Random Ponderings

September 10th, 2004

You might be a nerd if...

...you use your laptop screen in lieu of a flashlight. Or just turning on the room lights. Daily.

...you drive home through a thunderstorm, and check the radar using wireless internet once you arrive to see if it's worth waiting in the car for a few minutes for the rain to stop.

...you haven't been able to get your E-mail for a few hours due to a minor network configuration problem in your apartment. So, you start an X11 session to one of the computer labs on campus, open up Mozilla, and check your E-mail from home through a computer with a fully-functional network.

...you check the radar to see whether it is raining, rather than look out the apartment window.

...you start writing "You might be a nerd if..." sentences down on your computer so you can put them on your website when you have gathered enough from your day-to-day life.

July 17th, 2004
Well, I just started a new internship a week ago... So far, it's going pretty well. The first day was pretty much just orientation; we saw lots of videos. Yes, that's right, I got paid the big bucks to watch TV all day! The best of the lot was a sexual harassment video made by the company, simply a 90-minute video of their lawyer talking to the whole group. I'm told it was pretty bad in person, but as a video it was terrible - even if we had wanted to watch it, there was so much noise on the tape that every third word was unintelligible. Oh well, no great loss, I guess. It's an engineering job, so I won't have much contact with women, and I'm just so darn shy that I'll never talk to any of the ones that work elsewhere anyway.

So far this week, I've been pretty much just doing odd jobs; some paperwork, and a lot of learning about how the whole database system works so that I can do the paperwork. Understandably, they keep track of every minor little change, just in case they find that a lot of products are failing all of a sudden, they can find what caused it. I did get to design a sort of block diagram though for a product that is being worked on. And I think I'll be doing a lot of learning, so I'm really excited to see what the next few weeks have in store.

Free stuff I got at WWDC 2004:

• 30 inch Cinema Display poster
• Small plastic shark (from the Shark session)
• Lots of stuff from Stump The Experts:
  • The official Stump The Experts hat
  • Aaron Hillegass's Cocoa book
  • A T-shirt from Adobe
  • 2 decks of cards
  • The Best of The Joy of Tech
  • A box of Swiss chocolate, saying "Sweet Question" on the outside
• Pen with a red LED inside
• Pen with no LED (awww)
• Mints from Iomega
• Five books from Sams and Peachpit Press:
  • Kelby's "Macintosh... The Naked Truth"
  • Kochan's "Programming in Objective-C"
  • Kochan and Wood's "Unix Shell Programming"
  • Kelby's "Mac OS X KillerTips"
  • Landau's "Mac OS X Help Line"
• WWDC 2004 Backpack
• WWDC Student T-Shirt
• WWDC Attendee T-Shirt
• Xcode T-Shirt

  And finally...

• A new suitcase and carry-on bag because the airline beat my old suitcase to shreds

Yeah, I know it's Windows Media. Yes, I hate Windows Media Player too. But this is just funny - this guy was actually in Madison a while ago for MadFest 47, and I saw this guy there. Anyway, watch it if you have a few minutes - it's what happens when you mix a sick twisted sense of humor with a bright orange jumpsuit, a little bit of musical knowledge, and 30 bike horns.