I finished my semester (yay) and I am off to explore a few months of being able to do whatever I want.

I have some intriguing prospects. The coolest one so far is that I am communicating with the founder of an iOS start-up in Austria about going there for a month and completing my internship requirement. I am super excited about this possibility.

I am being offered a place to stay and help getting there, so if I can break even on my travel and living expenses I will consider that a great achievement.

I am starting to figure out what I am going to learn and how I would like to do so. My initial, not-thinking-things-through plan was to master Core Audio. This is still a large goal that I have that I want to work towards as quickly as possible.

But now I am thinking about what do I want to do with it. I also have interest and experience in graphics. This seems like a good opportunity to do Game Design. I know most people who do programming probably want to do Game Design. I am certain it is probably like my experiences in the Audio Recording industry where the cooler a certain career path is, the more sexist and intolerant it becomes.

I would like to design my own games. I have several ideas that I would like to implement. One that I had was far too advanced for me to do on my own and I had to figure out what I would do. I could go to someone about it and risk them taking the idea away from me and cutting me out of the process. I could talk to other people I eventually want to hire about co-owning the game with me, but I did not think that would go well. I eventually was able to formulate a less-complex version of what I wanted to do and I believe I can accomplish that on my own in the next year or so.

But where does that leave Core Audio?? I made a personal commitment to learning that this summer. I know that if I go chasing after every single whim and interest I have I won’t get anything done. I need to really figure out what I ultimately want to do so that I don’t waste this valuable time spreading myself in too many directions and accomplishing nothing.

Another fly in the ointment is my husband. He is under the assumption that since school is over I have no commitments and I am available to do stuff whenever he has a whim. We went to Star Trek Into Darkness on Friday morning because he took the day off. I don’t think he understands what I am trying to do.

That would not have been so bad had today not been so difficult. I felt like I hadn’t slept and I wound up taking two naps today because I felt exhausted. So I did no work on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. I made some progress in my C programming book today, but I feel like today was mostly a wash. I can have those days periodically, but if I am going to try and treat this as a real job, I can’t randomly spend my day playing Portal and napping with my dogs. I hope tomorrow works out better.

My progress through the Core Audio book is slow but steady. I completed the first two chapters. I could probably plow through them more quickly, but based on how hard it was to process the other information during the semester for iOS, I hesitate to go too fast through the book. I am trying to spend a few days on each chapter and go through them about two a week. The earlier chapters are probably easier, so I will reassess when I get further.

I thought I knew C pretty well, but there are a lot of commands I am using that I am not familiar with. I am going to go more in-depth with C while going through Core Audio.

I will give another update at some point soon since this is the first full week I have to myself.