Dilligas.com Home

May 15, 2004 - Oh boy

Right. So, where to begin, hmm? Well, I like bullet points, so:

• Dead week passed relatively uneventfully, if busily. Part of that is probably the part where I spent almost all of my downtime doing absolutely nothing and watching a lot of hockey. I worked a ton on those group projects. We gave two demos in dead week, and the final one during finals week. Again, to make a long, boring story that you really don't want to read short, everything went fine after a lot of work.
• That brought finals week onto us. But since the projects had been done since the Thursday of dead week, and my finals didn't even start until Thursday of finals week, and on top of that, I really didn't care about them at all in the first place ... well, finals week wasn't bad at all. I played a ton of frisbee golf, a little racquetball, helped Erin move, and had a hilariously fun night at King's (big belated props, by the by!). My two exams went fine on Thursday, especially for having spent a grand total of about an hour studying for them. Then the one on Friday morning (At 7:30 no less; how cruel is that?) went fine too, again, considering I spent about twenty minutes of "studying" for that. What can I say, it's Senioritis. Mine is chronic.
• The rest of Friday (and some of Thursday night now that I think about it) was spent packing up all my crap. Getting to bed at 3:30, then getting up at 6:30, then packing for a day is not necessary fun. All things considered though, it went surprisingly well. My folks helped a lot with the whole packing endeavor too, which was awesome. This was followed immediately by another late night, this time about 5:00, involving our annual tradition of going to Perkins at 3AM. This year had a slight change; we yoinked a couch, put in the bed of Plummer's truck, and rode it to and from Perkins. And then we left it in a parking space. Hilarious!
• That Saturday (after another three-hour night) was the big move to Pella. More or less uneventful, getting settled into the apartment (which is very nice; pictures pending) was kind of a chore, since there is nothing there. I don't know why that surprised me so much, but ... yeah, not something I had thought through all the way. Anyhow, it worked out.
• And on Monday, I started my job at Pella! A couple days of brainwashing orientation went just fine, and now I'm in my little half-cube for twelve (perhaps fourteen?) weeks. I have a project, though some of the details are kind of nebulous. More pending.

May 23, 2004 - Regularly Scheduled Programming

Right, so we're back to updating this once a week, apparently.
Things at Pella have been going swimmingly. The work is, admittedly, not what I would like to be doing for the rest of my life (at least not yet), but the people and the company itself is awesome. That, and the part where there are about thirty or forty other interns and co-ops, all of whom live in the same apartment complex as me, make living here quite a bit of fun. The eight-to-five thing every day is kind of a drag, but on the other hand, it's really nice to go home at 5:00 and forget about work entirely. Not something school lets you do.
Anyhow, I've started keeping Old Man Hours™ again (which for me, is bed before midnight), so I'd better wrap up here. Wishing everyone a good week!

May 31, 2004 - Happy Memorial Day!

The official start of summer is here, and with it, a chance to put off archiving yet another month's worth of entries, and to satiate all three of my readers with an update. (Yes, I know it's not the official start of summer. Work with me here.)
Both of my roommates have moved in, and they seem like pretty cool guys. It should be a good time out here this summer. And as a bonus, Dan brought a GameCube, so I'm totally hooked on Mario Kart Double Dash. Perhaps an update to the Gaming section soon? You never know...
Now I suppose I should blather for a bit about work at Pella... So for those of you that don't care, skip this paragraph. I'm on the Data Warehouse team - basically the point of which is to house and analyze all the data that comes through this company. Sure, no problem, right? Wrong. I never realized how much data making windows generates. And I just work with quotes, sales, and shipping; this is to say nothing of manufacturing, receiving, payroll, HR, pricing, documentation, customers, parts, units, installation, returns... It's mind-boggling. But anyway, my job for the summer is basically to recreate the system that Customer Service uses to look up order information when someone calls in with a problem with their window(s). You know, basic information: Here's what's on the order, prices, how and when it was shipped, who bought it, yadda yadda. The current system pulls data from an old database, and my job is to make a new system that pulls from the Data Warehouse databases instead. This wouldn't be bad... if it wasn't for a woman who is not even in my department and most assuredly is not my boss. This woman is absolutely militant that I will use a tool called Oracle Install Base to do my project. Now, Install Base tracks individual parts, using Bill Of Materials data. It can tell you everything about every last screw that went into each window. This is great - but it's not even close to what I'm trying to accomplish. She has an intern under her whose job it is to get this up and running, and so obviously I need to use the same tool. I have this analogy: She is giving her intern and me a set of hedge trimmers; she's telling her intern to trim the hedge, and telling me to dig a ditch. A perfectly valid tool being used for the flat-out wrong thing. So until we get that resolved, I'm not really doing much of anything; just trying to "research" this tool that I know isn't going to work. Bureaucracy.
And now I should wrap this up. Huge props to King for throwing an awesome barbeque and football game for Memorial Day today, even if I did miss my interchange and take the long way home. Hope everyone enjoyed their long weekends, and now it's back to work. *audience boos*
Oh yeah, and check out the finally updated QOTD!