped between a private Lutheran school and the local public school and was involved in sports and other extracurricular groups. Not only did I excel in the school environment, ending up as the Valedictorian of my class, but I worked between 20 and 60 hours a week as a grounds manager for a small housing development.

When I came to Michigan Tech, I had high expectations of my academic career as a physicist. However, I found a new passion within a year: student leadership. For the next four years I was heavily involved in committees and organizations within the university and managed to make quite a few ...

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• introduction