End of Internship

I finished my internship this week.  On Wednesday I gave my final presentation, everything went smoothly.  On Thursday and Friday I wrapped up a few last things, and my team all went out to lunch.  With that I am finished at Microsoft for the time being.  I did get a full time job offer, and now I have to decide about that in the next month.  I would say right now I am about 60% grad school, 40% wanting to go to work.  We shall see what happens.

This Saturday I went with a bunch of friends and saw Inception.  It is a really good movie.  It blows your mind, and you have a hard time following exactly what is going on.  After that we crashed a friends family ward’s BBQ for dinner, and then went to a ward film festival.  The films were really goofy, and that is what makes them so much fun.

Today I am just wrapping everything at home up.  I should fly back home tomorrow, and then I can see most everyone (minus those that still have not returned yet.)

Week 11

I got a new hard drive this week for my laptop, so I spent a good part of my week getting my new computer setup. I decided to also try some new file management techniques. This weekend I also re-indexed all of my music. I don’t have very good genre definitions, but other than that I now have all my music sorted in a much more modern way. Hopefully everything will continue to work, and I won’t realize in a few weeks that I forgot to back some stuff up J

At work, I am just wrapping up my presentation. On Wednesday I will be giving my final presentation then I will be leaving. I am starting to wish I had put my flight date for Saturday instead of Monday, but oh well. I still need to find a place to live for the next month. Janelle and company where on vacation for the last two weeks, so I wasn’t able to talk to them, but I will call Janelle tomorrow to see if I can stay there. If not hopefully I can figure out something in Provo so I can work for the month before I leave.

Guess all that is left in seattle is to start packing up. I have figured a few things that I won’t take with me to China. If I am lucky I might even be able to reduce the amount of weight I am taking. Lets hope so.

 

P.S. – I just realized that ryan has been positing comments, I will have to read those from now on   Ryan reminded me about the zune.  I have actually fallen in love with it.  It is a great music player.  Gets 30+ hours of battery life, and with zune pass I can download unlimited music.  I absolutely love zune pass.

Week 10

This week was a good little week. I am just wrapping up the last bits of my project. On Wednesday I went to Cirque du Soliel. It was a lot of fun. It was a great mixture of acrobatics, circus performance, and music. Certainly one of the best events I have been to in my life. We also all got free Zunes. At first I wasn’t that excited about the zune, but as I use it more I am coming to realize that it is a great music player. I have already used my zune pass to download about 1500 new songs, which has been great.

On Saturday I attended puzzle day. I had a lot of fun at that event. We didn’t do as well as last year, but since the team was smaller I was able to play a bigger part. I really enjoyed working through the puzzles with everyone. My team mates did really good at guessing what the meta puzzle was talking about without a lot of the info. Only one team had less clues solved then us, and still was able to get the answer to the puzzle. We might of even had a chance at winning if we had a full team of 12 members instead of just 7.

Week 9

Not much has happened this week. I was able to finish up the charting control to the level I wanted. Pretty much all that is left is for me to experiment with how to do filtering on the data my chart is showing. All of these constitute as “stretch” goals, so even if I don’t finish them, I will still be ok.

Next week is the more interesting week. We will be seeing Cirque Des Soleil next week, and I am pretty excited about that. There is also the pig puzzle day this Saturday. Hopefully I will be able to have a blast at these last few event before I head home.

Zoo Adventures

The actual work was rather good. I have pretty much finished the work that is tied to my charting portion of my internship. I have one part left to my project, and I don’t actually have to finish it to have a successful internship. So overall, things are going very well.

On Thursday I traveled a little, and did some shopping in Seattle. I was surprised that even at 7:30pm the bridge was just packed. It was a little like a video game getting to Seattle. The people her drive very interestingly, it would just blow your minds. Luckily we made it safely; I just have to remember to avoid driving to Seattle whenever I think there will be any traffic J

On the weekend I got to go to the zoo with a bunch of other interns from BYU. I really enjoyed myself. I especially liked seeing the otters. How I would love to be able to swim around all day, with no other cares in the world. My body definitely was a little uncomfortable walking around for 5 hours, but it was good for it.

After the zoo me and my roommate went out and got some Thai food for dinner. It was pretty good, but not nearly as good as the Chinese food I have had in China or good restaurants. It just made me more excited for the fact that I will shortly be returning to China. That should be a real adventure.

Week 7

This was a tiring week. It seemed like I was exhausted every day of the week. My sleep schedule really took a turn for the worst as well. I wasn’t going to bed till midnight or later. It really made it hard to wake up before nine or ten. That pretty much screwed up my whole schedule for any given day. I think I have learned my lesson about not doing that again J

This week in church I had to give a lesson on planning for ten years in the future. As I was preparing for the talk, I realized that I have never really had a plan for ten years from now. I have had wants and dreams, but never really made any concrete plans about these things. It was good to speak about the subject. Overall I think my talk went well, and it seemed to be well received.

I also demoed my project this last week. Overall I am very happy with how the presentation went. Pretty much everything about my part of the project was going smoothly, I probably did the best out of the group. Everything is looking smooth for the rest of my internship and I am excited that that is the case.

Week 6

Well I am now officially half way through my internship. In six more weeks I will be returning home, to almost immediately leave again, but let’s focus on the present for now. My internship is going well. My code is ready for the team demo that we are doing this next week Wednesday. It is cool to see my stuff being used by others on my team to make their project better.

This week was also the Engineering Forum and Microsoft. This event basically is a set of classes that all engineers can attend, sort of like education week, but for technology. I spent about half of each day Monday – Thursday attending these sessions. I really enjoyed them. Some of them were a little too high-level for me, and so I found them boring. There were also quite a few sessions that were very technical, and I just loved those. I got to learn a little about the new iteration of c++, multithreading in c++, and other very interesting topics.

The other exciting thing that happened this week was that somehow my PayPal account got hacked. Luckily PayPal caught the problem, and nearly all of the issues caused by it have been fixed. It was a little unnerving to wake up to such a problem Friday morning, but it is good to see that it has now been taken care of.