At World's End

This first semester of blogging has finally drawn to a close. Another year is lost to the mists of time, the summer coalesces into reality, and my friends and I become Seniors. My apologies for not making these posts separate and sooner, but I've been remarkably busy the last week. It just means I have more to talk about now.

First up is the end of school. Spring semester 2008 is now over at Harvey Mudd College and that means us students are out to do whatever it is students do over the summer. In my case that means working in Pasadena. Before we get there, though, we have graduation! The seniors are leaving us for ever and ever until they come back to tell us how easy the rest of the world is, and we get to listen to Bill Nye the Science Guy give the commencement speech. Bill's a great speaker and now my class has to come up with someone better...I have no clue how we're going to magic that up. Side note: I swear, if you're gonna get a doctoral degree pick the school with the best robes. We've got some very colorful members among our faculty.

Graduation from Mudd occurs on a Sunday (often Mother's day) and students are required to vacate the dorms by 8:00 Monday morning. Thus Sunday night finds my roommate and I packing feverishly and wondering where all this crap came from and more importantly, where it all can possibly hide during the year -- you really settle into a place and don't realize how much stuff you have until it's time to pack it all away. Things also tend to be distressingly non-rectangular. Being the first time that I'm spending the entire summer not living at Mudd (frosh year I took Summer Math, so I stayed for the first 6 weeks and soph year I worked on Staff for the CS Department almost the entire time) this is the first time that I've actually had to pack everything. I'm moving (moved...) into my sister's apartment in LA for the next 11 (10) weeks, so everything must be packed up and everything must be moved or put in storage. Good thing Mudd provides a lot of storage options for us. You see there my room in a state of partial destrucion. Things certainly got worse before they got better. I hadn't thought to take any pictures of my new room/apartment until now and it's currently plunged into darkness, so that'll wait until the morning.

Finally, I started work last week! So far I'm enjoying it. Guidance Software does computer forensics; in the paraphrased words of my (Mudd alum!) boss: first the door-kickers go and kick in the door (doorknobs are out of style in today's world), they shoot a bunch of people and shout "Clear!" Then the detectives come in and shut down the computers in a forensically-sound manner, check the computers into evidence, check them back out, and take the hard drives out. The hard drives have write-blockers attached and the detectives use our software to make an image of the drives. The computers get checked back into evidence and finally the detective uses our software to search the drive images for whatever he or she is looking for (incriminating e-mails, pictures, documents) even in the unallocated disk space (deleted files and such). It's apparently incredible to see someone tear into a drive with this and my boss is hoping to get me into one of the training courses they offer because it's "Wicked cool."

In order to unlock all the features of the software so I can be a developer, they gave me a USB dongle. It's worth about $60,000.

~KMarsh


edit: Here are pictures of my apartment. The first is the living room/kitchen/dining room and the second is my room.