General

Over the last two weeks, I have been feeling a strong wave of nostalgia, strangely.  I suppose it was because my last day at my current workplace was almost exactly 2 years from when I started, to the day.  The weather and situation almost matched exactly.  Thus, I had spent a lot of time reminiscing.  I especially compared my mindset from two years ago to my mindset now.  I also considered how far I've gone in the past two years (looking back, I've been almost exactly the same).  If anything, I've regressed in terms of my spiritual pursuit.  This was the primary reason I had decided that I needed a change in pace, a fresh environment, to shake me out of my funk.

Employment

I started at a new job last week, at Sabre.  They are a travel technology company, specializing in data dealing with air fare and scheduling.  In some ways, this move carried substantial risk.  I had moved from a higher-paying job and apparent job security into an internship for lower pay, no benefits, a long drive and no job security, in exchange for more "growth opportunity".  Interestingly, "growth opportunity" describes exactly my reason for leaving, but at the time, I did not know there was such a term.  I yearned to learn something new, to improve my skill set, and to advance in my career.  Those are all a part of this term.  Unfortunately, my previous workplace did not provide enough in any of those areas.  Of course, I will miss my old workplace.  There were nice people there, friends that I have made, whom I will miss.  I am pretty sure that I may have been able to stay at my previous workplace, and could have figured out another way to pursue all three goals of mine, because my previous workplace was very flexible and accommodating.  But, I was not sure how, and I was sure that I needed drastic change.  Perhaps out of desperation is the best way to describe why I did what I did.  In a few years, I will again look back, and consider whether this was the right move.

Vacation

Over the Memorial Day weekend, I visited Seattle, for an interview with Amazon.  That was a humbling experience.  There's a Chinese saying which goes something like, "One mountain is taller than another mountain" - meaning that there is always someone better out there than you.  My visit to Seattle really impressed me with that point.  My interviewers were smart, to say the least (of course, they came up with the questions, so I would assume they had a very good answer).  They could see what I was doing pretty quickly, without much explanation - something that I don't see often.  Regardless, I had fun, especially thinking about solutions and algorithms for the challenging questions they asked.  I was well-accommodated.  The whole time, though, I wondered whether it was a good thing to live in such comfort.

So, that pretty much sums up what's been happening in the last few weeks.  In many ways, this past week marked a new start, a new beginning.  I will try to make the best out of it.