There is an interesting enigma related to graduating. During the months preceding graduation, I was quite worried about the Rest Of Life, and what I would do with it. Once that became settled (for the next few years, at least), only a couple weeks before the end of the semester, I relaxed and stopped worrying about such things. Then summer arrived, and I realized I had no work lined up. Normally (in past years) I would have been worrying about what I would do with the summer. In a sense my perspective has been drawn further out. Now I feel old.
Right now it looks as though my summer will be spent working on an important (and rather nasty) porting project. Wings is a radio station automation system, in essence, a program that runs a radio station via predefined scheduling rules, satellite feeds, local recording, and recording other radio stations. My dad wrote it over a number of years, beginning in the mid 90's. It is currently in use in around 100 stations in countries from Eastern Europe to my own county. It was written to run under DOS, and never moved to windows because windows has never been stable enough to run for months at a time. The now-ancient Wings systems of the world are slowing fading out as finding hardware to support their then state-of-the-art abilities is no longer possible.
The job for the summer is to move Wings to the Linux operating system, thus allowing Christian radio stations around the world to keep using their radio stations with a mininum of expense and effort.
What does this mean for me? Its time to start coding in Linux, something I have yet to seriously attempt.
I have my worries, learning a new environment, attempting to mess with 10 year-old code, and being more useful than confused, but I also have hopes of doing something truly significant this summer. I could go back to painting walls with my old Spanish teacher, but this is probably more important.