I’m a Workin’ Man

Last Monday I started my internship at the Bank of New York Mellon (last July, the Bank of New York, and Mellon Bank merged – hence the Bank of New York Mellon).  This internship is absolutely perfect for me.   I am designing a front-end for a database of technical documents on different technologies that they have available.  In case you don’t know – I love computer programming in any flavor, but PHP and MySQL have been my specialty for the past 2 years because of my involvement in THON.

When I got my computer on Wednesday and my manager told me to try to install PHP and have at it, I was in heaven.  I had my test setup up and running and had my typical development tools (Notepad++, Firefox, and Xampp (Apache+MySQL)) installed and ready to go within half an hour.  Then I hit the road running.  My project is coming along very nicely, and I do believe I’m going to be getting this done much much sooner than he was expecting.

Other than the nerdy stuff – my office is pretty fantastic.  I have a window desk, from which I can see a good chunk of downtown Pittsburgh (including the two tallest buildings – US Steel and One Mellon Center (I’m in Four – right across Ross)) and it’s gorgeous.  Also, I’ve got a whole ton of desk and drawer-space (of which I’m hardly using any).

The only complaint that I have is that the commute is killer.  With gas prices as high as they are right now (I’ve seen $4.09 all over the place..), and with parking being ridiculous in Pittsburgh, I’m doing the whole Park and Ride dealy.  Since the parking lots fill up by 6:30, I’ve been having Julie drop me off for the 6:54 bus (which gets me to the office just before 8), and then mom picks me up when I get off the 4:10 bus around 5 and I’m home by 5:20.  So the first 12 hours of my day are taken up by getting ready for, getting to, doing, and coming home from work.  And then the next 5 hours I’ve typically been useless, and then I sleep and repeat.   But this is the real world, and I must wet my feet before jumping in next year.

A Weekend of Work, the French Man, Whack-a-Ken and a Family Feud Record

Since I haven’t created a very good Category system, I decided that a comprehensive title is the best way to get it done. Let’s begin.

Weekend of work – I worked all day Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Made Gibson trays each day (basically Gibson trays are awesome – four types of cheese, twenty pieces each, and a container of pepperoni. I might be the greatest Gibson tray maker in the world…). It wasn’t a miserable weekend, just really busy. Mary made it better by asking her Sex Survey of everyone. I never saw that coming from a 60-some-odd woman…

Saturday night, at 1:20 AM, I finished my World Religions paper about The Encyclopedia of Authentic History and heard the doorbell ring. I went upstairs, turned on the light, and saw a creepy guy. I reluctantly open the door and ask him, very confused, what I can help him with. He was looking for Ramsey or his dad (the people who lived here before we moved in… the dad was deported, Ramsey moved to Cali?, and who knows what happened to the rest of the family…). I told him that I didn’t know where they were (because that’s the truth) and had to continue telling him that for about 5 minutes. He apologized for coming so late, but he had just gotten here from France and needed to see them. This just further confirms that there was some serious stuff going down in this house before (drugs? illegal immigrants?). Oh well, at least he had an awesome accent…
Last night, when I got home from the Elwood City Fireworks and the torrential downpour afterwards, I decided to take Ken Jennings up on his offer for me to make a Whack-a-Ken game (here’s the conversation – about two-thirds of the way down is my comment and Ken’s reply). So I opened up MSPaint, made some podiums (inspiration from several Google Image results), stole Ken’s body from his book cover, stole his head from the Giant Foam Head on eBay, and put them into Flash. The Kens pop up from behind the podiums at random, and you click on them to get a point. It’s in its very preliminary phase right now. I’m getting feedback from his message boards (topic), and I’ll be making it better in all the free-time I can find! You can leave comments here too…
One last piece of business – this week, Family Feud is the return of the Lovable Losers. Both teams were rather horrible… Hector from the Hispanic team gave a couple VERY wrong answers and I don’t think Irene from the other team gave any correct answer… Anyhow, in Fast Money, I got 180 points. I gave 4/5 number 1 answers (only missed the “How long should a couple date before getting married?” (1 year.. I said 2)). Just wondering how well you all did and what your greatest score for a single round is… alright.. back to Whack-a-Ken!

A Wonderful Day Off Work

After a wonderful night of sleep, I watched Brazil outscore Ghana (the Cinderella story of this World Cup). I thought Ghana looked terrific, but the scoreboard showed otherwise (oh well.. you’ll get ‘em in 4 years, Ghana!). Then I saw Agassi being amazing again (I don’t know how he’s doing it – 20+ years pro is absolutely crazy!) and saw the important part of France’s foot hitting Spain’s butt (2 goals in the last 10 minutes makes for great television).

I’m convinced that internet courses are the greatest things in the world. When I decided to take two of them this summer, I was unsure how they’d be, but I’m loving them so far. My health class is an absolute joke. I’ve done zero reading, I’ve sticky-noted the chapters and index in the book, and I’ve saved the teachers notes onto my computer. I currently have a 284/300 and haven’t read a page of the book. I need 136 more points (out of a possible 300 more) in order to get the C needed for PSU to accept the credits, so it’s going to be a nice down-hill ride for me. My world religions course, on the other hand, is much tougher. The midterm was an essay test (which was an absolute curveball) and it was definitely tougher than my health midterm (which I missed one multiple choice question on). I’m not looking forward to writing my second opinion paper for the course (critiquing a website about Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Taoism, or Confucianism) and I’m dreading the final research paper (10-12 pages on my choice – studying why reincarnation is a Buddhist belief that they stole from Hinduism). However, I’m sure that I’ll be able to put in the necessary effort and get the C that I need in there as well.

After finishing up today’s health quiz (10/10), I was modifying this blog a bit, when I remembered Burdeezy’s link to Ken Jennings’ blog. So I read his entire blog and wandered to several of the links he provided (including the PODCASTS for the NAQT National Championships!). Not only does his blog show off how smart he is, but it also allows him to share his wit and excellent sense of humor. His very first post about Quiz Bowl and why it should be televised ends with this…

“You watch the spelling bee, as fellow ex-quiz-bowler Greg Lindsay put it to me last weekend, ‘To watch little kids suffer.’

So there’s your TV pitch: ‘Quiz bowl: all the cruelty-to-children of the National Spelling Bee, all the pulse-pounding excitement of Jeopardy!’ How can it miss?”

I’ll definitely be tuning into his blog daily for more entertainment!

The rest of the day off is looking like watching Syriana at Meloy’s, watching Last Comic Standing (taping it), and trying to figure out some CSS or Javascript to make an easier-to-manage navigation system for my site.

The First Real Post (Timers Program)

Alright, so as a sample of what this blog is going to be used for – here’s the first post!

Tonight, after finishing up my World Religions midterm and settling in for the night, I decided to install WordPress, just because it’s one of those necessary evils. So here it is!

Before I got around to WordPress though, I had updated my Timers program. Before the update, it had two major bugs – first off, if you just pressed “start” for the countdown without changing the 00:00:00 to something else, it would start you at an hour (not quite sure how my code defaulted to an hour – but whatev). So I fixed that up, and now when it counts down to 00:00:00 or if you just start it there, it plays an edited Windows XP “tada.wav” a few times in a row. Secondly, it was REALLY abnoxious that you couldn’t have a count-down and a count-up running at the same time. So I added a couple frames, modifed the Actionscript, and was “Good to go” ::Good-to-go hand motion from the Taco Bell commercial::

Here’s where the blog comes into play – if there are any comments that you would like to leave about the modified Timers program, this is the absolutely PERFECT place to leave them! Now you don’t have to feel awkward about IMing or emailing me, just say that you’re an anonymous user (or tell me who you are) and let me know what you think could make my Timers better!!! So let the comments begin! (please!!)

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress. This is my first post. I chose to Edit it, rather than delete it, and now I am going to start blogging!

Alphabet Game

Since I was stupid and left a ton of stuff on my U:Drive at PSU (including the Robots source code and the actual Flash file for my logo), I decided that rather than recreating the wheel, I’ll just have to wait until the end of summer (or until I get a chance to go back to PSU). That being said, I created a new game to show how the high score system works (it’s not my high score system. I found it HERE and modified it for my needs.). So, if you know your alphabet and you enjoy typing (or if you like seeing your name in a high score table), check it out! The Alphabet Game!!! (thanks for the great idea B! ’twas a great easy game to code)