It’s a new year in a new decade and that means it’s definitely time for some reflection.

2009 was my first full year in San Francisco.  Looking back, it seems like it went by in a flash.  I ran my first marathon, made tons of friends, found myself a wonderful new girlfriend, inherited the senior engineering position at YouNoodle, moved into a new neighborhood, celebrated my 23rd birthday and generally had a blast.

It seems like the longer I stay in the bay area the more people come to join me.  I can see how the “hella” locals might take for granted what a wonderful place northern California is, but I certainly don’t.  I’ve taken serious pleasure in exploring the bay area.  Camping at Trefethen, running courses every Saturday morning with Team in Training, hiking through the wilderness in the many state parks, hanging out at ocean/baker beaches, bumming around the Stanford campus, and dining at some of San Francisco’s finest restaurants (which are stellar).  I’m sure more people will end up out here before everyone settles down.

2009 was a year of foundation building professionally and socially.  In 2010 I’d like to continue both.  Socially with a focus on finding a “sidekick.”  Professionally I want to consolidate my position at YN, but I also want to spend more time learning.  I want to establish a working knowledge of statistics and statistical computing.  I want to drive less (possibly bike instead) and travel more.  There’s more to be done, but I think that’s enough resolutions.  Under promise and over deliver, as they say.

May the tens be even better than the ‘oughts.

As a relatively new card carrying member of the “real world” (read: post-college), it has come to my attention that dating is basically not the same at all.

In college, dating was easy. I was guaranteed to have several things in common with any girl on campus. At the very least we were both students and we were hanging out in the same place. More likely, we were studying related fields (which implies shared interest), had similar intellectual aptitude, knew at least a few of the same people, and were both looking for friends/more. A date was convenient. I may just have had to walk down the hall to get to her place, or at worst, across campus.

In the real world, dating is hard. Girls are distributed everywhere—across town, or suburbia are way harder to get to than across campus. A girl’s age is no longer guaranteed to be within 4 years of mine (not that that is terribly important to me, but it was convenient in college). Patronizing the same coffee shop is not a basis for conversation the way sharing a class is. I have no real reason to share a stranger’s company repeatedly the way a class or other regular shared appointment would.

Don’t get me wrong. Not having something obviously in common with someone isn’t enough to scare me away. That was the easiest part to get over. The things that concern me are the inconvenience and the undecidability.

Inconvenience makes regular meetings harder to establish. Not seeing a girl regularly makes it hard to establish a rapport. When I first approach a woman I’m interested in (and I’m typically only potentially interested at this stage) they either:

a) Like the attention and flirt with me
or b) Blow me off because they think I’m trying to lick them out of their pants with my silver tongue, or some other ridiculous reason.

Both of these responses are presumptuous. Sometimes I’m in a flirty mood, in which case a) is a perfectly appreciable response. Sometimes I’m not, and I just want to actually TALK to someone. Maybe that’s weird for a guy—judging from the binary reactions I get, I think its something most girls don’t consider. It’s really unreasonably difficult to establish platonic relationships because of it. Seriously, the only ones I have are coworkers or girlfriends of friends. Sometimes, I actually like to get to know a girl a little before asking her out.

Maybe I need to wrap my head around dating someone to see if I like them. That still seems backward to me.

The other thing that bothers me about extensive dating is its undecidability. N+1 has some good discussion on it here. In math terms (romantic, I know), dating is an optimization problem. You want to find the girl(s) that yield the local maximum of your utility function, whatever that may be. It’s undecidable in the sense that you never know when you’ve succeeded. You’d need to date every girl out there [though a statistically significant sample would be enough for a good guess]. My romantic side disagrees, and says I’ll know it when I see it.

Enough babbling.

I like hanging out with girls. So, if dating you is the only way to do it, here I come.

Before getting started, this movie captures the hilarity of CL: I Kissed a Girl (Off of Craigslist)

Fortunately for you, I actually have a real Craigslist story. This one is about the quest for the perfect roommate. Phil and I had high expectations, but had nowhere to turn. CL was the logical choice. Having been forewarned about the many crazies, I didn’t have high hopes. Nevertheless, I crafted a post that perfectly described what we were looking for.

I hate to have yet another stereotypical CL ad reiterating the same awesome traits that all roommates should have, but given the choice of medium (Craigslist), and the horror stories I’ve heard about crazy roommates found here, I’m going to say them anyway.

Things you can’t be:
A drug addict
A smoker
A pet owner (sorry, landlord wants to charge us extra for it)


Next, a little about us:

Mike, 21 — Enjoys meeting new people, exploring the city and surroundings, cooking, sports (soccer, skiing, frisbee, biking, volleyball), parties, shooting the breeze, a sharp wit, politics, technology, and photography. My two greatest loves in life are food and people, especially when experienced together.


Phil, 22 — Interested in science and tech. Crazy about movies but really sucks at music (an iPod full of stuff no one has ever heard of). Looking for culture and color—do you speak Japanese? Busy by day; social by night.

We both have day jobs, but don’t bring our work home. Actually, we’re pretty much awesome. Hopefully you are too!


And lastly, about you:

Things you should have:
-Good hosting skills (if you have people over, which is great, then you should clean up after them)
-A healthy respect for your roommates and for shared space
-An “A” in kindergarten (sharing is caring)
-A steady income
-Guys and girls both welcome

And Things we like:
Cleanliness (it’s next to godliness, you know)
Intelligence
Down to earth
Chill
Sense of humor (If you can’t take a joke, we’re not going to make it)
Independence
Outgoing (We’re here to experience the city and it’s people, ideally you are too)


Full disclosure:
The apartment is really nice (I’ve done a lot of apartment searching, and this the nicest one I’ve seen in the mission), but the room you’d be staying in is pretty small. It’s big enough for a queen bed and a dresser (with a big closet), but not much else. That said, the room will go for less than $1000; we haven’t finalized a price yet.

Just reply to the post if you’re interested, and we’ll be in touch.

If there were any decent people on CL, I was sure this would find them. 10 minutes after the post was up, we already had 3 replies. 30 minutes, 15 replies. 2 hours, 30 replies. 3 days, 55 replies. It was ridiculous how easy this was!

Due to the overwhelming turnout (which Phil and I initially attributed to our awesomeness, but later learned was more due to rampant desperation), we established some criteria. We wanted a local so they could introduce us to people, we had to be able to meet them in person, and they had to be able to pay the bills. Aside from those stringent requirements, we favored girls over guys because coed living is more fun—everybody knows that.

The responses we got included curt introductions, outright begging, soul revealing confidences, and complete wackjobs.

The most interesting thing in the responses was that a strong majority of them included their sexual orientation, something Phil and I hadn’t even considered—we didn’t care either way, but I guess that’s important in this city.

We found that most of the mens’ responses were a little more terse, didn’t reveal too much about themselves, and were generally pretty useless for personality matching. The not desperate ones, anyway. The desperate ones went something along the lines of “OMGIMMOVINGTOTOWNIN2DAYSANDINEEDAPLACETOSTAY CANIBEYOURROMMATEPLZPLZPLZ!?!?!?!”

Uh, no. You can’t, sorry.

Then there were the girls. Some of these were exquisite examples of TMI, total soul dumps that fell just short of complete autobiographies. One of ‘em must’ve spent a couple hours putting this together—I wondered if it was like a form letter response that she used all the time. Other sane ones, the ones I appreciated anyway, offered a nice taste of personality, a little playful wit, and managed to maintain their self respect.

Next, the crazies. To be fair, some of these people were probably just casting a wide net trying to find anyone that would put up with their “special needs.” The few I replied to were nice enough people, just in weird situations. One couple thought it was a good idea to cram themselves into our small third room. We thought that would just be a weird house dynamic, and to make it worse, at least one of ‘em was unemployed. Having oddball strangers at home all day just weirded me out. Another 2 girls wanted to live there too. That was an interesting proposition…so we emailed ‘em back just to see what would happen. We never did figure out if they were together or not. Regardless, they came off as total flakes and were certifiably psycho.

Shortly after we started meeting up with the prospects we had picked out, Dan, a friend of mine from Amazon, fell into our lap. A good roommate that Phil and I both already knew was too good to turn down, so I never did get to finish this CL experience.

That said, living in San Fran should yield other opportunities.

Wish me luck. Much love.

Among my purchases while equipping my new kitchen was a set of standard stainless steel aluminum cored pots (nobody likes teflon anyway). Not included in the set was the ever indispensable omelette pan, so I had to make a separate purchase. This being my first omelette pan, I made a naive decision and bought one that matched the rest of my pots. Stainless steel sticks to things. Things like omelettes.

There are a few ways around this of course: lots of oil, non-stick spray, etc. The traditional method is “seasoning” the pan, which I decided to try. I found some instructions here and went at it. Excited to try out my newly seasoned pan, I chopped up some onions, peppers, and cheese, tossed them into the pan with some eggs, and promptly scraped my sticky sticky omellete out of the pan. Upon further research, you can’t season stainless steel. Bummer.

Guess I’ll go buy one of those new-fangled carbon steel ones instead.

For those that don’t know, I’ll give you a little of my educational background. I left high school with 32 AP credits (which can be applied toward college credit). When choosing a university, the acceptance rate of those credits toward my degree was among my criteria. It’s expensive to go to school out of state, and minimizing my post-college debt was important to me. At that point, a $30,000/yr price tag was too much for me to fathom. I ended up choosing the University of Michigan, which happened to meet all my criteria, AP credits included.

I carefully planned my schedule so that I could get my B.S.E. in 3 years, with plans for a M.S.E. in 4-4.5. I succeeded and graduated with honors in 3 years. Along the way I had the opportunity to work for Amazon and Apple, two very well-known companies in the world of computer science. At Apple, on the south end of Silicon Valley, my entrepreneurial inner child was getting restless. Coming back from WWDC (apple’s huge developer conference), I ran into one of the engineers at my current company (YouNoodle), we hit it off, and I decided to ditch grad school and come to work full time. That’s the synopsis, but let’s rewind a little.

When I think back on college, a few things stick out in my mind. The first is my ex-girlfriend, then my friends, my fraternity, and lastly my schooling.

It was the beginning of freshmen year, a time of trepidation and excitement for all the new people on campus. It’s the first time many are living outside the shelter of their parents roof, and the best part is: nobody knows anyone. At least, that was the best part for me. Everyone was desperate to make friends. You could walk up to anyone and they would actively try to find something in common with you—I wish everyone was like that all the time. The University groups would make you play dumb games to get to know one another, and everyone went along with it because they didn’t have any better ideas. It worked. Most of the people I still keep in touch with I met freshmen year. One of these silly events was also where I met Marie. It was a scavenger hunt on North Campus, to help show us the lay of the land. We were to divide ourselves into groups of 10, and hastily follow the clues to reach some unknown prize. Everyone looked at each other stupidly. When nobody knows anyone, how could they divide themselves up? Having little patience for this, my expert leadership skills kicked in and I went to grab the list of clues. I then pointed arbitrarily at 9 others nearby, and said they were on my team. We were one of the first teams to get started… Anyway, Marie was in this group, and I suppose she was taken with my arbitrary decision making ability and stunning good looks, so she came to talk to me as we wandered around North Campus trying to figure out in what year some building was built, among other things. I don’t remember what we talked about, but that was when we met. After that, I saw her playing frisbee outside our dorms, got her phone number and things started rolling. Sometimes even in the mud.

We had a great time for probably 2.8 of our 3 years together. I had commitment issues. Stereotypical, I know. I didn’t know w

hat I wanted to do with my life, much less who was going to be in it forever. I learned a lot about relationships though—that was my first long term one. At the same time, I feel like having the same girlfriend all through college stifled my social life. I have more high school friends than I can count, and gained more confidants there than I have appendages. From college, I have uncountable acquaintances, a few friends, and less than a handful of confidants. My high school had 1200 people and my college had 40,000. How the hell does that happen? Long term girlfriend, that’s how. If our relationship had worked out, I wouldn’t have traded more close friends (or anything, really) for it. But it didn’t. My advice: take advantage of the early social atmosphere. Make friends. Stick your hand in many honey pots—how you interpret this particular juicy metaphor depends on your style. I didn’t mean for it to be (that) dirty, so get your mind out of the gutter.

Like leaving anywhere I’ve been for a long time, I’m going to miss my friends the most. From cookie baking in MoJo to offering a shoulder to cry on, my friends got me through college. No question.

I worry about my college friends the most though. College isn’t my home town. I may not go back that often. When I do, will they be there? Some of them probably will; many people never really leave home. A lot of them were meant for bigger things though. I know people from college all over the country now, and that will only get worse as more of my friends graduate. I’ll have to try to coordinate visits with all the people I’ll miss most. You know who you are.

One of my favorite things to do on campus was to wander around and find all the little oddities that most people aren’t curious enough to even notice. There was this shed (later christened the love shack) on North Campus, right off of Fuller as you pull into North Campus along the bus route. The tip of the roof barely pokes out above the brush surrounding it. There were a few other artifacts inside and around the shack that all seem to once have had greater purpose. One in particular was memorable because Trey actually got inside it — we called it the man trap, because it bore a remarkable resemblance to a mouse trap. If it wasn’t completely overgrown and clogged, I might’ve worried more for his well-being.

The bar crawls were also memorable. Nothing beats a boot (yes, of beer), the free taco bar, and great company shooting the breeze at the Heidelberg.


Triangle, my fraternity, has a stated purpose of “Developing balanced men in engineering, architecture, and science by providing an environment which fosters personal growth and professional success.” It met those goals, but I had to help out. A lot. I was unsure about being “Greek” as any sane non-legacy should be. I was reassured by the state of my organization of choice. It was in its infancy. That meant I would be able to play a strong role in shaping its growth. During my 3 years there, I held a position every semester. I started at webmaster and worked my way up through the presidency and remained the general counsel beyond there. My thoughts and ideas touched every aspect of our organization: community service, university relations, pledge education, operational organization, parties, recruitment policies, etc. The things I’m most proud of are the recruitment policies. We go through the same “rush” process as the rest of the fraternities. And rush is not a misnomer — the historical origins of the term, while interesting, don’t help my point as much as the literal meaning — our campus has 4 days to appeal to, and decide between, anyone that may be interested in joining. Our fraternity is the only one that I know of that interviews its candidates. We put them on the spot, and ask hard questions. We figure out who’s there for the right reasons: brotherhood, self betterment, etc and immediately weed out the ones who are just there for our awesome parties (which we have, believe it or not). I don’t want our organization turning into just another frat. We’re More than a Fraternity®. As part of our pledge education, our members have required reading! I made them pick something from our “Leadership Library” which includes titles assembled from interfraternal leaders and alumni. It includes Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, and many many others. I found some of these books very interesting, and they sparked my passion for leadership and dealing with people. I hope it did the same for the pledges I taught. They probably hated it. Oh well, it was good for them. I can say things like that now. I’m their elder.

I was privileged enough to watch the fraternity grow up. When I joined, we had ~10 people, a tiny “house” that was really just where some of our guys lived, and we held our chapter meetings in the union. When I left, we had 52 people, a huge, awesome house, a steady growth rate, and about 100 times more awesomeness. I can’t wait to see how this fall’s rush goes. We’re nearing the point where we won’t need to recruit people—they’ll all come to us.


Lastly comes my schooling. Theoretically this is the most important part of college, but in practice that’s not true at all. Sure, I learned things, it even prepared me for my career reasonably well. I suppose, for what I paid, it should at least have done that. But really, the best part of a michigan education isn’t what I learned there (I could’ve done that anywhere), it’s the doors that network opened for me.

Michigan has the largest body of living alumni. That’s probably my favorite part of the school. Anywhere in the world, if I’m wearing a Michigan block “M” someone will yell “Go Blue!” It happens to me all over the states and in Europe as well. By graduating from Michigan’s engineering school (which was top ten in every degree it offered while I was there), I was able to get interviews from any company I wanted. Once my foot was in the door, I just had to show I was competent, and job offers flowed right in. There will be a few professors that I’ll miss, but I didn’t get to spend enough time with any to build long-lasting relationships. Despite that, they managed to show me some of the advantages of academia. There is something quixotically appealing about academic research that I regret missing out on. The “real world” is so deadline or profit driven that it’s hard to justify research that, while intellectually stimulating, may not pay off. I’m hoping to find something interesting enough to work on that it will almost be like an idealistic university research project. My current company should be able to offer me that kind of opportunity, and I’m excited to explore what it might be.

It’s past my bedtime. G’night!