jake.marttinen

Three more weeks <3.

Marko really does have some awesome roommates: Mark’s girlfriend Erin made us fajitas and a pie over the course of the week, and I woke up Saturday morning to the delicious smell of Mark making bacon and pancakes for breakfast. However, it was sadly my last morning in Maryland so Marko and I loaded up the Volvo after breakfast, met up with Peter Denny, and hit the road at noon.

After a few snack stops, jamming out to the TRON soundtrack, and some squished legs (I was crammed in the back bench with my boxes), we arrived in Manhattan at around 2:30. We got extremely lucky and managed to snake a parking spot a hundred feet from my door. We headed up to grab the keys and meet my new roommate for the first time, quickly moved my things upstairs (three flights), and then headed out to explore a bit and find some food. About five minutes later, we found ourselves at the South Street Seaport. Marko bought a spy video alarm clock :p, we grabbed a late BBQ lunch at Heartland Brewery, then found some coffee at Jack’s Stir Brew Coffee. I already love Jack’s; they make a latte that very nearly compares to Dark Horse in Toronto. We wandered around for a bit more, then Marko and Peter were on their way.

I spent the rest of the day unpacking and settling into the new place. The room is fairly small, but it’s cozy and I like how it feels. The apartment has roughly the same square footage as my Toronto place, although the layout is not quite as efficient. The room came furnished with a double bed, as well as a small closet, shelf, and glass-topped desk. My screen is just the right size for the room, and I still have plenty of desk space to use for work if need be. Overall, I’m pretty pleased with the place! It’s in a nice location, there’s a decent gym right around the corner and a cheap grocery store a block away, the waterfront is minutes away, and I have rooftop access!
My vacation had to end some time though, and I dragged myself out of bed at 7:00 this morning for my first day of work. Getting to work is relatively easy: it’s a few minutes walk to the subway, then five stops to my exit. And the train is cheap compared to Toronto! $2.25 a ride, and discounts for loading up a MetroPass. I didn’t have to get up quite so early for work though, as the doors were all still locked at 9:00 and Zahid (my mentor) didn’t show up until after 10:00. In the meantime, I checked out the 9th floor office (desks for less than 20 people all in an open-concept space, with three small meeting rooms at the back), grabbed coffee with the CTO, and started setting up my laptop. Once Zahid arrived, the rest of the day consisted of setting up my laptop (I’ll just be using my MacBook Air) and teaching myself Node.js. Lunch was at PotBelly’s with Zahid, Rahul (another 4A from UW), and Lee, after which we checked out the Union Square farmer’s market. I was glad to find out that my hours will be pretty low-key (usually 10:00-6:00) and that everyone in the office seems really friendly/cool.

On the way home, I stopped at the local gym (Chinatown Sports Club) and signed up for a membership ($149 for six months!), then spent the rest of the evening unwinding with some Game of Thrones and Mad Men. The rest of the week will be spent settling in: getting into a workout routine, finding where to do laundry, get a haircut, and buy deli meat, and getting comfortable with waking up earlier than people normally should. I definitely like New York so far though; it really is just a bigger, grungier version of Toronto.

(On a sidenote: I finally got all my marks back and came out with a 78% average. I’m happy with that; Quantum and Graphics kicked my ass but I managed to pull a 73 and a 76 respectively in them. One more term to go!)

So much for my relaxing week off.

After sleeping in and grabbing a late breakfast on Tuesday, I had just started watching the latest episode of Game of Thrones when Marko called me. He said he had to go to Attleboro, Massachusetts for work, and asked if I wanted to join him on a mini road trip. As I had zero plans, I threw some stuff in a bag, and we were on the road towards the Hampton Inn in Providence, Rhode Island within a half-hour. (Slightly related, and proof that Jersey Shore is ruining our society: We grabbed Popeye’s for dinner on the way up and the cashier was a black guy with a bleached blonde blowout.) We got to Providence around 11:30 (it was a six hour drive), grabbed some pizza, then crashed early in the extremely comfy accommodations.

Marko was already gone when I woke up, so I headed out to tour the city. The hotel was conveniently right downtown Providence, so I grabbed Starbucks, checked out the gorgeous riverfront, and then began wandering the city. At around noon, I found myself in a gorgeous and massive Catholic Cathedral. However, a priest appeared from nowhere and I suddenly found myself in the middle of a service so I booked it out of the place. I checked out the Johnson & Wales campus later on and met a Sarah Stone who gave me a personal tour of the (tiny) campus. Afterwards, I grabbed some soup for a late lunch and then headed across the river and up the hill to check out the Brown University campus (gutters of the Ivy Leagues, according to Peter :p). However, it soon started raining and my feet were tired so I headed into a Starbucks for a coffee. Marko was soon finished work and we were on the road again, back to Maryland.

While I was in Providence, Tony Tang (a fellow UW mathie who I had met once before :p) messaged me saying that he was going to be taking the Megabus down to Washington D.C. for a few days and that I should head down to tour for a bit with him. I headed down in the old BMW on Thursday morning, picked Tony up from the bus terminal at around noon, and headed to Panera to grab some lunch and plan our day. We then found some convenient free parking near the National Mall and began to walk around: we checked out the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, White House, grabbed some Starbucks, sat outside the U.S. Capitol for a bit, then went and drove along Embassy Row. Tony was going to be staying at his friend Ben’s parents’ place near American University so we grabbed a quick dinner at an Irish Pub near Ben’s place (Ben coincidentally also goes to UW, for nanotechnology engineering).

We had a delicious fish and chips dinner and watched the Ottawa-Rangers Game 7. When we went back to the car to leave however, the key broke off in the driver’s door. My phone also conveniently had a dead battery so Tony and I headed back to the pub to start calling locksmiths. It seems that no locksmith wants to touch a BMW, but we finally found one who would. After working to get the key out of the door for nearly two hours, the locksmith admitted defeat. After denying that he knew how to hotwire a car, the kind Jamaican man drove us to Ben’s place where we tried to figure out what to do next. As the car was on a heavy commuter street (it was a tow-away zone from 7:00-9:30am), we had to move the car by morning. Sam had a spare key, but it was all the way up in Aberdeen. Ben’s mom finally agreed to drive us up to meet Marko and Sam halfway (roughly Baltimore) to get the spare key. After a bit of a fiasco meeting up with the guys (the result of a dead cellphone and no phone numbers), I finally got the car running and headed home to Aberdeen.

Friday ended up being a lazy day; Marko was home sick (and managed to work his way through at least ten episodes of Game of Thrones) so cleaned up a bit and made some chocolate chip cookies in an attempt to thank Sam for his amazing hospitality (A man asked if I was Marko’s son at the grocery store; there isn’t quite that much of an age difference!). We went for a walk in the woods behind Sam’s place in the afternoon, and saw some kittens hanging out with some sheep and their baby lambs. I headed up to Elkton in Marko’s Volvo wagon later in the evening to hang out with Hailey, Kat, Aimee, and Alyssa for a bit, and then headed back to Aberdeen for my last night in Maryland.

Even though I started out wishing I had stayed in Waterloo for a few more days, I know I wouldn’t have had nearly as good a time as I did in Maryland. It was awesome to get to know Sam, Mark, Erin, and Tony, hanging out with Marko made for some great times, and I got to see some cool places that I had never imagined visiting. But my brief vacation is now over, and it’s time to move on to Manhattan to continue my adventures!

Karl and I pulled into Marko’s place at 5:30am on Saturday. The driveway was full up with about a dozen cars, so we weren’t sure it was the right place. The door was open though, so we walked in and start looking for signs of Marko. There were signs of Finnish culture around and a mattress on the floor in the living room, so we just laid down and passed out.

We woke up around noon on Saturday to absolutely perfect weather. With sun and high 20s and just the right amount of breeze, Marko decided it was the perfect weather for a day in Baltimore. After breakfast on the patio, we headed down to the Baltimore Inner Harbour area.

Baltimore feels like a coastal Detroit: mustas everywhere, run-down buildings everywhere, and just an overall depressing vibe. It’s certainly beautiful in it’s own way though. The harbour was bursting with life and colour, tourist central. Old military ships and submarines were docked everywhere, but they charged an arm and a leg for tours. After getting some (expensive, but delicious) frozen custard from a stand on the docks, we grabbed Starbucks and chilled on their upstairs patio for an hour or so.

After a while, we headed over to Nicholas Hiivala’s place at the edge of West side Baltimore (so sketchy, crackheads everywhere). The house was beautiful: an old row house completely redone on the inside, with three long, skinny, tall floors and a rooftop patio overlooking the city. I would absolutely love to live in a place like that, perhaps downtown Toronto or Minneapolis. Nich’s girlfriend Marissa was at work (Two Boots Pizza), so the four of us headed in for a pizza (The Bird, chicken and jalapeño) and to pester her for a bit. The beautiful weather couldn’t last forever though, and midway through dinner the sky cracked and the rain came pouring down. After dinner, we trekked through the rain to check out the graffiti walls by the train tracks behind MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art), then to One World Coffee for some caffeine and dessert. Driving through the night has the unfortunate side effect of utter exhaustion though, so we headed back to Marko’s in Aberdeen and called it an early night.

Sunday was depressingly gloomy; I don’t think it stopped raining for a minute. Not much adventure went down, basically just a visit to Starbucks, a wander around the mall, Chipotle for dinner, then hangouts at Morgan Granger’s place for a bit with a fire and strong black coffee.

I finally got myself a local SIM card. T-Mobile was the best bet for me; AT&T is the only other GSM provider in the States, and the general consensus online is that their service is generally sketchy in NYC. My plan is unlimited everything for $60/month, with the first 2GB being at “4G” speeds. I added on an extension of my calling and messaging to Canada for $10/month as well. T-Mobile doesn’t have the greatest customer service though. When I first set up my number, the guy told me that Jacob was “pretty much his favourite name ever”, with Elliot being a close second (lucky me :s). Later on, when I tried to look up “boogie” on urbandictionary, I got the message that WebGuard was enabled on my account and inappropriate sites such as UrbanDictionary would be blocked. A phone call to customer service didn’t fix anything, as they needed to confirm my age via my Social Security number and its associated address (of which there was none, as I got my Social Security card when I lived in Canada). I had to head in to the store to get the block removed.

I’ll basically just be hanging out around Maryland until next weekend. Marko’s roommate Sam loaned me the keys to his old E30 BMW (1990 325i) for the week, so today I just ripped around the local twisties and explored the beautiful state of Maryland. Marko said I might be able to head into Environics for the rest of the week and work for a bit, so I’ll most likely take the opportunity to keep busy and make a few extra bucks.

Even though I haven’t made it to New York City yet, this adventure is already amazing .

It just hit me: nothing will ever be the same again.

Counting down the days until leaving to New York, saying goodbye to Anna, even packing up my clutter accumulated over the past three years, none of it really made feel that much; everything still felt relatively normal. But moving out of the Shakespeare Manor earlier today suddenly made it all real. 237 Shakespeare has been my home for the past three years, and even though the house will be around for one final term without me, it’s the end of a chapter in my life. I still have one more school term to go (Winter 2013), but it will in no way compare to the memories of the past few years. Kory’s graduated and off to the real world, and most everyone else will finish up some time in the next eight months as well. Ben and I will surely find an awesome apartment for my last term, but it won’t be the same. Throughout all the goodbyes however, the prospects of living and working in New York City are keeping me happy.

The past few weeks have been a flurry of preparation. Final projects for graphics and quantum turned into final exams, and working through the seemingly endless list of tasks required for packing up and leaving for NYC only added to the stress. Renewing my Visa, notifying OHIP of my absence, doing taxes, changing mailing addresses, unlocking my cellphone, packing up everything not going to New York for storage, securing an apartment, the list of things to do seemed insurmountable. I’ve never been so glad to have an American passport; I can only imagine the headache a visa application would add. I did manage to get most everything done though, and I wrote my final exam this morning (PSYCH 306), grabbed coffee with Kory and Melissa one last time, packed the rental car full of my clothes and electronics, and hit the road around 8:00pm.

It’s currently 2:30am and Karl and I are cruising through the beautiful mountains of Pennsylvania. We’re finally back on the road after stopping for a 45 minute nap in a gas station parking lot, and Karl’s pretty convinced he’ll be good to press through the final 300km to Marko’s place in Aberdeen, Maryland (probably because he just slammed a Red Bull and a bag of corn nuts). Karl will be heading back to Canada on Monday, but I don’t get the keys to my apartment (31 Oliver Street, in Manhattan) until the 27th so I’ll be hanging out in Maryland for the week. Peter will be driving me the two hours to NYC on Friday, and then the real excitement starts. My new job as an Entrepreneurial Hacker at Peek starts on the 30th, and settling into the new place, meeting the new roommate (KM), figuring out laundry and groceries, finding my way to work, setting up a bank, finding a decent gym, etc., will only add to the adventure.

My free time this term is already looking pretty booked. Osheaga with Calvin and Jeff (and hopefully a bunch more bros too) is August 3-5, Ben and the boys are hopefully coming down for May 2-4, Karl and Maija will be around for a few days in early June, I’m hoping to make weekend trips to Maryland at least once a month, and I’ll be heading back to Canada for a week in August. My weeknights will be filled with preparation for my full-time job hunt: getting my portfolio and website back on track, getting my Windows Phone app side project completed, and interview prep (research/study).

Well, my exhausted brain isn’t letting me write any more coherently. I promise I’ll make regular posts throughout the term, and pictures will be posted frequently to Facebook if anyone is interested. And please, everyone come visit me in New York; my door/couch will always be open to you .

Best birthday present.

http://consequenceofsound.net/2012/03/sigur-ros-to-release-new-album-valtari-in-may/

fun. can do no wrong:

Above & Beyond’s label Anjunabeats has really been finding some fresh new artists lately. Played at A&B’s show back in February, here’s a killer remix of Afterthought by Heatbeat:

An excellent article by Mat Honan, quirky and fun: http://gizmodo.com/5875243/

What a physical world we live in.

For whoever missed it, Lana Del Ray’s debut album came about today. Get it. Damn, that beautifully melancholy voice won’t stop echoing in my head.