| I will be home in days! |
|
Green dates indicate good days, Blue dates are neutral days, and Red dates are bad days.
|
August 16, 2002: I'm outta here!It's been a really awesome summer, but it's time to go now... Tuning out for this season :)
August 08, 2002: I guess I should add a few comments of my own on top of Rachel's :Þ The presentation went well yesterday :) Byron came in yesterday morning and said he wasn't going to be able to make it, which was a bummer, but that's ok :) He said that so far feedback has ranged from "It was a really outstanding presentation for an intern" to "He should have been more prepared"... The important thing is that Vlad (manager for our group) was really impressed :) His reaction was "What school do you go to? We should hire more interns from there" :) So today I really didn't accomplish a whole lot, updated some documentation and mucked around on the computer a bit...
August 08, 2002: So, apparently it's become my responsibility to update Scott's webpage. He also complains that I'm too vague as to who's talking but I say, if he's too lazy to update it himself, that's just too darn bad.
August 07, 2002:
Well, the big presentation is tomorrow! The good news
is that I didn't have to stay as late as I was expecting to tonight to
get stuff to work (although I think working from 8 AM - 10:30 PM is
still pretty darn late!) I even had a chance to test out my demos to
make sure that they'll actually work tomorrow :) I've spent the last
two days making an XSLT stylesheet for my output files- very fun stuff
:) Basically it transforms this crappy
looking XML file into this pretty HTML
file Make sure you check out the
IWiaPropertyStorage::SetPropertyStream (do a search for it in the
files- look at the original, and then look at the version in the html
file :)) Hehe :) The really funny thing is that that's probably going to be the coolest part of the whole show- never mind the program that I've spent the whole summer on, everyone is going to be impressed with my fancy style sheets :) Oh well, time to get some sleep!!
August 06, 2002: Damn it-I bought a book and now I'm thinking about grad school-lovely...
Anyway, Scott's all ready (almost) for his thingie tomorrow. He made a rachel-mistake today. One copy of his program worked-the other 19 that were exact copy and pastes of it didn't work. It turned out that it's case sensitive and the copies were the wrong case.
August 05, 2002: So anyway, Scott said I could update his webpage-silly boy :) I can't talk about what he's doing because I can't read his mind but it sounds like things are going well. In MY news, I'm free-I no longer have to teach reading to a bunch of six year olds forever until next summer. I'm going to New Jersey for a week and I thought it was going to be really boring but now that Scott's given me his password, I can instead have the enjoyment of wreaking havoc on his website-or at least his add page :)
August 03, 2002: Hehe :) Today is the first 8-hour day that I've had in a long time :) Too bad it's a Saturday... :Þ Grant moved out of the apartment this morning, so at least temporarily I have it all to myself :) I don't know if anyone else will be moving in or not... I added some cool stuff to my program today - it stores a bunch of system and device information in the log file now... Couldn't quite get it all to work yet (it's actually very tricky to figure out the processor speed!), but I've got most of it so that's good :) Now I get to work on an XSLT style sheet to make my log files look nice :) I bought a book yesterday on XSLT, and it looks like it should be fun... The real challenge will be to have it ready for my demo on Wednesday... Byron said it would be really awesome if I could, but not to worry about it if I can't, so we'll see :)
August 02, 2002: Rachel insists that I put something here. So there - I just did :) Bill's barbeque was really cool - everyone should have a couple gazillion dollars to spare so that they can have a house like his ;) And yes, he looks and sounds the same in person as he does on tv. I'm demoing my project on Wednesday, so I've been busy getting things ready for that... The real trick is to add cool stuff to it without breaking anything between now and then ;)
July 30, 2002: Well, I got a lot done on my program today- It actually works now!! I'm definitely going to be demo-ing it tomorrow or Monday, not sure which yet though. Of course, tonight is the BBQ at Bill's house :) I'll try and find time to write all about it tomorrow :) (I might also be going rock climbing tomorrow, not sure yet...) Time to go!
July 24, 2002: Today was a pretty good day I think :) Yet another problem came up today, but with Byron's help I was able to figure it out pretty quickly (mspaint isn't single-threaded after all ;)) and once we knew what the problem was, it wasn't too difficult to think of a solution. So, another day on that, but by all accounts, it appears that it will be the last issue that we have to address before I can give a demo to the rest of the team :)
July 23, 2002: Today was definitely a very good day :) It seems that the closer I get to having a prototype ready, the more technical problems that arise, and they seem to be getting harder and harder... But, today I actually managed to provide some good news - I found a pretty nifty solution for a really tricky problem :) So, if anyone wants to know how you hijack a this pointer and replace it with your own, just ask ;)
July 19, 2002: Well, this looks like it's going to be a very busy weekend, so I thought I may as well go ahead and put up an entry now while I still can :) Byron seems to think that I'll have my demo ready by Monday or Tuesday, and that I'll be able to give a presentation to the rest of the team on Wednesday...!! Oh, and did I mention that we're in the middle of doing some major re-engineering to it? We're ("We" == "me") completely redoing some of the internals from scratch... In some ways this is cool - I was using COM interfaces for a lot of stuff (which was not a trivial task) and we decided it would be better if I just implemented the things myself instead of using what already existed. Cool because it's more fun, and more useful for us, but wow, how did it get to be Friday so fast! Right now, it looks like I'm definitely going to be coming in to work both days this weekend... In other news, we're going to see Eight Legged Freaks in just a few minutes, and we're having a party this afternoon... Nobody likes to work too much on Fridays :)
July 17, 2002: Well, things hit a major setback today :) Yesterday I merged my code with the program I'm piggybacking off of, but they didn't want to play nice together. Finally, late this afternoon we were able to track things down to dll loading/unloading issues, which was good that we found it, but now it poses a whole lot of questions about object lifetime that need to be answered :) And if that makes no sense to anyone at all, that's ok :) The important thing to take away is that now I've got to spend at least a day or two to make some decisions about my nifty tool and then turn those decisions into actual code, which will take even more time :) So oh well, at least we finally figured out what was going wrong! I was here late last night trying to figure out why MS Paint (which I certainly didn't write) was crashing in code that I did write :)
July 16, 2002: Hehe :) I guess I haven't been doing too good a job of keeping up with this lately... I thought that I'd update it in the middle of the day today while I'm thinking about it instead of leaving the office in a rush at night and realizing that I'd forgotten again :) In work news, someone else in our group (the testing group actually) wrote a program that does something similar to what I'm doing, and so I'll be able to tap into that and get a lot of functionality for free :) So, I've spent this morning merging my code with his, and this afternoon will be more interesting because I'm actually going to be editing his code :) I'm definitely going rock climbing either tomorrow or Friday, don't know which yet :) Hmmm... I've also been playing around with a little side project and learning XML. One thing that's pretty funny - So a couple people have stopped by and signed my guestbook, and put in links to their "businesses" (in quotes, because their of dubious legitimacy :)) so I just took out the links (and in one case removed the teeth whitener ad) and left the stuff that says "Great site!" :)
July 10, 2002: So today was a good day - I had my review this afternoon and it went really well :) My mentor said that things were going great and that I was well above the curve in a lot of areas :) I also got a functional demo of my program going today (as opposed to the demo I was here until 12:30 last night creating, which was slightly contrived ):) :) Our school recruiter had a dinner for us Maryland interns today, it was interesting to note that less than 1/2 of the people who get flown out here for an interview get an offer (and of course only a small fraction of the people who interview get flown out here)... So then I went straight from having pizza for dinner to ultimate frisbee practice... I'm pretty wasted now :) But all in all, today was a good day :)
July 09, 2002: Today has been a very long day - it's now 12:36 AM, and I've been here since 7:45 yesterday morning... But the great news is that I have a complete end to end working version of my program!!! Woohoo! So my plan is to go home, sleep late, and then spend tomorrow coming up with a nice front end for it so I can give the demo out to people :) Time for bed!!!
July 06, 2002: Okay, so I got up the pictures from my hike today - 45 of them! I hope that's enough to keep all of you happy for a while :) I'll probably have more pictures to put up in a few weeks, whenever Mick gets around to developing his roll of film. I think my favorites are the two panoramic shots at the end, the first one is 3 pictures merged together, the last one is 7 pictures merged together... Email me if you want full-sized versions of any of them (the first panoramic is 1.15 MB, the larger one is 1.44)
July 05, 2002: Ok, so I've received a lot of complaints because it's been a week since I've updated the daily Scott Moore soap opera :) Usually what happens is that I've got somewhere to be at a certain time, and I end up leaving in such a hurry that I don't think to update this :) I had a really fun day yesterday, went hiking up Mount Si with Mick and his girlfriend... Took lots of pictures, I hope to get some of them up this weekend :) Then last night we went to a party in Seattle, which ended up being quite a fiasco :) So today I came in to work, and I finally got my program to a point where it actually does something ... very cool indeed! Granted, it doesn't do much, just creates a file in a very controlled situation, but at least it's something :) Anyhow, I'll try and be better next week about updating this thing :) I'm not sure what I'm doing this weekend yet, I may not even come into the office at all (although that's unlikely, since my midpoint review is Tuesday). Oh, and lest I forget- I get to go to to a BBQ at Bill's house! :)
June 28, 2002: I've been very busy this week, that's why I haven't written anything for a few days! This is Visual Studio Awareness week, so I've been going to all of these talks about things they're doing with the compiler, optimizations, etc... Very interesting, but it's tough to get stuff done when I'm out of the office for most of the day :) Today is Rachel's 21st birthday! HAPPY BIRTHDAY RACHEL! Amazingly enough, even with going to all of the meetings, I've been able to keep on schedule :) Today we're having two parties (2 free t-shirts!)... I guess I should also mention that I jonied the ultimate frisbee team - we've had two games so far, and lost both, but oh well :) Anyhow, gotta run, but I wanted to put something up so people would stop complaining about how I'm not writing anything :P
June 24, 2002: Today was a pretty good day :) This is Visual C++ week at Microsoft, so all week long they're having talks about different aspects of Visual Studio and C++. So, I went to two talks today, very interesting :) I got a free hat at the first one - woohoo! The second was about advanced template programming techniques, and this stuff was far out :) A full time guy stopped by my office this afternoon to talk about it, and he didn't understand any of it either, but it sure looked cool :) On the way back from my first talk, I ran into someone else from Maryland, so that was kind of cool too :) I've started actually coding my component, and it's going :) I don't know if we'll have a prototype by our original July 5th deadline, but we'll see :) Hmmm... I guess that's about it :) Today is my last day of freedom - the new intern is arriving tomorrow :)
June 22, 2002: Ack! - Worked for 11 hours on a Saturday! My
mentor and I were the only two people in this building all day - everyone else had the sense to enjoy the beautiful
weather :) The good news is that I was actually able to get quite a bit done though :) Hmm, unfortunately spending all
day in the office doesn't lead to a lot of exciting things to say, so I guess I'll just leave it at that :) (For the curious, today was a tossup between green and blue - green because I got a lot done, blue because I spent the majority of a Saturday in the office... in the end blue won, because there are already plenty of green days up there :) )
June 20, 2002: Well, under political pressure, I decided to make today a bad day :) So I had a one on one meeting with someone this morning about my design, and he kicked my a## :) But, once I got over the "I'm such an idiot" feeling, it actually proved to be very helpful feedback. The actual design review turned out to be not a big deal at all... For one thing, 9 am apparently is very early in the morning for some people :) I also got my intern goals back today (which I didn't write) and was asked to rewrite them because they weren't specific enough... This was accompanied by an email lecture about how to write good goals... bleh :)
June 19, 2002: Today was definitely a good day :) I now have a copy of my design document in circulation, and my formal review is tomorrow morning - eek! I think it should go fine, but I realized after I sent it out that I forgot to make a change to one of the diagrams... oops! I guess I'll have to print copies of that page before the meeting. In other news, some $@#$ intern discovered the "interns" alias - doesn't common sense say that sending email directly to 800 people at once is not a good idea? So, first there was the original message... then the messages from people saying "I don't want this crap in my inbox", then the people saying "don't use this alias" then the people replying to the original message, then the people calling people idiots, etc... Doh! One last note - apparently the team (in the company sense) plays soccer every week, so I'm going to play tonight :) Should be fun I think :) June 18, 2002: Hmm... So I haven't posted in a couple of days, so today's Good day extends back into the weekend. I really didn't do much last weekend, so that's why there aren't any new pics, sorry! I'll definitely make sure I have some new ones to put up this weekend though. I had dinner at a Thai restaurant in Seattle on Sunday, and it was really good :) I'm starting to get into this whole ethnic food thing! Workwise, things are going well... I'm working on the official design document for my component. It's definitely nice to actually be doing something, rather than thinking about how I'm going to do it... I had a bit of troubles today though, because my UML isn't quite up to speed, but I'm working on it :) I'm hoping to have a draft to go out for review tomorrow, then I'll start coding. Yayy! It will also be fun to do something I'm a bit more familiar with - good old C++ :) Of course, I probably shouldn't be too anxious to start coding, since once I start, things are going to get pretty hectic, but oh well :)
June 15, 2002: Nothing like a lazy Saturday :) So, last night I saw The Bourne Identity - not bad; I've seen better movies, but I've also seen worse and it was pretty entertaining :) Went to a party after the movie... Lots of bad beer, lots of fun until people started passing out and taking speed, so I left after that... After being so exhausted yesterday and then going to that party last night, I was really surprised when I woke up this morning and actually felt great :) So I dunno, maybe I just had a bug yesterday or something. So, the good news is that I'm going to definitely buy an XBox, and in fact, I'm going to try and convince Grant to go out today so I can get it :) Yayy! Of course, I don't know when I'll actually have time to play it, but I'm sure I'll work that out :) Otherwise, not much going on this weekend, I think I *may* be going hiking tomorrow, so I should get some good pics from that. Otherwise, I don't think I'll really have any new ones to add this week... Well, I guess that's about it for today :)
June 14, 2002: Not quite sure what to make of today :) Didn't actually accomplish a whole lot, unfortunately... Made a tentative schedule for the summer, went to a tech talk about eHome, which seems kinda cool.... Went to lunch, and halfway through the fire alarm goes off, so I just went back to my office. In just a few minutes, I'm going to a party for our big boss (no, not Bill :)) and then...? Of course, the good news is that I got paid today! :D
June 13, 2002: So today, Byron decided to be funny - he didn't tell me that when you run stress tests on your machine, you should create a sandboxed user for them... So, since I didn't do this, he decided to take advantage of that fact this morning by hacking into my machine, sending myself a message, and then crashing one of my computers :) Otherwise, today was just more design stuff, playing with XML, NTSD... Had another meeting with Byron, and he thinks that I'm right on track with the design, so that's good :) He also thinks that I'll be able to start on the coding soon - yayy!! :) Hmm.. so tonight is taco night :) Unfortunately, I don't think we're going to get quite the turnout we were hoping for... In fact, I think it's going to be exactly three people... But, I guess that means it's just that much more for us to eat :)
June 12, 2002: Did laundry today, and I'm even going to have a "real" dinner - what could be better than that? :) Of course, I'm here at work almost 2 hours later than I wanted to be, but oh well... I started looking at some XML stuff today - very cool :) I spent most of the day writing a CD database program so I could learn some of the ins and outs of XML... Pretty fun :) I also installed .NET Server on my second machine, so now I can start running Stress tests at night :) The specs for my component still aren't finished yet, so design work on that is kind of in a holding phase ( hence the fun with XML ) I guess that's about all the cool stuff that happened today :)
June 11, 2002: Well, today was a pretty boring day :) Pretty much, I just stayed locked up in my office, and worked on designing my nifty little component. About the only external contact I had was around 3, when I talked about my ideas with my mentor. The good news is that my thoughts were pretty compatible with his, and he generally agreed with what I said, so I guess I'm doing alright :)
June 10, 2002: So, I've caught a lot of grief from everyone for missing a few days, geez... :) I've put up some new pictures ( mostly from our trip to Seattle yesterday ) nothing too exciting :) One thing I've noticed is that the pictures seem to get a lot darker when I compress them, so I might try tweaking with settings and things a bit to see if that helps. So today I started actually exploring/designing my component - very fun, but also very challenging! Even the simplest details seem to take quite a bit of thought and consideration... But, I guess that's why we've alloted a week and a half for this part of it:) I also went to a really cool demo today... Can't really say what it was about, but it was really neat :) Anyhow, that's about it :)
June 09, 2002: I know I said I wasn't coming in today, but we're going to Seattle and I left my Prime card (gets you discounts) in my office, so here I am :) Today, we're going to do the underground tour of Seattle, then hang out in Seattle for the rest of the day :) Should be a good picture taking opportunity, which is good because I don't really have much this week... Anyhow, that's about it :)
June 06, 2002: Today wasn't really a bad day, it was just very frustrating :) I spent a good portion of last night, and almost all of today debugging my new image program... From the output, it seemed that the picture was getting misaligned ( look in next week's pictures, you'll see what I mean :)) but I couldn't figure out how in the world the data was getting off... Finally, after about 8 hours of looking at it, I realized that the data *wasn't* getting off - when I wrote it to file, I was writing it to a text file, which causes many problems when it's bitmap data :) At least the good news is that I did in fact fix it and get it to work :) But, I think I'm starting to get a bit crosseyed from spending the whole day looking at bitmap files in my hex editor :) One cool thing that happened today was that our team decided to go out to lunch today. We went to a Mongolian grill, which was really cool - they've got a buffet where you just put all the food you want in a bowl, then you hand it to the chef who cooks it up for you while you wait:) It was very good :) That's about it for today though!
June 05, 2002: Today was a pretty good day :) I got to show my scanner program to my mentor; he liked it and so now my next assignment is to expand it to use any device, and to do in-memory transfers instead of going directly to a file ( If you don't know what that means, it's ok :)) The cool thing is that since I'm modifying it to work for *any* WIA enabled device, well, I can use it for any WIA enabled device, not just the particular model of scanner that's on my desk :) Not that I would actually want to, but that's a different story... Speaking of stories, dear old mom pointed out that I have two different entries for June 4... Actually, the first one was written rather late at night on June 3, but the date is automatically added by my server, which is on the East coast where it was already well past midnight... Hope that clears up some of the confusion :) Anyhow, back to work!
June 04, 2002: Not too much to talk about today :) Our group went out to lunch today so I could meet everyone, and I finished my scanner program :) I didn't get a chance to show it to my mentor yet though, because he vanished... I also downloaded a really cool program that someone wrote that lets me control all of my computers from a single keyboard/mouse - If I move the mouse off the screen to the right, it just goes to the next computer. Kind of like having multiple monitors, except that it's multiple computers instead :) The one disappointing thing is that I don't think I'm going to be able to go skydiving after all... They need the payment by next Friday, and I don't get my first paycheck until the Friday after that, so oh well... Anyhow, it doesn't do any good to finish early if I don't get to go home early ( well, relatively speaking :) I got here at 7, and it's not 4:30 :Þ ) ...
June 04, 2002: All in all, today went well :) I finished my Local Server program yesterday - nearly 1,000 lines of code to create a program that displays a message box saying "Hello World" :) Obviously, behind the scenes, a lot more than that is going on :) In really cool news, today I saw a talk by Bjarne Stroustrup... very interesting! So now I'm working on a program that will fetch images from my scanner using, and then later this week I'll actually get to start on my "real" project :) Hmm... I also found out today that another intern is going to be sharing my office with me in about 2 weeks.... My mentor and I aren't quite sure where he's going to go because all of my stuff takes up quite a bit of space! :) At any rate, I'm going to be going home soon - working on 13 hours for today...
June 02, 2002: I guess things are just going downhill :) Today hasn't been horrible,it just hasn't quite played out the way I expected it too... In good news - I finally got pictures up :) yayy :)Of course, it turned out to be *quite* a fiasco... I ended up not being able to use the program I wrote to automate the upload process because apparently Kodak imaging doesn't come with Windows XP, which means that the ActiveX control I used in my program didn't exist either... I spent several hours this morning trying to install it ( try manually creating GUIID keys in the registry - not fun! ) and ended up not being able to do it... I could possible still use it if I could get my laptop hooked up to the network, but 1) I don't think I'll be able to connect just because my laptop is running old software, and the network doesn't like that, and 2) I left the ethernet connector at home (MD) anyhow... Oh well :) But I did get them up manually, so I guess that's good :) So, here's the deal with the pictures - I'll probably be updating them about once a week or so, but no guarantees on that :) To save space on my server, I'm going to delete the previous week's pictures. If you see one you like, the easiest thing to do is to just download it directly from here. However, I probably won't be as diligent about deleting them off of my camera/local computer here. Also, all of the pictures that I post will have been edited - usually cropped, and a severe resolution reduction to make them fit on a screen :) If you want the originals for any of them, let me know. This week's pictures were all taken with my digital camera, but in the future I can almost guarantee that I'll also be using the digital camera that I got from Microsoft, as well as the scanner (i.e. take pictures with my film camera and scan them in). So that's enough about the pictures :) Unfortunately, I was supposed to go hiking with someone today, but I think since I spent so much time with this, he went without me :( Oh well... I guess now I have more time to work on "real" work stuff :)
June 01, 2002: Yep, today was only a neutral day :) The tour of the Seattle Seahawks stadium ended up being really lame - it wasn't really a tour at all, just a chance for people getting season tickets to come check out the views from various seats... So I came back and walked to a park that's in Redmond... The park was pretty cool, but it was about a 45 minute walk... A bunch of the interns had a barbeque this afternoon, so I went to that, met a bunch of people :) Unfortunately, I won't be able to get my pictures uploaded tonight... I was going to come in and do it, but a bunch of us are going into Seattle, so I guess you all will just have to wait until tomorrow :)
May 31, 2002: Today went pretty good :) I'm getting a lot done with my out of process COM server - a whole LOT of code just to produce an app that displays "Hello World" :) Of course, that's not my real project, I'll actually start working on that next week :) I went to the Microsoft store today; great prices, limited selection. If anyone needs Windows/Office XP or Visual Studio .NET, let me know :) Today's observation is that there a lot of mountains out here. Real mountains, not the "they're the biggest hills we've got, so we'll call them mountains" that are out East :) Anyhow, time to go home and get something to eat, then go to Safeway - Woohoo! I'll definitely be back this weekend, and hopefully I'll start getting some pictures up :) I just finished a neat-o FTP client that'll make my life a lot easier in that department :) May 30, 2002: Well, I finally made it here! There's so much going on I don't know where to start :) This place is definitely very awesome though :) Basically, there are 2 priorities here -
May 26, 2002: I'm leaving tomorrow! :-D All signs are good - I finally got my reimbursement check for my interview trip, and I just got my grades - another 4.0 :) Next time I write here, I'll be in Redmond :)
|