Well, it’s about that time. Maybe it’s appropriate that at the time I write this, I’m sitting at a desk in my old room at my parents’ house, the same house I lived in when I was in middle and high school. It’s more than a little surreal; it makes me feel like the last four years of my life never really happened. But they did. I’m now the proud owner of a couple of bachelor’s degrees, and the part of my life where the big decisions seem obvious is over.

I’m getting ready to pack up and leave Austin. Everything I own that’s not already in Seattle will go in my car with me. I don’t know when or if I’ll ever call this place home again. It doesn’t seem real, because of all the other times in my life that i’ve left this place I just come back some days or weeks or months later. But it’s always been home.

I’ll miss it, but I think it’s time to go. One can only have so many experiences and memories tangled up in one place, and there are some movie theaters, parks and stretches of road around here that are getting dangerously crowded just with my own experiences. When I visit them I see ghosts–people I knew, things I’ve done. It’s really heart-breaking sometimes. Maybe going to a new place, attaching experiences to new surroundings will help free me, open a real new chapter in my life.

I know I’ll always come back here to see my parents, to see old friends who linger in this great town. I think I’ll always be from Austin, no matter how many years I put between her and me. Who knows–maybe someday I’ll return here to call it home. But for now, I’m pulling up my anchor to see where I drift. First stop: Seattle. Not a big jump, except in geography. We’ll see how it goes.

I’ve recently started running more often, and I wanted to keep track of my mileage, etc. So, I went looking for a good software package that could keep track of everything and make pretty graphs, but all I could find were many websites that offered the service for free by becoming a member.

I’m nervous about trusting my data to a third party system, so I started thinking I would just build a little database to keep track of this stuff. I want to stay platform neutral, so I decided that I might as well make the thing a web-accessible database.

Writing this thing in ColdFusion would be easy, but I’m trying to learn Java to prepare for a summer internship as a Java developer, so I’m going to try to implement it as a Java servlet or something. I’ll likely open a project at sourceforge.net. More news to follow.

Well, we did the Puzzlehunt thing. What a ride. You can see all of the pictures and puzzles at the Puzzlehunt site.

Contrary to the way things must seem, overt.org is alive and kicking! We got back from MS, started another busy semester at UT, and now I’m focusing web-development efforts on the upcoming UT Puzzlehunt.

Well, we left M$ for good. We’re now in a Best Western in Spokane, about to hit the sack. the trip page has a few pictures. Tired now… must sleep.