Allow me to reintroduce myself.

February 6th, 2009

It’s been a few years since I quit writing for my own personal weblog. A combination of busy-ness with graduate school, boredom, and the lack of anything interesting to write about led me to abandon blogging.

Since I’m picking blogging up again, I figured now might be a good time to reintroduce myself to the curious souls out there. Quite a lot has happened since my last blog entry and in many respects, this is a fresh start for me.

Presently, I am a graduate student on my way out of graduate school, leaving a doctoral program with a master’s degree. I like to think of it as “failing forward“. I’m not being forced out of the program by anyone in it, rather, I decided late last year that the whole “publish or perish” rat race wasn’t for me and I’d rather be judged by the things I build rather than a curriculum vitae stuffed with papers that only a small group of people will ever read. I enjoy my research and the pursuit of learning, but the academic environment wasn’t really the right place for me to build and innovate in the way that works best for me.

Since making that decision to leave the academy, I have been furiously bootstrapping a new business that will (hopefully) support me once the graduate stipend disappears in June. I’m calling the company Audacious Software and my goal for the venture is to build a company that thrives by creating and delivering software products that do something novel and useful for their users. Presently, I am focusing my efforts on creating and marketing a home automation platform called Shion that builds upon some of my research work at Northwestern University.

Outside of school and the office, my wife and I have also been learning the ins-and-outs of raising a puppy. The rascal’s name is Scotty and he guarantees that no waking hour at home passes without some sort of new challenge. In addition to raising a puppy, I’ve also begun to learn how to play a musical instrument after years of wondering how music is made.

If this sounds like a lot to be doing on any given day, it is. I have a knack for underestimating how much time and effort will ultimately be required for a given project — starting a business and raising a puppy have not been exceptions. It’s been a few weeks since I’ve had a decent block of time to level my night elf druid and my Netflix discs have remained unopened since arriving late last year.

I bitch and moan quite a bit about having too much to do, but truth be told, I’m enjoying (almost) every minute of it. My stress levels and running around may have reached record highs, but it’s liberating knowing that each action I take brings me closer to my end goal, a topic that I may explore on this blog in the future.

So, if I’m so busy, why start up a new weblog? A couple of reasons:

1. I would like a richer channel to communicate with friends and family. Facebook & Twitter are nice, but I also like having a space where I can throw a couple of hundred words toward a topic that interests me from time to time.

2. I don’t anticipating having too many opportunities to do serious writing in the near future, and I’d like to keep the gears greased for those times when I need to pound out some text for my business or other endeavors on short notice.

3. I would like some record of this period in my life and my handwriting’s far too gone for me to seriously contemplate starting a written journal. My long term memory can be quite selective, and I’d like to use this space as a place to record what I’m doing now for future reference.

All in all, this weblog will be mostly a mixture of vanity, irrelevance, and bloviating, but I do think that a few useful nuggets will slip in from time to time. I’m looking forward to having some fun with this and connecting with new and old friends alike.

Thanks for stopping by.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 5:53 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to “Allow me to reintroduce myself.”

1. Jo Vermeulen says:

   February 6, 2009 at 5:10 pm

   Hi Chris,

   Sorry to hear that grad school didn’t work out for you. I wish you the best of luck in your next endeavors!
2. Chris says:

   February 6, 2009 at 5:17 pm

   Grad school was great in that I had a wonderful supporting advisor, a great group of fellow students to work with and a nurturing environment for doing some interesting work. The problem (for me) was that the career path after graduate school wasn’t too appealing.

   I’ll probably write a more in-depth post that describes why I chose to leave (especially in this wretched economy) and explain my thinking in more detail than the short blurb above.

   Thanks for writing and best of luck in your own work. I hope that the HCII conference came together well.
3. Jo Vermeulen says:

   February 6, 2009 at 5:38 pm

   I think it’s important to be able to enjoy your work, today and ten to twenty years from now. So if your choice of leaving grad school takes you a step forward to that goal, then it’s the right path to follow in my opinion. Phew, I’m getting philosophical :-)

   You’re welcome. The HCII paper got accepted and there are quite a few interesting papers in the session on human behavior modeling, thanks for asking!

   Anyway, good luck with your company and who knows, our paths might cross again someday :-)
4. Patti says:

   February 7, 2009 at 9:57 am

   Welcome back! I miss seeing you on campus (or on the L!) and I’m hoping we’ll get to hear all about your new adventures on the blog. :)