If I had only one word to describe the past year, it would be: tumultuous.

So many things, good things, have happened this year, meriting this small attempt at making note of some of them. Without further ado, here is the tale of 2002.

In January, I was still a student at Ohio State University, enrolled in the second half of my Senior Design course. Our project was to build a computer-operated interface to a standard, remote-controlled car. My contribution was in the sensors section, where I built an embedded sensor board with temperature, acceleration, and GPS measurement capabilities, hooked onto a wireless transmitter. I was not getting very much sleep by the end of the quarter, but I did turn over some kick-ass embedded code.

Much of Winter Quarter was simply dealing with the freezing temperatures and the engineering workload. 

Spring Break rolled around, and I went on a trip with our IEEE student section to Fermi Labs and Argonne National Labs. Funny that they put high-energy physics labs in the sleepy suburbs of Chicago.

Spring Quarter was beautiful. And heart-wrenching. A delightful irony presented itself. Naturally, the powers that be would wait until my final quarter to suddenly bring to my attention two girls that I could fall for. Ah well. Documenting my life through pictures, I purchased a digital camera which arrived on April 23rd, 2002; very many of the photographs on this site come from it. 

I spent a lot of time consoling myself (nope) at Buckeye Donuts. 

In May, I was selected to participate in the Washington Internship for Students of Engineering (WISE), a ten week long program in Washington, DC dedicated to introducing engineers to the world of public policy. Tuned to the semester system, the program let me out of OSU a full two weeks earlier than the normal end of our quarter.

Washington was a blast. I signed up for a Japanese language course and met two of these three monkeys. 

It was exciting to learn a bit about how government (doesn't) works, and to enjoy the Fourth of July in the nation's capital. I met a lot of good people, and discovered a lot of the city on my bike. My friends Nishanta and Gabe came down for a visit over the Fourth, which was cool.

Over the course of the summer, I managed to take four trips of my own. The first was for the wedding of my cousin in Chicago. The second was the trip that we took as a group to North Carolina, with barbecue, beach, and sunshine. (And skinny dipping, whoa!) Seeing the sun rise over the ocean was awesome. The third was my clandestine jaunt up to New York City to attend the Hackers On Planet Earth 2K2 Conference (and to watch Les Miserable and have an incredible Italian dinner). The last was my abduction by Nishanta and Brieanne back to Ohio, for an extended week and a half visit, which was really cool. 

At the end of the WISE experience, I moved my gear into a storage unit and flew back to Cleveland. My brother and I painted four rooms in his house and generally just farted around playing his XBox (evil). At the same time, we made sure that my Subaru was in ship shape (it was except for the radiator), and I started preparing for my run to the West Coast.

I spent another week in Columbus, catching up with people and getting more gear ready to go. One more day in Beavercreek, in the house that I grew up in just before my parents sold it. I stopped by one final time on the way out to see Gilbert in Indiana, threw my darts at a map, and...

..split a few days later and drove to Madison, Wisconsin, hopping into the Youth Hostel there for a night. It felt good to be on the road, driving through states that I had never been through before. There is something to the way we travel, that I find disturbing. We hop into airplanes and zoom through the skies, setting down a few hours later, in completely different locations and cultures. But we do this in a point-to-point fashion, in a way that loses the effect of distance and time. In some sense, by entering the plane, and staying stationary in our seats, we ourselves, only move a few miles from our point of origin, our homes or hotels. The plane moves for us. And when we step off the plane, we lose the sense of geographical scale that something like driving makes us aware of. I'd been to Seattle and the West Coast before, long ago when I was a wee lad. But we'd gone there in a plane, and it had been at night. Lately, I'd been wondering whether our country is actually one contiguous piece of land, one that could be driven across, or was our country, and indeed all the nations of the planet, were they all just islands that we flitted between on jetliners when we felt like? Were my maps all simulacrum, copies without an original, or did the real thing exist?

The real thing exists, and I drove across it. There were a few scattered names I had in my address book, but mostly just road and National Parks between me and the Pacific Ocean. On September 5th, I reached the West Coast at Newport, Oregon. In less than two months, I was able to dip my feet in water on both sides of the United States!

Down the coast to San Francisco, east to the Grand Canyon, I hauled 1500 miles in 3 days and stopped to visit a friend at UArkansas. Then UIUC. Then Ball State. Then Purdue. (September 20)

A few days before Autumn Quarter was to begin, I drove back to Washington, extracted some of my more useless/unused items, and drove them back to Cleveland. By the end of my Coast-to-Coast adventure, I logged over 10,000 miles on my 15 year old car.

During Autumn Quarter, I worked as a Research Associate at the New America Foundation, a centrist policy think tank in Washington. And as of December 1st, I was hired on in the same capacity, and will be working for them until the end of May, 2003.

I'm looking forward to the new year and all of the crazy adventures to come. I look forward to meeting you.

Merry Christmas. Feliz Navidad. Buon Natale. 2002. enter