One year ago today...

At this time a year ago, I was probably sitting in the barber's chair getting a haircut for my wedding that evening. I had left my job of four years at Northwestern University's Academic Technologies a few days before and I had been spending the days between leaving the job and the wedding meeting people at airports, shuttling them around the city, and helping out where I could with the wedding and honeymoon plans.

After the wedding, Holly and I spent two weeks in Scotland exploring places like Edinburgh and Loch Ness. David and Christine were gracious hosts during the last half of our trip, and I'm still trying to repay that favor whenever I can.

After Scotland, we returned to Chicago. Holly went back to work at the law firm and I began digging in my heels for the summer Oyez rebuild. A couple of months later, I attended my graduate school orientation and school began shortly after. I really had no idea what to expect from graduate school and the last year has been one giant learning curve. I picked up the gist of social constructionism, directly observed daily life in a "publish or perish" institution, and wrote my first machine learner.

Life has been a roller-coaster since then and last week, I turned in the last papers of my first year. I'll be plenty busy over the summer, but for a few days at least, I have some room to breathe. I've been inspired by Matt Wood's return to blogging and I'm planning on making a more concentrated effort at keeping this space up to date.

To kick things off, I'm planning on posting a few retrospective posts on the last year and the lessons learned. (I also changed the name of the blog to "Aetherial Vox" to shake things up a bit.) In the next few days, I'll a few posts on life in a top-tier research institution (and it's not all flowers and candy), the gulf between practice and theory (research), married life, future plans and goals, and some other related topics. So, stay tuned (all three of you).