Well, aren't I great at blogging? Since my last post I've decided to put Guatemala on hold (and then a few weeks later found out I didn't get the grant anyway). Now I have a foot-in-the-door type job with a company that I could potentially stay with for quite some time after graduating.

I'll soon be starting my second semester as an IST major. I'm deliberately slanting my electives towards Computer Science, so I've got learning Java on the menu in the coming months. I enjoyed learning Python last semester quite a lot, and I've even been chipping away at some of the problems on Project Euler over the summer. Hopefully the transition from Python to Java is gentle enough that I don't go too crazy. Then again, it seems I'm always overestimating the difficulty of my academics. I think I have pretty good excuses though. Last semester I was taking a more difficult math than I'd ever taken and learning my first programming language. I thought it was going to be a lot of work, so I ended only taking 13 credit hours instead of 16. Then it turned out that only one of those classes was very challenging. This semester, I'm still only taking 4 classes, but I'm having trouble even finding a fifth class that fits my schedule and meaningfully contributes to my degree. Maybe a calculus class at Pima? Then again, I'll probably be working more hours during the school year now. Hmm...

My new job has me working from home. I've set up a nice little nook with my work computer in it, and got myself an ergonomic chair that's tailored for tall people. I've also been riding my bike regularly in a way that could legitimately be considered a workout for the first time since last year's Tour de Tucson. My goal was to make it to the top of A Mountain without stopping by the end of June, and I made it about a week ago. On Thursday I completed the loop around the summit that contains about half of the climb two or three times before descending all the way to the bottom. Here's the statistics on a ride that looped the summit twice. Now I need to find a longer ride. I've been thinking about taking a shot at Gates Pass (that data is from me driving my car around my potential route). It'd be an incredibly beautiful ride, and there's not very much traffic, but there are also some pretty long stretches where there aren't any bike lanes. That's kind of scary. Anybody know any good west-side-of-Tucson bike paths that are suitable for a road bike?