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!

An “Interesting” Day of Work

I’ve noticed that no one is posting any comments to any of my blog entries, and that’s rather discouraging. However, just in case there is anyone out there who has spent the 5 minutes necessary for reading it all, here’s another post!

Today’s main topic of discussion – work. Now, you might be wondering, “How exciting could the Giant Eagle deli be??” The answer, my friends, is VERY exciting! Today, I got to make Gibson trays (which means I put 20 pieces of each of four types of cheese in a circle around a container of pepperoni! How hot is that?!), slice some Giant Eagle Ham Off The Bone (on sale this week for $4.99 a pound!), and talk to a 65(ish) year old woman about my sex life. Let’s just say it was entertaining!

Anywho, after closing with Meghan and Phil, I came home and finished watching Hotel Rwanda. I’ve been working on this movie for a couple weeks now (only 2 other nights, really), and it turned out to be every bit as awesome as I had hoped. It was one of those really sad movies the whole way through. I must admit that I ended up crying during the tidbits of real information about the story (at the end). I give this movie two thumbs up, and strongly encourage everyone to see it. It was really good stuff.

After that, I began surfing the web again instead of writing my World Religions paper (I’ll get to it eventually… I have to…). I browsed through Tim Knapton’s website again, and am just in awe that I am friends with someone that good at web design. If you or anyone you know need a website created, Knappz is a great guy to go to.
I had my daily dose of Ken Jennings’ blog and found out about his eBay auction! I’m really thinking about putting in a couple weeks’ pay as a bid, just to help the cause (and because I wouldn’t mind winning that at all).

Oh well, I suppose that’s it for now. Hopefully I’ll be able to be somewhat productive with my paper during the Germany-Argentina game in the morning, but we’ll see how that goes…

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!