7/29/08

So I have been back on the bike a few times in the past couple of weeks and starting to love it again. Mainly just the mountain bike since the fall season is coming up and I am getting a new one pretty soon.

My first stuff on eBay sold good and everything went smooth and it was all sent off within the next day of the auctions ending. So my second set of stuff is about to sell in 45 minutes and so far the results are looking good.

So today I upgraded my website to one that has an unlimited amount of pages because previously it only had a 5 page limit and I have been creating some more getting ready to post them up... so stay tuned!

Here are two links.. this one is for my profile on eBay which has all the items I have listed and my website at jtoka.com.

7/20/08

Nothing too spectacular has happened to me since the last time I posted except for opening up my first eBay account and posting a few items up there as well as buying some stuff. My first item to ever bid on was a 60 gallon bag of packing peanuts. It may seem like a whole bunch of packing peanuts but it really isn’t too big. The reason I decided I should buy them was because the cost of packing supplies can get really expensive depending on where you shop, and eBay has prices on everything that usually runs about $20 cheaper than at the stores.
My first wave of items that I am selling is a few bike items, such as a few chain rings, a cassette, a couple pairs of sunglasses and so forth. I’m actually having a lot of fun posting stuff and watching the price for the stuff I don’t want go up.
I’m still browsing around researching stuff I should do to earn money off the site and one idea I was thinking about is buying and selling bikes. Possibly buying complete bikes and piecing them out.

Read On...

Ok… so I have a quite a bit of time now to actually post something worthwhile as an update of my life lately rather than the quick little blurbs.

Since I didn’t really post anything all that great up during the school year I can give some insight of my freshman year of college as well as what happened to the cycling career that was going as good as it gets, and why it suffered, in addition to the direction my life is heading. This will be quite a long post, probably an epic, but it should be good and not get too boring, and since it’s on the fabulous internet it will always be here.

So last summer I got to arrange my schedule around and had it set up so I had a perfect Fall semester to be open for a nice long ride every day, and some days have double rides, as well as hit up the weekly club rides in San Antonio that they have to offer. I was enrolled at the University of Texas at San Antonio in the CAP (Coordinated Assist Program) which lets you go to the University of Texas at Austin, the big boy school, by meeting some standard criteria such as maintaining a 3.2 gpa and acquiring 30 credit hours during the freshman year. These are just a few of the expectations that were to be met, but the system is set up really sketchily in order to filter out the incompetent and leave them behind, which happens to about 75% of the people in the program, yet many people choose to opt out of the program because UTSA fits them.

Ok well back onto the bike subject. I thought it was going to be a perfect fit because San Antonio and West Texas offer the best riding anywhere within the Texas borders, so I had plans of riding with all this free time that college students have to mess around. As well as seeing many other riders get stronger in my life time when they start going to college, and a lot of people I have never heard of start riding and get really good. Well that theory got shot down the drain within the first few hours of being alone and on my own.

It just seems kind of odd, I mean it’s not that I was cut loose from a house where my parents forced me to ride and do everything their way, or that I was burned out from racing for 8 years, or anything of the matter, it was just that I was too busy doing other things. It’s not stuff that could be blamed on partying because my peers who get bad grades due to partying and all that are the ones whose parents forced them to do stuff like outrageous curfews or other odd stuff controlling parents do, and my parents had never done any of that to me.

But when you move off on your own and have to take responsibility of everything with your life and making sure you are on top of everything time management starts to get more important and higher priorities tag on to other things. I mean school is definitely my number one priority, it’s the biggest investment I have ever had to make.

I mean many people go on to tell me that getting a serious girlfriend is what caused me to stop my riding, but that has nothing to do with it, I mean she encourages me to ride more than anyone else I know… Thank You Sofia…

Well enough of the ranting about not riding and time management and all. My first semester didn’t go as well as I wanted it to because I was still studying based off the ways I did in high school, even though at every college orientation that’s what they tell you not to no matter how well it worked. All I would do the first semester is go to class to attend the lectures and study the notes I took in class for every exam, and there was only one class I was interested in and that was economics, so I read the book. Well the first transformations, or shall I say tran”sofia”ations, happened after I had met Sofia and started dating her. Getting a girlfriend isn’t usually an advisable route to take if you want to succeed but I was attracted to this girl and I don’t even know how. But my grades turned around and improved… only if we had met the beginning of August and not the beginning of September J.

So midterms came out and I had 2 A’s and 3 C’s, which isn’t that good at all, and one of my A’s wasn’t a transferable credit to Austin and it was in a math class. The other A was in economics and the rest were in English I, Basic Chemistry, and History II. My first intentions were to major in engineering and do something on the basis my father does, who is a civil engineer, and that is not at all what I am interested in now, even though it is a lot of math. So after taking economics which I am really good in I decided to take the business route to fulfill my education and prior to that I though all business school did was teach you to run restaurants, even though it is one of the best fields to study. I sure was ignorant.

Second semester starts and my study habits change completely. Now I am utilizing my resources and actually reading the books. I mean who would have thought that a $100 textbook would come in handy, I mean never in my life had I ever used one until now. From then on all I would do is read the chapter before class, go to class, and what used to be lectures I had no idea where info came from all came together. I mean I was able to take part in the lectures and discuss topics in front of the class and actually chime in with the professor. In the previous semester I would get annoyed with having to go in and type for an hour straight to get everything the teacher says, they just teach corresponding to the book. I think the perfect example to this would be my politics class. Just to let ya’ll know, politics rates up there with the math and economics. I would read the book, highlight it all up with what I thought was important then go to class and just sit there and look along with my book. I mean many people think its a waste of a book to highlight it all up but it got me an A in the class when only 20% or so gets A’s so do the math.

With the new study habits my route to Austin was attainable and I wasn’t going to let this lifetime opportunity just slip away so I worked diligently and had a 4.0 up until the last month or so when my math grade had slipped to a B. I rounded out that semester with a 3.8 and to my surprise I even had gotten accepted to the Dean’s list.

With my acceptance to UT in Austin a lot more responsibility is on the table for my part and I plan to make a 4.0 and get into the McCombs business school in the Fall of my Junior year and major in Finance or Accounting. It will take a lot of hard work but I am up for the challenge. It seems kind of odd but now that I’m there it feels like I am at a “real university” yet UTSA is a real one too.

Well enough about the boring school stuff now time to talk about my summer! This summer has been good so far even though we haven’t done any traveling at all and I can just be lazy and rest from my school and get ready for yet another adventure in a new place. Back when I had gotten home for summer vacation I started hunting diligently for a job because I didn’t want to spend my summer bored, sleeping all day, checking facebook 100 times an hour. So after about 25 applications being dropped off and interviews scattered throughout I picked up a job working for Katz Express over here in The Woodlands. So far its been a blast working there and I put in an average of 40 hours a week so the cash is flowing in, well at least I feel that way, and I’m enjoying life.

I’ve also been trying to manage my time, even though I have a lot right now, to go for rides and get back into the cycling scene. I think living in Austin will help me out with that because it is pretty much the bike heaven of the south, so I should be more apt for it. My transferring of schools will be a very healthy move on my part for making my life better and a lot more fun. So I have been out on the bike three times this past week, and I mean that is a huge change from the 3 or 4 times in the past year, so I am clearly making forward progress.

Also lately I have been researching and researching on running a work at home business, or even possibly opening up my own. That is the main purpose of the launch jtoka.com and the reason it doesn’t have much is because I am very slim on ideas, yet I know with my entrepreneurial mindset something big will pop into my head, I mean I might even run through a few different styles of what I am doing, but it is all just a little project I am working on. I mean who knows, I could even get lucky enough to score my millions from that, but I’m just looking for something to give me a little spending money so I don’t have to mooch it all from the parents. So if anyone has ideas just shoot me an email or leave a comment, anything will be greatly appreciated. I mean even if anyone knows anyone that works from home that would work, because I don’t feel like losing my money to scammers even though those scams are what bring their millions in, or what they claim to be millions.

So this is essay, I mean blog post, is quite possibly longer than the term papers I had to write for school, but I hope it catches everyone up on my life as of now.

morning update

Today is one of the earliest weekdays I have had to wake up this summer. I had to wake up around 6 a.m. to take my dad to the Toyota dealership because the car had to get fixed and right now I am sitting at the computer drinking a cup of coffee because I am nearly half asleep and need to stay up. I would go back to bed but I have to go to the dentist to pick up my retainer at 9 and cash my payroll on the way. At the beginning of the summer I got a job at Katz’s Express over here in The Woodlands, and I must say that it is one of the best jobs I have had out of the three jobs I have had in my life. Working and being lazy are the only two reasons holding me back from riding again, but if my coffee actually kicks in and I lose my tiredness in about 30 minutes I shall go for a little ride after I get back from the dentist.

My acceptance into the University of Texas at Austin is probably one of the biggest highlights of the summer, as well as my life at this point. I went to orientation last month around mid June and got to register for classes so I am finally enrolled. Earlier this week I went back to Austin with Sofia because she had orientation as well; congratulations to her acceptance as well. But I probably wouldn’t have gotten in if I wasn’t with her because she is someone for me to compete with academically since I have a very competitive nature. So I joined her as well as her mom and had a really fun trip. Since Sofia was finally able to register since she was at orientation she couldn’t get into the classes I was in, so I pretty much changed all the timings around for mine and we have made our schedules almost completely similar. I plan on only taking 13 hours this semester because apparently the courses are going to be harder than anything I have ever done, and everyone, I mean everyone has been telling me how hard school is there. I plan on working as hard as I can and getting a really high GPA because I have intentions of transferring into the McCombs business school to pursue a degree in Finance.

Well I have to run to the dentist now so there will be more to come… hopefully after a ride.

Quick Update

So a lot of stuff has happened in the past few months and to cover some of the important items I have just opened up a website as of yesterday and the link is jtoka.com and I also got accepted to UT and will be going there next year.

I am pressed for time at the moment as I am going to be waking up around 3 tomorrow morning to go fishing, but I will be making a long detailed post of what has happened in my life the past few months.

So in the meanwhile check out my new site as it will be growing pretty soon, and I eventually plan on opening up a small internet business fairly soon to give me something to do in my free time.