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Commencement

Posted In: Academic — May 7, 2008 @ 10:56 pm — Peter

Last weekend was Spring commencement at Regis. It was a lovely ceremony and the weather turned out to be perfect despite a gloomy forecast. Believe it or not, I got a bit of redness on my face from the intense Colorado sun. There are a few loose ends to wrap up before I’m officially a “graduate”, but no reason not to celebrate now A big THANK YOU to everyone that supported me during the journey through graduate school!

The ceremony was a wee bit long for Amelia, she said “all done”.

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First Day of School!

Posted In: Amelia, Academic, Everyday life — April 7, 2008 @ 11:49 pm — Stephanie

Today marked yet another milestone Amelia has reached–her first day of school and her first time ever left with someone who isn’t family. Although her school is walking distance from our house, policy for the first week dictates we drive so that we have a quick exit in case there is separation anxiety. And there was plenty of that—but not on Amelia’s part. Nope, it was Mama who was in tears as we pulled away from the school. Amelia? She ran straight into the schoolyard with her teachers and classmates and never looked back. One of her teachers, seeing my obvious anxiety, was sweet enough to give me a call of reassurance. Mia was doing great, playing independently and was in good spirits. Such a relief to hear!

While I was thrilled she was doing so well, let’s just say that my eyes never strayed too far from the clock. Was she missing me? Calling for me at the door? At 4:30, it was time to pick her up. We get there and we don’t even get as much as a hello! In fact, she straight up refused to come with us. She was busy playing with this darling little blond boy. We had to stay until his mom came to pick him up and then little stinker followed him towards his car. So much for her desperately missing Mommy! :/

She stayed dry and used the potty like a pro. Absolutely NO problems. She had a blast, and I feel a lot better about her going again tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow I’ll even do something with my free time other than stay home, clutching my mobile phone, with my eyes firmly trained on the clock…

Without further ado, here’s our little schoolgirl!

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I’m done! Well, not quite…

Posted In: Academic, Everyday life — December 21, 2007 @ 10:43 am — Peter

The grades are in and I couldn’t be happier. It was a rough past 8 weeks but I manged to pull off a couple more A’s to boost my GPA to 3.900, the lowest possible point to graduate with high honors, Summa Cum Laude. The idea of graduating with honors is totally foreign to me. While I won’t air the dirty laundry about my undergraduate GPA, lets just say I was nowhere close to honors.

I say I’m done, but I do have this pesky thesis to tend to yet. The plan is to take the next 8 weeks to select a topic, draft a proposal and then get a considerable amount of the research and documentation done. The following 8 weeks will be used for wrapping up the thesis document and preparing for presentation and defense. Should all this go as planned, I’ll be graduating on May 3rd 2008.

Here is my final grade report sans the row that represents my completed thesis.

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Stay the course

Posted In: Academic — October 10, 2007 @ 10:03 pm — Peter

After a ~5 month break from the Regis MSCIT program, I’ll be returning to class October 22nd. I’m veering off the plan since once of my intended electives is unavailable this term. I resisted the urge to take another advanced software engineering course and instead booked myself for two management oriented courses. One of the courses requires use of Microsoft Project. This will be an interesting use of virtual machine software since my primary computer is now a MacBook Pro.

Tonight I had some time to scope out the required texts and first night assignments. Regis works on an 8 week term length with an assignment due the first night of class. Five books total, one I already have. Tallying up the total via Amazon.com, $250! I didn’t budget for this at all and was not looking forward to shaving money from other expenses. Before ordering, I collected the ISBNs and pumped them into the Prospector interlibrary loan system. Could I get any luckier?!? All the books were available and will be arriving at Regis library in a couple days. With any luck I’ll keep them for the 21 days + 1 renewal period and not have to shell out any cash for texts this term.

Time to hit the books!

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Burning down the house!

Posted In: Academic, Work life, Everyday life — May 15, 2007 @ 9:15 pm — Peter

Things got pretty exiting around the Motyka household last night as we (I) had an incident with a pan of flaming oil in the kitchen. Long story short, everything is fine, nothing caught fire (other than cooking oil), but we had a visit from the Denver fire department just to spot check and give piece of mind that the fumes in the house were not dangerous. Despite a request for a discrete arrival to the fire department dispatcher, trucks showed up with flashing lights and squealing sirens. I learned some valuable lessons, hopefully if something like this should happen again, I’ll be better prepared.

In other news, tomorrow (5/16) is my last day as a full time employee at Fiserv ISS. There are some people I will really miss, thankfully I’ll still be working downtown and will make an effort to do lunch with friends on occasion. There is a not-a-going-away-party happy hour tomorrow from 4pm-6pm at Wynkoop Brewery, do come if you’d like to share a few beers with me.

On 5/21 I start work with Ping Identity Corporation. This is an exiting opportunity for me as it will be my first time working in a pure software/technology environment. Being a smaller, agile company, I’ll certainly be spending more time focused on challenging technology assignments instead of wading through process and bureaucracy. More to come as I get acquainted with Ping.

I wrapped up another two classes at Regis on 4/29 which puts me at the 3/4 mark, 27 of 36 credits. One of the classes was graded with a pass/fail mark and I passed! The other class, I earned an A-. The A- was disappointing, but thankfully it didn’t jeopardize my chances of graduating with honors. I’m really exited to have started my thesis project. When I have some time, I’ll post a detailed entry about the topic. In the mean time, a brief summary: A methodology for assessing open source software solutions for use in non-profit environments. A major component of the project will be a case study performed at Maxfund Animal Shelter. The case study is getting off to a slow start as I’ve spent most of my time fulfilling other requirements of the thesis process. Instead of taking more classes over the summer, I’m going to focus on the case study to avoid managing this while preparing other aspects of the project. Here is a snapshot of my progress in the MSCIT program so far:

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