BlakeBrannon.com

Well it has been quite a while since my last post. I hope everyone had a great holiday break and is back in the swing of things for 2008. My life has changed quite a bit in the past month. I graduated from Georgia Tech, finished my DSRC research, started a job at Wandering WiFi, and moved into a new apartment. Things are busy, but it looks like a great 2008 already.

Georgia Tech Graduation

I graduated on Dec 14, 2007 with my Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering degree from Georgia Tech. Since it only took me one year to get my degree I would say it was well worth it! After my Bachelors degree, I said that I was looking forward to grad school to further my technical knowledge. Not the case. Although I worked as a research assistant for Dr. Mary Ann Ingram, I transitioned my career emphasis from technical engineering toward business management.

I still did some pretty cool research. My research consisted of throughput analysis for 802.11p wireless vehicle to vehicle communications. The main purpose of the research was to determine if a two channel allocation scheme is sufficient for US city grids, or if a three channel allocation should be considered. The may “research” in the project was the development of the analysis model used to calculate the throughput for overlapping WiFi BSS’s. If I get authorization, I will post the final paper.

Wandering WiFi

I started the new year with a new job. I am working for Wandering WiFi; a startup company in Atlanta that manages wireless networks, equipment, and devices. They monitor 36,000 hot spots across the US and are expanding fast. 2008 should be a good year for us.

I am working as a project manager/consultant. I took this job because of the immediate amount of responsibility and experience I would get. One of the biggest drawbacks of other companies that I looked at was the fact that they stuck you in a training program for the first few years, Yuck! Working for Wandering WiFi is a lot of work and at times very frustrating but I feel that the future benefits will far outweigh the hard work.

Moving to a New Apartment

Between graduating, finishing the research, going home for Christmas, we decided to move! For future reference, I would not recommend moving in the middle of finals week; it’s just chaotic.

We moved to the historic Baltimore block in downtown Atlanta. We are renting a penthouse apartment with a nice view of both the downtown area and midtown. Since the inside of our apartment is still under construction, Chrissy will not let me post any images. I’ll give you a few teaser photos of the outside.

Check back soon and we should have a new album for apartment photos. Oh and if you are in Atlanta, come stay with us, we have an extra room!

New for 2008

Well to start the year off, I got a new Mac! It was a gift from Apple; my older iMac G5 crapped out and thanks to the Apple Care, I ended up with a brand new iMac. Check back for a post about my experiences with Apple and my thoughts on the Intel platform.

Since I have started my job, my time is very limited. I hope however to continue to grow my site visitor base and to focus more on personal branding and creating original posts.

Overall 2007 was a great year and I don’t expect anything less for 2008.