My stash

Today was Perl scripting day. Hooray. I actually made some headway on making a little system for checking (and fixing) the Barnes and Noble files.

I worked with Greg to figure out exactly what he wanted, then made the whole thing for him. He's in the midst of field testing it, but I was proud of how it turned out. I had some pretty slick little logical bits of code that I was thinking “Well, there isn't any reason why it wouldn't work, but I'd be surprised if it did.” Then when I tested it it worked. So, that's always a great feeling.

Yep, so that was my day. Did some keyword queue stuff, made some other query scripts, and got good at balancing pizza, pasta, chips, and sandwiches on my plate for the Tuesday lunch. I also discretely stocked the fridge, maintaining my stash of Coke Rewards codes.

I'm Back!

Oh well, didn't post anything about my trip. I'll get to that eventually.

So, today was my first day back, and to start it off my professor, Dr. Brandle came to visit.

After my meeting with my GTS people, I met Dr. Brandle at 10:00 AM

After Dr. Brandle was acquainted with Mark, my boss, we had a little meeting in a small conference room to overview what Doubleclick really does so Dr. Brandle could understand what the company did from an up/down view.

After that, I gave Dr. Brandle a quick whirl of what I did, the tasks I do, and etc. I showed him the scripts I wrote, the stuff I did, the famed database chart, etc.

After that, it was time for lunch. We went to a great little place called Sidebar. I had the safe “grilled chicken sandwich,” but they put a great spin on it, with a lot of melted provolone cheese and a good honey mustard sauce on it, a consistency I hadn't had before. The fries were good, and they were seasoned. They were seasoned so much that I had seasoning spices all over my fingers when I ate them. They were still good, and didn't taste like the cookie-cutter seasoned fries you usually get.

The conversation flowed well, topics ranging from computer science degree trends to everyone's college background. So, it was a good conversational atmosphere.

After we got back from lunch, Dr. Brandle and I talked a little bit about my Yahoo Stores backend website engine. Then, after that discussion, Dr. Brandle left.

It was a good visit. The rest of the day I played catch up from being gone a while.

And...I FOUND THE AWESOME SUN TIMES GUY! Yes, I'm excited.

Vacation Time

So, today is my last day for a while. I'm going to Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado for a week, very far away from cell phone towers, internet, and power – at least while I'm on the trail.

Today was the colossus of people all calling me, coming to my desk, and wanting me to do stuff.

I was doing two people's jobs plus my own. Since I had helped those people out with stuff, I knew what they did for much of their job, so I could do it to some extent. Well, all the people I had helped out on my coworkers behalf started contacting me directly, because two of my fellow coworkers were gone.

So, it was e-mails piling on top of e-mails, with an ultimatum given to me by anther coworker to get a script out the door in an hour, no less...since a company which I am fond of needed something by 5. Joy.

So it was a little stressful watching some of my tasks colliding in mid air while the debris rained down on other tasks.

So, basically, I recycled stuff in the keyword queue in intermittent spurts while I hacked away at the couple of Perl scripts that needed to be done. Somehow and some way, between the confused people calling me and the stupid bugs Perl threw my way, I got everything done.

Hooray.

I will be blogging about my adventures in Colorado, just to keep consistency in my writing and having a nice log for my trip.

Yes, this laptop will probably be on top of some mountains as I type. That will be pretty cool.

Since my Colorado trip has nothing to do with my job (Well, a lot of what I type doesn't, but whatever), all my entries will be put on http://xanga.com/danmagicman7

Follow it if you want. If I have momentary access to the Internet, posting my xanga entries online will be the first thing I'll do.

This Means War

So, I'm becoming a turn-key script kiddie for our group. I guess that's good. It's work, so that's good.

I checked some of the files that Barnes and Noble sent us as part of their data feed...and it came up with 47,000 orders that had errors in them, out of 250,000. That's a 20% failure rate. Thumbs up Barnes and Noble!

I just checked basic things like making sure the products actually added up to the correct amount, and each field had the appropriate number of data entries if an order had more than one product. Yay.

However, it's hard to talk about such trivial things such as scripts when a battle is brewing in the office. Oh yes, a full fledged battle.

It's become a routine of mine to occasionally restock the fridge with pop when it starts to get empty. We have two closets devoted to holding all sorts of pop, mostly in fridge packs of 12 or in bulk cardboard trays of 24 or so.

I've recently noticed that on most Coca-Cola fridge packs there's a little logo that says “mycokerewards.com.” About a week ago, it dawned on me that I could simply reward myself by doing the office a favor and restocking the fridge.

The fridge packs have a little paper perforation around the corner of the box which you rip off, opening a little slot for the cans to be taken out. It is on this perforated corner that the Coke reward codes printed.

Each fridge pack is worth 10 points, while any normal bottle is only worth 3 points. Most of the rewards online are pretty ridiculous and far fetched to even try for – 625 points gets you a $25 gift certificate. Many thousand points can get you a cruise or other neat prizes.

They do, however, have sweepstakes that are 3 points per entry, with a maximum of 20 entries allowable each day. They have a super nice, Canon SLR camera that you can enter in. As you guess, the more you enter, the better your chances are to win.

So, for a few days I would casually enter in 1-4 of these codes in if I restocked the fridge. No one really stocks the fridge anyways. Except one man.

This...larger man gets serious in restocking the fridge. The day where our drink supply is getting low in both the fridge and the closets is a sign of when the new, huge shipment of pop comes in. On this day (or any morning where the fridge gets empty) , he completely stocks the fridge. He goes to town for about 30-45 minutes organizing this thing. Things are stacked in order, perfectly on top of each other and everything is displayed in a sparkling manner. I wouldn't be surprised if they were alphabetical.

Earlier this week, when I noticed he stocked the fridge, I did some inconspicuous searching of the garbage to see if he threw out the coke rewards so I could you know...enter them in online.

Then, the discovery came. I found box filled with cardboard scraps, mostly the perforated corners of the fridge packs. But...they were only the excess scrap of the cardboard corners – the part where the codes where printed on were nowhere to be found! They were neatly ripped out of the cardboard.

AHHH! A conflict! I must get coke rewards!

But, how am I to achieve this lucrative bliss of obtaining these codes if another person is systematically and efficiently stocking the fridge? What am I to do?

I do something I call “preventive maintenance.” – stopping the infection at its source.

Probably the most annoying thing when stocking the fridge is ripping off the corner of the fridge packs, because if you don't do it right it comes off in a mess, or you can rip open the whole pack. I mean, come on...who wants to be responsible for ruining a fridge pack? Seriously...

So, why don't I just do it for people?

A few fateful days ago, I opened up the closet and went to town. I organized and prepared all the Coca-Cola Zero's for immediate refrigeration. That means, I stacked all the packs of that kind in a block, made them all facing one way, and had all the perforated corners removed. That means, to restock the fridge, it's a simple process to find the kind of pop you need to restock, then plop it in the fridge – no ripping or frustration necessary. Nice and easy.

The best part of it all is that while providing a service to the entire office, I get the Coke codes :-).

I'm ridiculous.

GoogleClick

Today was work and a meeting headed by a dude with Google. He talked about *approved* topics about the Doubleclick / Google acquisition as to not arise suspicion. Some person talked about something to someone who posted it on the Internet regarding the merger, and neither company was happy because this whole thing was under review.

So, as an *internal* employee, I guess I can't talk about the internal, but I can give my opinions and regards of what DoubleClick does externally. These facts are known (or can be known) by anyone, so I'm not revealing anything or beholding some untold truths. Any client of ours or any person smartly looking at what Doubleclick does has access to anything I'm saying. I'm just stating my thoughts and opinions on this matter.

Google is acquiring DoubleClick to become a player in the affiliate world of marketing. DoubleClick Performics has great tools and backend technology to support this. Our affiliate products fall into two categories: the barebones affiliate tracking and client support side, and then the data research and reporting side.

What we do with affiliate marketing is that we work with clients to meet their needs, support the affiliate system for their website, and support the surrounding aspects of that client. Furthermore, we provide reporting tools for advertisers and publishers so they can see what's going on. Really, the advertisers get to see some of the cool stuff because they can get reporting of their affiliate data mixed in with their pay per click (Paid Search) data, and the conversions of each.

Actually, we are getting to the point where we are a client's all-in-one stop for online advertising. We offer personalized, customized solutions for large advertisers. We can set up Affiliate marketing for them linked in with our network of publishers; we can maintain their paid search listings with Google, Yahoo, and MSN; we have technology for media-rich affiliate ads for advertisers; we can optimize a company's website for search engines; we can work with clients to submit their product listings to product comparison engines; and we can combine all these things into one set of clean report data for our clients.

It's no news that DoubleClick bought Performics, and many of the products that both companies brought to the table are just starting to get integrated in a slick network of systems.

Wait, Google wants to buy us?

We service clients on a client-to-client basis, with a person in each company representing each client.

Google, on the other hand, has an open network of advertisers and publishers with its AdSense platform. Google just released an affiliate ad on to its already powerful AdSense network. With Google Analytics, anyone can easily sync up all this data into coherent, powerful reports.

Google is catering to the individual with advertising and reporting they do themselves while DoubleClick has client-facing representatives to do this all for the client.

There are many companies out there that do many of the services DoubleClick provides without the big infrastructure and powerful application products.

To me, it seems like DoubleClick would be the “premier” division of Google. However, I don't see how they could merge operations. Maybe they have a surprise stored up for us, but I'm a little puzzled how a client-facing all-in-one advertising agency can merge all its services into a search engine giant.

All Google has said is that they want to get into the display advertising field. That covers one arena of our services: Affiliate.

We aren't even the biggest company out there for Affiliate, but we are the biggest company out there for Paid Search, which links MSN, Yahoo, and Google's paid search ads.

But, how would it work out to have a service provided by Google that linked up your paid search with other search engines...besides Google? How do you have a search engine optimization division that is part of Google not get criticized for having an unfair advantage for optimization because they might have “access” to the secret algorithm?

How would the other hundreds of Search Engine Optimization companies do if Google released a service to optimize websites for itself?

Obviously, Google and Doubleclick probably thought these things through. It's my hypothesized guess that Google will take a bite out of the company to merge with existing Google technology – the affiliate technology.

It will be interesting to see how the rest of DoubleClick operates if this Google deal goes through. I'm hoping it will operate just like it did, but the only thing that Google really merges is the affiliate technology.

To me, it's like breeding apples with oranges, but we will see what happens.

Pizza-Ria

Today was a day filled with work and meetings. We had an all Affiliate meeting, and I had a Paid Inclusion/Catalog submission training meeting which was pretty interesting. The rest of the day I actually dealt directly with some people other than my coworkers, and doing stuff for them.

I actually had to do some file modification manually without a script. I know, bummer.

Today I went to Pizza-Ria – a fast pizza joint with the same style of pizza as Bacci Pizzaria I went to on my first day on the job.

It was good, cheap pizza. The slice was a big one, but did not even come close to the huge monstrosity of a Bacci Pizza slice. The flavor was good, but not as good as Bacci. It was cheaper than Bacci by a hair, but for $5 flat at Bacci for a coke and a slice of pizza that covers an entire tray, you can't find anything that beats the great value of that.

A Half Day

Today about a forth of my group was gone for and half of the people who were left were leaving early, including me (have some weekend festivities planned requiring some travel). Luckily, some of the program managers gave me some work to do.

Noontime I left and went to get an Italian Beef at Max's takeout.

It was good. My favorite kind of beef is the kind that has enough spices and its own kick to stand alone without sweet or hot peppers on top.

This beef wasn't it. It had good texture, good juiciness, but not a signature flavor to the beef like Portillo's has or Johnnie's Beef by my house. However, the hot peppers were doused in spices and gave the sandwich some flavor, so the peppers saved the beef. When I got into it, it was really good.

Now it's time to go home, hurray.

Sun Times!

Today I worked on more little scripts and keywordqueue stuff. Nothing new.

I went to Potbelly's with my friend Jonathan. It was a good lunch, they have good sandwiches.

In the city, there is an echelon heirarcy of beggers and homeless people. I've observed each class and am ready to formulate a classification for each one. Ready? Here goes.

At the lowest end there are simply the people that sit and have a sign. No cup, just a sign. I don't understand what they expect people to do, since many people aren't going to stop and say “hi.”

Then, next up are the people who have a sign and a cup. Usually, they stand or sit there, cup in hand, with a sign. Usually these people are the ones that look the most needy. Some homeless people don't look very homeless at all.

Then, the more common group are the cup shakers. They stand there, no sign, shaking a cup. Some try to make rhythmic songs with their cups, others just shake with random hand wiggles. Most of the time the same people are in the same places day in and day out, showing up at the same times with the same cup. I've noticed most of them have clear Starbucks cups. I wonder why that is.

Next up are the people that actually sell stuff. The most shady of these things are Streetwise newspaper sellers. These Streetwise issues are about the size of a magazine, and I think it's a magazine produced to help homeless people – I'm not sure exactly how it works. Most veteran sellers stand there, meekly displaying the Streetwise issue.

I saw a Streetwise issue hung on a support post for the El train, and there was a picture of one of the Streetwise sellers on the back. The story went on to talk about how he had been doing it all his life at the same corner! He was one of the guys that just stood there, he's on a corner near my work. I thought that was pretty cool how he could actually sell that much by just looking at you.

Other Streetwise sellers are kind of annoying. I usually don't see them very often, probably cause they don't sell very much. Most of these people sit in a chair or stand, chanting or singing “Streetwise!” One lady made an ear-piercing, high-pitched wailing noise, then said “Streetwise” after the noise. Any normal person would keep a large distance around anyone doing that, let alone approach them to get an issue of Streetwise. One, less annoying lady said “Good mornin', Streetwoooyys.” When I walked by in the afternoon, she was still saying “Good mornin'” I guess she's a morning person.

Then, there are the Sun-Times sellers. You know who they are by the bright-orange apron thingy they wear. Some of them just stand there, displaying the morning's issue, others make a slow, sing-songy chant “Sun Times!”. Usually these chants end in a high note.

However, there was one man who had a distinct Sun-Times call. It was a definitive, raspy, and soulful call of “Sun-Times.” He didn't sing it, but he just kind of said it with a tone. The “sun” was on a higher note, and he slid to a lower note when he said “times.” It sounded like “SUn TIIIIiiimes” with the capitalization stressing the loudness of the accent. His call exuded a confident attitude of, “You want to buy a Sun Times issue. But, if you don't, I guess you're missing out on the cool thing to do.” He didn't say it often, but every 15 seconds or so.... “SUn TIIIIiiimes”

It was fun to listen to. I haven't heard him in a few days. I don't even remember where I heard him. I kinda want to find him again – just to listen. Sometimes I look at some of the Sun Times sellers and hope they say it like that man did, but they either say nothing or say their own inferior chant.

Then, there's Freddy the drum player. He takes the cake. He's out there rain or shine, playing his drums. Not only is he determined, but he seems like he's just happy being there, playing his drums. I still need to make that website for him...

Tilapia

Today my boss took our group out to lunch. Right before everyone was getting ready to leave, I went to the bathroom. When I came back, they were all gone. Being the smart intern that I was, I remembered what the address was, and without looking it up, I found my way there, then found my group there.

They actually sent a guy to go looking for me, but by the time I made it to the table, he was coming back. It was this really nice seafood restaurant on the riverfront, with two decks overlooking it. It was really cool. Best of all, we didn't have to pay for anything.

I had a bowl of gumbo and cashew-crusted tilapia. The gumbo was simply amazing, really spicy with a great flavor. It hit the spot. Then, the tilapia came. Usually tilapia is in one or two smaller pieces, this thing covered the whole plate, and it was all over some really hearty rice. They put it in some sort of buttery vanilla sauce. All I know is that it was the best tilapia I've ever had. It was flavorful, the perfect texture, and the crunchy “cashew crust” was really good.

I worked on scripts. That's what I did. We had a group meeting about the release features of ConnectCommerce, and we had a group meeting.

A Stressful Day

Today I had plenty of stuff to do.

I had to write a query pulling data from all over the database, and it was requested by someone who doesn't know much about the database. To put this in perspective, I'm pulling from three tables with over 230 MILLION entries in them, each. Combined, they probably add up to over 1 billion rows. That's a lot.

To make things worse, sometimes things aren't named in the most intuitive way in the database. So, the person requests a certain data field, not knowing what's involved to actually get it to them. I spent most of the morning testing this huge query (just to do little test things to make sure it had the data I wanted). I gave him a little sample of the query for him to CHECK and make sure it was what he wanted, and so that he could crosscheck it with other reports he had to make sure it was correct. On top of the fact of me not knowing the exact structure of what the structure of the database was, I wasn't sure if the somewhat vague field names were what I wanted.

Then, once you think you've got it and you show it to them, they go "Oh, by the way we need you to do this." Little do they know you need to restructure the ENTIRE query to do so. And, it is almost the same complexity as asking your uncle's neighbor's step-sister's ex-boyfriend what the name of his dog is. Each person representing a database table.

My coworker who assigned me to do this for them usually doesn't deal with big queries like this, so I guess that's why I was doing them. I was kind of in the dark as to what all the fields and tables meant. When I said that this guy wanted some more hard-to-find fields, he kind of gave me a vibe that we didn't need to do them, so I was confused.

After this guy gave me the go ahead to run these reports for all the dates in the range, I processed the queries. Both took over 40 minutes.

Guess what. Something was wrong in both of them. Goodie. He said we would work on it tomorrow and send me test data to compare it against.

What? Test Data? Why didn't he give me this before? That would have helped leaps and bounds. Whatever.

Again I was called to save the day for Barnes and Noble. Hooray. Basically, in a discussion whether we should do some data file work or they should do some data file work, the decision ended up where we would have to do this data file work.

That means, manually editing all these files. Or, in another words, me writing a script so to do it automatically for thousands of orders.

I finally got it all working, and then I talked to my coworker and went home. I have to process like...50 or so files in the morning with this script, so that will be fun. Hoo-ray.

Yea, Tuesday lunch, same old, same old. While I was eating lunch, on my break, I received word that one of the big e-commerce sites I managed went down. Yahoo did something to their servers which affected how I programmed the website, so it went haywire. Luckily I made a Band-Aid fix on it in as little as 5-10 minutes, but some stuff wasn't up to snuff. It will just have to wait till I get home. Which has been busy, to say the least.

A Seriously Serious Post. I'm Serious.

My blog has been drifting towards the fun side of my Chicago experience lately, not my job experience. So, for those who don't like that, this post is for you. We'll see which style is the better.

Today I worked with the Keyword Queue. The keyword queue is the crossing of our API interface with Google, Yahoo, and MSN paid search. We throw keyword requests at all of these engines in huge patches, managing bids, managing keyword groups, creating groups, pausing campaigns, the whole nine yards.

Basically, it's the system that links Google, Yahoo, and MSN with the client's campaign so we don't have to log in to each one of them separately. So, what is this keyword queue?

Basically, it's the matrix, kinda. Any request that people put into ConnectCommerce to get changed on the all the respective engines at once gets put into the keyword queue. The queue waits until the unprocessed (newly entered) tasks pile up to about 4000, and then we shoot all these requests over to Google, MSN, and Yahoo. We get charged every time we do this, so we try to keep the requests in pretty large batches.

Unfortunately, not all requests go through without errors. Sometimes people try to edit keywords that don't exist on the engines; sometimes they try to add keywords to groups that don't exist, or move them to places unknown. This is where the errors happen.

If someone does one of these things, it sits in the Keyword Queue (we'll call it the KWQ) marked as an error with a friendly little description. Sometimes the API of the engine just looks at all the incoming data, freaks out, and runs and hides from us and sends us back silly error messages that mean nothing, those get in here too.

When people fix these errors, for instance, by creating a group that needed to be there before they tried to move keywords to that group (which didn't exist earlier) we recycle the tasks. That means, we run a script to say “OK, run these tasks again and see what happens” Lots of times the tasks go through, and happily coexist on both our interface and the engine. Lots of times it doesn't, and it's a whole troubleshooting process in managing the system to get them to go through.

Often times there are 100,000 individual things in the queue, so it's a bit of a nightmare sometimes managing it all. Some specific tasks get resubmitted 9-10 times. That's when we go through a glorified process of zapping these tasks and sending our interface the “Ok, this task has problems, it didn't go through, so, it's canceled, deal with it”

Part of the issue is dealing with the Program Managers who aren't very technically inclined thinkers, who sometimes make simple mistakes repeatedly or don't understand some of the more complex inner workings that hang up the system.

So, it's a balance of dealing with stuff yourself and letting them know the tasks went through OK, or working with the Program Mangers to get it fixed on both ends, and you can just zap the stuff in the queue.

There's a lot more to it, too, we have a syncer that comes along and checks everything in our interface against everything in the Google/MSN/Yahoo API's and makes sure things are up to snuff and the same.

The queue can be accessed through lots of tools, but we have a powerful database-side access for the info. I wrote lots of nifty little scripts to organize the data with access to the backend database so I can diagnose some of the keyword queue problems more effectively. We have an interface that the program managers and us can use to see the keyword queue, but sometimes it's necessary to run advanced queries at the source.

Since recycling and zapping stuff from the queue is sometimes risky business, the program managers don't have access to do those sorts of things. That responsibility lies with us.

That was something that just took up just a couple hours of my day. So, there. I spent the rest of my day writing some documentation for the checking cookies based on our system which allows the program managers to do some analysis themselves.

I also am taking on a pretty big project with Barnes and Noble that needs to verify all of our data files that get sent to them. It needs to make sure there are the right number of ID's, quantities, etc for each order and that all the arithmetic adds up. It needs to process thousands of orders, and if I do a good enough job it might just get stitched into the ConnectCommerce system so we don't have to do it externally.

Where did I go to lunch?

I'm not telling you.

Where did I get a glorious snack?

I'm not telling you that either.

What adventures did I embark on?

That's confidential.

How was my day?

Why should I tell you that?

What were my emotional inner thoughts?

I think you should know the answer to this one now...

How many winning lottery tickets did I have?

If I told you I would have to give you my money.

The Inconceivable Contradiction

Today I had the best gyro sandwich I've ever had in my life.

It was glorious.

It was mouth-watering.

It was a messy, sloppy, delicious mess.

It was a sensory overload of the perfect symphony of flavor.

It was a decadent pinnacle for which all fast food restaurants should stand by and embrace.

It was overflowing with meaty chunks of gyro meat, creamy cucumber sauce, spicy sauce, tomatoes, and onions stuffed into a grilled pita.

It was a spicy gyro at Max's Takeout for less than five bucks. I apologize for making this paragraph shorter than all the other paragraphs, which were increasingly growing in size.

Wait a minute! Just by saying that last sentence I increased the size of the previous paragraph to henceforth eclipse the one preceding it! By stating the fact of my apology, I conflicted the very reason for which the sentence itself was conceived!

Inconceivable!

Ahh!

Anyways...back to my thoughts about the gyro.

Oh the spicy flavor! Maybe it was the best gyro I'd ever had because I've never had a spicy gyro before, but then again I haven't seen many spicy gyro's advertised. And, it still is the best gyro I've ever had. So there.

To be honest, most of it (especially the white cucumber sauce) fell on my hand before it went into my mouth. As a result, it may have looked like I murdered a mayonnaise bottle with my bare hands after I was done eating it, but hey...I would murder a mayonnaise bottle any time of the day to eat one of those gyros again.

Then, when I got back to work, I conducted a taste test between Dr. Pepper and Cherry Coca-Cola.

Cherry Coca-Cola wins for its great, simple, cherry flavor, but Dr. Pepper also wins for its bold and sensitive (delicate, even) combination of flavors in sugary goodness.

I helped out the new guy again and some stuff, I felt important. I worked on figuring out some bugs, which turned out to be bugs that shouldn't ever be happening (well, bugs shouldn't ever happen anyways, but you know what I mean).

So, that was my day. I was the bug mastah...kinda.

No Body Hair

Today, half my group was gone. Everyone was trying to find things to do to pass the time. It was a slow, quiet day here at Performics.

There's another guy who is new who is like me where he doesn't have responsibilities yet, so he has to ask people for things to do. He talked with me about SAP applications and recommended that I program in .NET because that's where the demand is. We talked a little about websites, and educated each other about things we didn't know. So, that was a good conversation.

For lunch I met up with my friend Jonathan to go to the Taste of Chicago again. He and I got some really good Puertorican sandwich thing. It had a whole different taste I hadn't experienced before. Next I had some southern style jerk chicken, and I also had an Indian rice dish which I enjoyed. Yummy.

When I came back a nice, time-consuming, tedious interface task came up, so we coworkers divided it up amongst ourselves to tackle the problem as a group. When I finished, it was time to leave. Hurray.

Oh, when Jonathan and I were making our way to the Taste, we saw a huge line of about a dozen people on Segways.

Just one person on a Segway sends out the statement “Hey, look, I'm weird!.” A group of people on Segways says “Hey, look, we are being weird together!” A group of people on Segways all wearing super-bright reflective vests and meandering on and off the sidewalk gives the staement, “Hey, look, were a bunch of weird people who have no idea what we are doing!”

While I was thinking how weird those people looked, ironically I would have liked to have gotten to ride a Segway. If I had to wear a speedo and swimming goggles just to ride it, I'd still be up for it. Hey, when you step on those things you are automatically weird anyways, so does it really matter what you wear or what you look like? Hmm...this might be a good way to find a suitable excuse to shave off all my body hair.

I mean, would you think of a person any differently than if they were on a Segway and had hair versus someone on a Segway with no beard, hair, or eyebrows? I didn't think so.

Does anyone have a Segway I can borrow?

Lunch Duality

Today I fixed up one of my scripts for my boss, and did some other easier jobs throughout the day. I went to the Taste of Chicago at 10:45, to get there at 11:00 to beat the rush. It was a good move, and I tried some pretty interesting stuff there. I really liked it.

When I got back, I forgot that it was Tuesday! Free lunch! Ahh!

But...wait...what is better than a free lunch? Two lunches in one day!

So, that's what I did. Eating at the Taste of Chicago doesn't really fill you up much anyways. So, yay.

I considered sticking around for the huge July 3^rd fireworks display, but decided not to. I had to leave work early because all trains from 5PM-6PM were canceled, which made no sense to me. The train I was on took an HOUR ans TWENTY minutes to get to my stop. Ridiculous. It took every single stop on the way back and the isles were filled with standing people.

After that experience, I decided fireworks might be a bad idea. I talked to some friends who went to the fireworks display, and they said it was like a mass exodus of the entirety of the gates of Chicago. Millions of people flooded the streets to get out. Many of them to go on the train.

Superhuman reflexes

Yesterday I stepped on a nail during a semi-professional fireworks shoot I was helping out at. It went through my shoe and into my foot. Not into my shoe and through my foot. Important difference.

Luckily, because of my superhuman reflexes, I was able to prevent the nail from going through my entire foot. In one, less-than-graceful motion I fell immediately and whipped off my shoe. It kinda hurts when a rusty nail goes into your foot. I was carrying more fireworks to the shoot site, and of course they went flying because I was in a rush to get them there before the shoot started.

Yea, ow.

I did the shoot in a little pain, after the site cleanup and everything.

After I drove all the way home from Indiana, I was home at 1:00 AM and my mom told me to go to the ER to get it checked out. So I did.

After I finally got "admitted" to the hospital from the waiting room, there was this lady who had dimensia or hysteria or something. While I was waiting for an hour in my little area, she yelled “Help me” every three minutes or so. A nurse would come in, and there was nothing wrong with her besides the fact that she couldn't sleep. So, my tiredness at 2 AM mixed with the beeps and bleeps of the machinery, and an old lady yelling “Help me!” at the top of her lungs made that night a stressful one.

Finally a doctor looked at me, and they gave me a tetanus shot and cleaned up the area.

In any case, I was ready to go to bed at 4:30 AM. So, I notified my boss of my situation and said I was going to be a bit late.

So, that I was. I grabbed a quick Jimmy John's lunch on the way to work and did my duties for the day.