inTern Me Beautiful

Last Monday

2007-08-20T18:07:00.000-05:00

Today was my last group meeting ever. Hoorah. I worked on a query and I worked on a script and I tested and I wrote e-mails and I sent E-mails and I received E-mails

The conducter that walked by looked like he was straight out of the old west. Skin, tall, slender body type, aged face, discolored beard, narrow glasses, longer hair.

Anyways, that was kind of it. Feels weird only having a few days left.

Today I went to Siam Rice, a Thai Restaurant. I got “Thai Spaghetti”. I asked for it spicy, and it wasn't spicy at all, so I was unhappy about that. It was a little undercooked, the green beans were too raw and so were the carrots. If there's anything that ruins a stir fry its undercooked vegatables. The flavor was pretty good and the service was really fast, I got my noodles and stuff within 5 minutes. I would have rather waited to have a fully cooked meal first, however.

And that was my day. I sent out an e-mail to my group saying I was gone on Wednesday, and gave them my contact info in case a they had a runaway script or a question on one of them.

Last Friday

2007-08-17T18:03:00.000-05:00

Today was my last Friday at Performics this summer. I'm nearing the end.

I'm not going to give my “in retrospect” schpeil yet, but it has been a good time here at Performics.

Today was another intern's last day. Her name was Diane, and was part of the group that sat behind Sean, so right by me. We all went to Jamba Juice, then I went off to get another delicious spicy Gyro.

After that, well, that was that. I helped a guy figure out how to use my script (some scripts I just write for myself to do a task for someone) for future reference when I am gone.

Honestly, and I'm not trying to be boastful here, if it weren't for some of the scripts I developed, there would be times where people would be in a real predicament with loads of manual work to get the task done.

For instance, what I just worked on was fixing orders for CompUSA. Basically, things were changed, and orders needed to be updated. However, somewhere along the line, a specific order would be listed multiple times, once for each product that was in the order. If sent to our server, and there are multiple orders of the same order number submitted, they will just keep replacing themselves, and only the the latest one processed will exist on the server.

So, these orders needed to be “rolled up” into one line with all the pertinent data and with new order total amounts calculated. Doing this manually would be a huge chore, and getting the script request to engineering would have a long turnaround time. So, me being the script writer, it could be done quickly.

In combination with script writing, I've done custom query writing too – and this is all internally focused.

Maybe I could make a position for myself, “Internal Technical Assistant” or something. It's a thought.

Oh well, that was my day.

Super Intern Powers

2007-08-16T18:26:00.000-05:00

This glorious day I had the same work to do...and another “tedious” task from the Search side of things.

This guy gave me a huge list of over 400 links in which I had to search in Connect commerce, and click about 4 times to change something, each click taking about 10-20 seconds. That would have been a lot of time, and he was like “get back to me tomorrow”

HAH!

He expected me, the Dantern, to do that? I searched and asked me group, got a script to do the job, and finished the list in about 20 minutes, then e-mailed the guy back with “(Name), All Done.”

He sent back a surprised but half happy response. To him, I had super intern powers allowing me to be capable to perform such a feat.

I had hoped I would actually learn something doing this job shadowing than doing repetitive, mindless (well, not today...) tasks. I'd rather do many other things than do a task that any person at a computer could do.

I went to Monk's Pub today to get a burger for lunch. It was good. I'm not sure if I had to be 21 to be in there or not, but I heard the had good burgers, and they did...and I didn't order any beer. So, I think I'm in the clear on that one.

The rest of the day I wrote a custom script to help out this guy who had a CompUSA account messed up on multiple levels (nothing he did, just other people's errors compounded on other people's errors made a mess).

Something new?

2007-08-15T18:26:00.000-05:00

Well. Feedlab. Other script writing stuff. Coke rewards collecting. Lunch going. But...wait for it....waaaaiiiiit for it....something new! Oh boy!

Yes, I had e-mailed someone a while back about helping out (hopefully job shadowing) the Natural Search group.

Well, today, someone e-mailed me something to do. Well, I can't say that it was super exciting or something that made me learn anything, but, nevertheless, it was something new. I had an Excel file full of 300 MSN article URL's and titles, and had to write a keyword phrase for each one. That was it.

No shadowing, just typing.

I finished it pretty quickly, and e-mailed it off, and the guy seemed happy it was done.

I hope that isn't the only thing I'm doing for the Natural Search group, but I guess beggars can't be choosers.

Today I went to Taco Fresco and tried out all sorts of hot sauces on my chicken burrito. None of them were as spicy as I had hoped. Oh well.

Printer

2007-08-14T18:26:00.000-05:00

Today I did nothing new. Same thing. Feed Lab, miscellaneous keywordqueue tasks, and miscellaneous testing. You've heard the drill before.

I even had the same lunch...Tuesday lunch. You've heard that drill before.

I even got a coke reward code. You've heard that drill before too.

What was different was that the new printer we have on my side of the building started making a loud, incredibly annoying, high pitched wailing/squealing noise whenever someone printed something. I think it was one of the rollers.

It would just be going “Weeeerrrrrreeeeerrrrrrrreeeeerrrreeee” resonating through the office and my skull. Today people seemed to be printing lots of paper, so as a result I had lots of noise. Goodie.

Well, that's all.

Time Travel

2007-08-13T19:13:00.000-05:00

Today is a Monday. Therefore, all Mondays are fun. However, if your Monday is not fun, what day is it? Have you entered a subconscious vortex of the world as we know it? Do your brains explode? Do you get teleported to the year 1865?

Well, when I have an unfun Monday, I'll tell you.

And today...wasn't a fun Monday.

8/13/1865

G'day chaps. I aught to tell you about me day ther' today. At Ye Olde DoubleClicke Perfomics (It's where I work, Y'see), it be a Monday.

Today there on this Monday we had a meetin' of sorts. We all sat in chairs of black cow's skin and talked about stuff and the like.

After that, I was workin' on me 'puter on somethin' called uh Speed Lab. It's sort of a crippled program, see, and uses a high amount of me 'puter's CPU and memory! I jus' about challenged it to a sundown challenge I was so dem' der' frustrated with the darned thing.

While I wuz' a'messin with Speed Lab, I had a problem with a query, you see. A lad sent me one of them fancy electronic messages, y'see, and the report I generated for him wasn't quite about up to snuff.

After much time of depatin' and pleedin' with the database, I finally threatened the information I needed out of it. It wasn't pretty.

On this day fer' lunchtime, I walked many paces to Ye Olde Perry's for a Mad Moscow (half corned cow and half pastrami) sandwich. I just about died it was so good.

I jus' about better be goin' now.

Squishy Ball

2007-08-10T00:09:00.000-05:00

Today was Friday. Not a moment too soon.

Today I did more with the huge MSN script report thing I was doing for this guy. I worked on that and Feed Lab ( I mean Speed Lab) for the majority of the morning. Once I got the script into a workable state, it was a very “click and wait” mode of working for both the query and Feed Lab.

For lunch I went to “Eat and Drink” again, reviewed earlier in my blog. It is the little Chinese hut caboose thing on the side of the road that fresh cooks your food on two full Wok's. I went to Wallgreen's to get some cash, but the ATM machine was broken, so I bought some 99 cent cashews to get cashback from the cashier. A coworker of mine tried the ATM machine too, when I left I caught up with him and asked if he got cash, and he said he couldn't either. We found out we were both going to Eat and Drink to get some Chinese food.

Inside he didn't have any cash, and the minimum order for a credit card was $10, so it was a good thing I was there because I just paid for him and me in cash, and he paid me back later.

I got the Kung Po Chicken. Yum, it was good.

After Lunch, it was just waiting for the huge script files to all transfer over (I had to redo it a few times) between servers and for Feedlab to be done.

Our clickserver went down in the afternoon, meaning any link that generates us money wasn't working. So, that was an exciting moment to see everyone scramble to get it fixed. It was soon fixed within the hour.

And, how did I not tell you guys about this earlier. A few days ago, I was at Greg's desk asking him about stuff, and I found that he had a couple still-in-packaging squishy balls with the DoubleClick branding on them. These are coveted items.

I said “Woah where did you get these!?” And he was like “Do ya want one?”

SWEEEEEEEEEETTTTT. I now had a coveted squishy ball. If you squeeze it tightly enough it bubbles out from the corners of your hand, turning from green to translucent showing the innards of the ball. It kinda looks like crumbled blue cheese is in there. Very weird consistency.

I heard rumors of balls popping and spraying all over the place, but I'll take that risk. It's just so fun and habitual to squeeze it, start typing, squeeze it again, then toss it up and down while I think of my next master plan in the perl or the query I'm writing.

Yippee!

Speedlab

2007-08-09T22:54:00.001-05:00

Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooork.

So, I had the worst task ever today. Feedlab. People have affectionately called it “Speedlab.” What I was doing with it took all day. That's all I need to say.

I went to lunch at Ricobene's. They are famous for Breaded Steak. So, I went to get an “Original Breaded Steak.” There was a size below it called something else, but I figured I was a man and could handle the “regular” size. I didn't want some small half size thing.

When I got this thing, it was a wrapped foil...thing the same length and width of a small fire extinguisher. I'm not kidding. When the guy handed me the tray it was at least 5 pounds of pure meat.

It looked like a giant sandwich. Upon opening it, it looked like a sandwich, but upon further inspection it was just a slice of fluffy French bread on top of folded breaded steak with mozzarella cheese, peppers, and marinara sauce covering the whole thing. Breaded steak is usually huge with the average thickness averaging ¼ of an inch, so this breaded steak was folded rolled up from the middle to resemble the size and shape of a very long sub sandwich.

The first bite was a delicious combination of spicy marinara sauce, cheese, fluffy and chewy French bread, flavorful and spicy peppers, and savory breaded steak. It was awesome...after a while.

When I finished a half of the sandwich, the feeling in my stomach is what I would consider “considerably satisfied and filled.” But there was HALF of this thing left.

I pressed on.

When I was almost done with my sandwich, I overhead some guys saying that the police were Chicago's biggest gang because they could do whatever they wanted. Weird people.

Then, I finished. I would say that my stomach was “feelin' it” when I was done. But it was oh so good.

I do admit, the flavor combination did get a little simplified and uninteresting a little under half way through, but a man never can deny a mound of savory meat sitting before him.

Anyways, after I waddled my way back to work, I had a query that generated a data file totaling over 1 GB. It was a very...um...fun moment when I discovered notepad, Word, Notepad++, and even the server side vim program couldn't open the file. They all gave me very terrified, scared, and bewildered error messages.

In my fruitless attempts to split up the file, I determined that I had to regenerate it. Oh well, that's for tomorrow.

It already took long enough figuring out what the people wanted in between me fiddling around with Speedlab...err..Feedlab.

I need a callsign, so I'll make up one.

Danny boy three-oh-seven-five-oh-two-niner supdawg yeah zoom wizzle pop....OUT!

The Hand Slap

2007-08-08T22:53:00.000-05:00

Today was a stressful day of lots of work. One of our new guys took the day off, so I took over his “job” of doing orderupdates that I did in the past. I hate doing orderupdates.

Before, we had tried to outsource this task, and all the program managers were aware that we had someone from India, not in the office, sending orderupdate e-mails containing status reports. Usually, it was pretty bad English followed by an error message, followed by a an Indian name.

This new guy we have working for us is Indian, and it was a little humerous to see that he sent emails almost the EXACT same way as the outsourcing e-mails. At first glance, I would think to myself, “Oh, that's the outsourcing dude sending us e-mails again.” Then, I'd check at the name and it would be our coworker.

I asked the lady that usually is the “boss” of them or whatever, and she said she had to actually call certain people to say, “No, this guy is really in the office.”

That was a funny moment.

I went to lunch at Jamba Juice. Yep, just got the biggest all-fruit smoothie. It was good.

While I was walking around for lunch, it was quite apparent that it was a hot day in Chicago. The back of my hand slapped the back of an oncoming girl's hand, and it was a disgusting, wet backhand slap of skin against skin. Sick.

Then, we had a guy come down and ask me to make a custom report. He's a guy from upstairs, not a tech guy but sometimes bothers our group for information.

Anyways, he said he wanted every link that had an “inactive” status. So, me and one of the other senior guys from our group couldn't find any inactive, but we stumbled upon lots with the status of “deleted” which he'd never seen before.

So, I quickly asked my boss why things would be deleted...so he goes looking at that.

Then the dude comes back downstairs to talk, then my boss walks all the way over to where he's talking to the senior guy in my group, and it was a weird conversation of “Why do you need this report?” “Can't you just do it this way?” “But why does that make sense?”

We found out that the guy actually wanted “deleted” links, but initially he called them “inactive”, so if we knew that we could have saved a lot of time.

I didn't understand why I couldn't just write the query and let everyone stop worry about why he needed it.

Whatever.

That's what I ended up doing, and spent time to get it right with all the data he wanted. That was my day...

Lady

2007-08-07T22:45:00.000-05:00

Today I directly worked with a manager person. She needed a special script/query/report run daily to tell her if any orders were bugging out for a certain client.

She had pretty specific requirements like she knew exactly what she wanted in the report. I sent her a sample of the report, and she was confused. She called me and asked, “what am I looking at here.” So I walked through with her and figured out what she wanted and what technical things I needed to implement in the script.

The phone call went well and I think she appreciated how I walked her through the technical requirements of the report while trying to match it up with the expectations of the report.

That was the highpoint of the day. Oh, yea, it was pizza Tuesday

Hooray

2007-08-06T21:05:00.000-05:00

Scripts scripts, more scripts, and then some keyword queue. The work for the day. Yah. Then we had an all company meeting talking about strategist reports for our clients. It interested me a bit. I had to leave early to claim the monthly pass I left on the train. Hooray.

Today I had a graceful moment. I stood up pretty quickly to go talk to someone, and in the process my right foot got wrapped around the front right the leg of my chair. Since it's on wheels, it moved with my leg, but in the process I tripped a little and grabbed onto wooden backrest for support. As a result, the chair swung to the right and forward around my leg, then slammed into my wooden desk. It made a very large wood-on-wood clapping bang noise. Everyone in the office kind of poked their heads out and looked at me. Hooray.

I went to lunch at Estelle's Kitchen and had an Italian Beef Sandwich. It is a classic Mom and Pop diner because only Mom and Pop run it! They make everything right before you, even my beef and fries.

The beef had great flavor with the peppers, the fries had a good flavor, but it made it better that it was such personal service. I didn't even order a drink and the lady kindly gave me a cup of water with my meal, and got me a plastic fork and napkin even though they were within arms reach of where I was. So, I'll probably go back there because it is a happy place.

Later in the day one of my coworkers dropped a hard plastic water bottle and it bounced loudly on the ground. I jokingly commented, “Hey, you made a noise too!” They replied, “Yea, but not as loud as you!”

Hooray.

Hooray?

Yes.

Hoo.

Ray.

Day off

2007-08-03T21:04:00.000-05:00

I took the day off because my grandpa needed help with some stuff.

Same old.

2007-08-02T21:03:00.000-05:00

I went to Perry's (again) and got the "Perry's Favorite" sandwich on rye. Corned beef, Russian sauce, and coleslaw. It was amazingly good.

Otherwise, it was the same old of things to do at work.

Credit Card Debt

2007-08-01T20:32:00.000-05:00

I went to this bakery place for lunch. It was alright. They didn't use the special "Texas Jalepeno cheese bread" that was supposed to come with my sandwich so I was mad. The satisfactory level went way down.

Thereafter, since I was still hungry, I went to Jamba Juice. Yummy.

I have $59 that the credit card company owes me, so it feels good. Yay. How often do people have credit card debt where the credit card company actually owes them money?

I do!

My stash

2007-07-31T20:22:00.000-05:00

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!

2007-07-30T20:19:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-19T19:37:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-18T18:06:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-17T18:05:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-16T21:44:00.001-05:00

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

2007-07-13T21:43:00.000-05:00

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!

2007-07-12T21:42:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-11T21:41:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-10T19:48:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-07-09T22:11:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-06T19:30:00.001-05:00

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

2007-07-05T19:54:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-03T19:53:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-02T19:48:00.000-05:00

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.

Cheezborger

2007-06-29T19:44:00.000-05:00

Today was a long day.

Sean got annoying today. He decided to read his e-mails and his e-mail responses to the entire office. He was in a very talkative mood.

I worked on the custom script I was working on for Mike, deciding how to combine multiple queries, save data from previous queries, etc.

At 11:15 Sean expressed the desire to go to lunch because he was hungry. I mentioned I was going to the original Billy Goat Tavern. It was a bit of a walk, and he said he didn't want to go. So, 5 minutes later, I got up and left.

I called my friend Dan (thankfully he doesn't have the same last name as I do) and we met up at the Billy Goat for lunch. We got there right before all the tourists got there, which was nice. All the other restaurants I go to serve hardcore lunch-going-businessmen clientèle. The original Billy Goat is in the middle of tourist town on Michigan Ave.

The food was great, though. I got a Triple Cheezborger...how it's spelled. Probably the best burger in the city.

Back to work. Sean exclaims in his bellowing voice “DUDE! Where WERE you?!?”.

“Uh...I went to lunch”

“Dude...I wanted to go!!!”

“You said you didn't”

“I can't believe you stood me up!”

He went on. And on. And on....and on about it. For about a half hour he had intermittent spasms of vocal tirades about me standing him up for lunch. Apparently even though the entire office could hear him, he had to bring it up again...and again every time one of his coworkers walked by. I got good at staring at my computer screen today. I didn't want myself to be responsible for annoying the office.

Anyways, I got a good amount of work done and had a nice big project (the script for mike with keywords) to do. Since it was a script that I thought up of doing, I kind of directed myself on it. I also had to run other queries and stuff throughout the day. Yippee.

Tired

2007-06-28T23:15:00.001-05:00

Today was productive. I went out of my way to write a script for a situation I thought necessary. The guy I wrote it for was happy.

My boss started me on the documentation for writing Knowledge Base (KB) articles. So, to train to write for the KB, I was reading articles on the KB about the KB. Unfortunately, we hit a wall because I'm the first person in the GTS Performics group to start writing for the KB. So, once that gets going it should give me some nice responsible stuff to do. Right now, I have intermittent projects that often times get hung up on things and I have to wait for some step to be done to start again. Most of the time I have enough things to do to fill up a day, but other times I have to bug people to get stuff to do. So, that will be nice because I'll get something that I'll be responsible for.

So, in any case, we had hot dogs served up for lunch. Yummy.

I'm tired.

Wednesday

2007-06-27T23:14:00.000-05:00

So, Wednesday. Things to do, things to do.

Yesterday I found a pretty significant bug in the Connect Commerce system. I won't say what it is, but I felt pretty accomplished finding it. It's not something someone would use in the way I was all that often, so that's why I probably found it. Kinda got that escalated today.

I went to salad spinners today. Kinda part of my “bla” day. It was gloomy and rainy on the walk to the train. Some of the movie trailers were missing, too. Hum, ho.

Yep.

Green Grass

2007-06-26T19:34:00.001-05:00

Today I had lots of things to do. I sent out my infamous “Intern for Hire” e-mail and thus, work poured in.

Today, to aid company-company relations, I was one of 30 to eat lunch at the Google location in Chicago – only a few blocks away. Several groups were allowed to go over, and mine was today.

They had a very fun, bubbly atmosphere, and they actually had a chef to cook for their small office! The food was good, and free. Amazing.

What was even MORE amazing was that they had a BETTER coffee machine than us – it was an automatic Espresso machine. *envy*

They also had a HUGE selection of drinks, and a selection of free goodies like candy, individual popcorn bags, and energy bars. One of the drink refrigerators (there were 4) had “Naked Juice” in it. Probably the freshest juice available, they tell you what fruit goes into the little plastic bottle, as well as some added ingredients (natural, like plants and stuff) to boost the nutritional value of the drink.

I discovered this after eating, so I took two to go...out of Google. Stealing? No. Borrowing? Kind of.

I drank my “Red Machine” drink first, which was good. My “Green Machine” drink consisted of two apples, ½ of a kiwi, banana, pineapple, and something else. After drinking it, I realized that some of the booster ingredients were broccoli, spinach, blue-green algea, wheat grass, and barley grass. Apparently they were saving me the trouble of going outside and grazing like a cow.

Moo?

I bet my breath tasted funny after drinking that, it wasn't too bad though, just a little...grassy.

On the topic of Google, many of you may have noticed that I have Google Adwords ads on the sides of my site. I put them there by choice, to make a little bit of money (so far I've made a whopping $1.10). They display ads based on what I put in this blog. I've found ads about Hot dog stands, catering services, mexican rugs, mucus (guess which post that came from), and – honest to goodness – an ad for an “Are you Gay?” quiz. I didn't know my posts were dabbling on that fine line, but now I know...I guess.

So, in an attempt to give Adwords some randomness, craziness, and utmost confusion, I'm going to write about things that relate to absolutely nothing, not even themselves. Observe my off-the-wall imaginary Google-ads messing upper writing:

Green pants and Ham. Sam I Am? Green pants and Ham! Sean got his little squishy green ball stuck on the ceiling – Green balls and ham...I am? Have you seen sam? Or his ham? What about Fred. Is he Dead? What kind of casket did he have? Was it blue, polka-dotted, or purple? What were his last words? What was on his gravestone..tombstone? Green caskets and Ham...is Sam.

Butterflies! The colorful, wonderful, rainbow creatures of the earth. Caterpillars! The inch worms that aren't really an inch. Should I measure them? Maybe. Do I need a laser-guided ruler? Maybe. Lasers? Laser POINTERS? Laser MISSILES? Laser guns? Laser drawings? Bright Lasers! I know! Green Lasers and Ham! Point out the best parts of your ham with your new GREEN laser pointer! Or, you could point out Sam! Green lasers on Sam! Sam, say your name. “Sam I am!”

Trains, Plains and Automobiles. Lions, Tigers, and Bears, Oh My! I see London I see France...what color are your underpants? Green underpants and ham! Have you any Green underpants and Sam? Does Ham? Ham I Am?

MP3 players, Computers, and Cell Phones, Oh my! Conquering the universe, oh yes! Binary bits of programmable goodness drive their power. And with that p wer t ey ca do ce ain t..i..... D. ja s ?

My brain shut down. I cannot write abstractly anymore. I'm feeling really weird after that grass drink. Like, really weird. Grass is a slang term for marijuana, do you think they know the difference? I sure do...err...hope so. Bleh.

Office Neutrality

2007-06-25T18:56:00.000-05:00

Today, I finished up the Perl script for my boss. Got it cranking out Excel files, and almost cranking out automatic e-mails with all the excel files attached. Whoopie. Thats the work I did today.

I went to Burrito Beach today for lunch. It was a pretty good burrito. I got there before the rush. It was a little smaller than a Chipotle burrito, with a little fresher taste, but different. I think I like Chipotle better. Was cheap too, only $5. I did enjoy the habenero hot sauce they had on the table. Yummy.

Sean was kind of depressed today. He didn't giggle, talk to himself, or bellow out elations of joy to the entire office at all today.

We did make an official “Neutral Garbage Can” zone between our desks. When I came on the job, he had the garbage can on his side, but after many large gestures, much heated debating, and lots of back-to-back bickering sessions, we decided that the Neutral Garbage Can idea was indeed a good solution. Both of us had to reach equally far to throw stuff into the garbage can. On top of this, the garbage can is in a neutral position to the walkway we are next to.

This way, our garbage can was available to one and to all – the most sharing, caring, and personal garbage can in the entire office. I was a proud parent. I even hung a little Post-it note chain consisting of three post it notes stuck on to each other in a downward fashion. “Neutral Garbage Can” was written on the top sticky note, and an array of arrows were drawn down the other two sticky notes, giving the garbage can an inviting, kind, and friendly aura about itself.

Now, no longer will people have to walk the extra 20 feet to find the next neutral garbage can. Now passers-by have the great luxury and delight of pleasuring themselves by saving 20 feet of consciously carrying their light, small, and yet extremely burdensome trash with them. Now people can seek the immediate relief and comfort of throwing away their garbage at our Neutral Garbage Can location.

Some people might call this bravery, heroism, going beyond the call of duty, or even an unnecessary charity to the world.

I just call it doing my job. The world can thank me later.

The Dark Knight

2007-06-22T19:24:00.001-05:00

So, today, I did a lot of writing the script. Yea.

Sean had lots of trouble with his phone today. Let me act it out for you. Kinda.

*phone rings*

*Sean puts on the headset microphone*

“This is Sean”

*Sean fumbles with the phone, and takes the phone off the hook*

“This is Sean”

*Sean presses buttons on the microphone headset controls*

“This is Sean”

*Sean presses another button*

“This is Sean...Oh hi!....”

I laughed.

Then, for lunch, I went on an adventure. I went to find Mr. Beef, in hopes of getting a fantastic Italian Beef. It was North of the loop again, so more west, which incidentally was a more grungy “urban” area than the loop.

When I got there I ordered a “dry beef sweet and hot with juice” In non-Chicagoan language, that's an Italian Beef with dry bread ( not soaked in juice meat), sweet peppers, hot peppers, and a little juice on top.

I got it To Go, then walked around to find a “park,” deemed impossible from the lady I ran into yesterday. I walked west. Eventually, I found large groups of black people standing around, leaning on buildings, and all staring at me. It was then I decided that I was giong in the wrong direction, and after I rounded the corner I went back to the east.

It was then I ran into Moody Bible Institute, which did have a nice little park/eating area. HAH!

The beef sandwich was good, but not the best I've had. The beef flavor was excellent, however it didn't have the savory “kick” given by a combination of good culinary spices. Also, the sweet peppers just tasted like a green pepper, not marinated or anything, and the hot peppers weren't that hot. I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Also, one of my friends was working there, so I called him up and we met up for a few minutes. He showed me where he worked, and I even got a doughnut out of the deal! Yummy.

The rest of the day I was doing some little Keyword Queue tasks, more script stuff, and then I had no less than 24 credit cards to apply to for Citi bank. That was fun. The more fun part is that only some of them were tracking properly, and I had to try to figure out why they weren't. Ugh.

In the midst of Citi testing, Sean was like, “Dan.”

“Huh?”

“Wanna get a Slurpie?”

“Mmmkay”

So, we did. Hooray.

I don't know if any of you know this, but they are filming Batman: The Dark Knight in Chicago, and it's a huge deal. If you don't know, it's the sequel to the film “Batman Begins.”

On the way back from work to the train, there is a parking lot with all of the trailers for anyone in the movie. There are also kinda temporary ones parked near the curb on the street. I looked for the names of famous people on the street trailers, but couldn't see anyone. Don't feel like trespassing in the parking lot.

There are also lights all over the sidewalks that are pointed at buildings. They aren't “on” but there are dudes in yellow shirts that say “security” on them. I guess they are the keepers of the lights.

Anyways, there are a bunch of pink signs taped on to poles letting the crew, extras and actors know where to go. They read things like “SET, LUNCH, BREAKFAST, RESTROOMS, EXTRAS HOLDING AREA”

Sean and I passed the Signs pointing to the building that said “Set” I said I wanted to check it out. When you went in the building, it was just an elevator room, so I decided to get my Slurpie first.

I got my Slurpie, and on the way back I said bye to Sean (who was too chicken to go explore the set of a movie) and I went into the elevator. I had passed this little building so many times, and I was really curious, and I wasn't going to be a sissy and wimp out on something that would be neat to see. What are they going to do to me, tell me to leave?

In the elevator there was this huge sign “effective today, you need your crew ID's to get on the set” Yada Yada Yada. The “SET” was taped over the 6^th floor and 7^th floor buttons. To be honest, I was a little chicken at first, so I built up my courage by pressing floors 4, 5 instead. When 4 opened, I realized it was just a parking garage because I could see cars. So, I got off on the 5^th floor and explored.

The parking garage spiraled around and around like normal parking garages. In the center, however, there was a tightly spinning ramp for a quick way down from the top level. So, at about the 5^th floor, that inner area was open to the sky.

As I was walking up, I saw a yellow-shirted security dude in the inner section. I hid behind a car and waited for him to pass, then continued walking where the 6^th floor just started. I saw a some equipment that looked like a reel. This piece of equipment was right by the ledge overlooking the inner area of the parking garage, with a strong looking cable going to what looked to be the top floor of the parking garage.

After I walked forward, another security dude was looking in a car, then saw me and came up to me and called me Sir. He directed me to the stairwell and told me to go away.

Stairwell eh? Why didn't I think of this before! I just walked up to the 6^th level, then the 7^th level. I looked out of the top floor window, and on the roof of the parking garage there was all this equipment. I snapped a few pictures on my cell phone to prove my existence there.

Out from the window I could see the entrance of the swirly inner ramp on the top floor, and the men were building some ramp thing near buy it. I couldn't get a good look because their was equipment all over and I was peering through a small, dirty window, but I still got to see the set. There was a yellow-shirted security dude walking around, I think he almost saw me, but I was too stealthy-like for him.

I went down to the 4^th floor and started walking down, then saw another stairway. I decided to go up that one.

When I got to the 6^th floor, saw a huge theater light with the tripod on the stairs. There was what looked like a projector screen. The projector screen was positioned against the wall in such a way that the lamp's light bounced off it and illuminated the whole area. If you were looking outside into the stairwell, you would see the that the stairwell was illuminated, but you couldn't see the projector screen. I squeaked past the tripod and all the thick cords and peered out the 7^th floor window, which was really dirty, so I couldn't see much. There was some guy's coffee just sitting there so I was nervous someone would come, so I wasn't there for long.

I did look out the window in the stairwell though to see outside. I noticed that from the perspective of the stairwell, all the buildings surrounding this building had lights positioned around them on the ground. I guess they want to light up all the buildings to make it look neat, so this must be a pretty big scene.

It was really fun to see that though. Just remember, if you see a rooftop scene in on the top of a parking garage and there is an illuminated stairwell, your friend Dan was in that stairwell at some point in time!

That was my day. It was memorable.

I need to get a yellow shirt.

I have a drinking problem.

2007-06-21T18:37:00.001-05:00

So, today. So much happened. Not really at work, but so much happened.

So, to start the morning off was an all-hands meeting. This mean that everyone in the company packs themselves into rooms to all huddle around a solitary conference speaker and projector to watch the CEO go through stuff. After the meeting is over, it is akin to “opening a can of sardines” Everyone was out of there in a second flat.

After that, it was time for lunch. It was a long meeting. So, I didn't have any cash, and had less than $20 in my bank account so I couldn't go to the ATM. I have a good amount of money in my savings account, and I was expecting a paycheck from work to come in to my checking account, so yea.

I just wanted to get cash back on my credit card at Walgreens, so I just grabbed the first cheap thing I saw in sight and got it. It happened to be a Pop Rocks fruit roll up. I went and checked it out at the register, and discovered I couldn't get cash back from my credit card. Oh well. I stuffed it in my pocket and went on.

I decided to walk and find a good place to eat. I ended up walking north, towards the tourist part of the city. The place with the huge McDonalds, Hard Rock Cafe, Rainforest Cafe, Harry Caray's, etc etc. All too expensive. Everything down there was at least $13-$15 for a good meal. For lunch, no less.

So, I stumbled across Sam's Grille, and got an Italian beef to go.

Then, I tried to find a place to sit down and eat. Apparently, in that part of the city, no one is concerned with sitting down. There are no places to sit. No benches, no nice little planter boxes, no nothing. I didn't feel like impaling my buttocks on the 3-foot-tall black fences that went around almost every imaginable planter box and tree, so I pressed on in search of a suitable bench to rest my legs and have a good little lunch.

No such luck. I a decided to start asking people where a “park” was, and the first lady laughed when I asked her, so I stopped asking people after the first person. What an adventure.

I ended up sitting down and eating in the huge McDonalds. As soon as I bit into my Italian Beef, I discovered that it was...

...filled with maggots.

No, just kidding. I found it to be filled with medeocracy. It wasn't good, and it wasn't awful. It tasted like Italian Beef, but on the other hand it also tasted like some mystery meat which had been reheated in the microwave for way too long.

Ho-Hum. I thought the fries would save the day, but they were a soggy, kinda chewy lump of fried potatoes. Blech. Oh well, live and learn. Only get Italian Beef at a place where the line is out the door.

This area didn't really feel like the cozy downtown area I worked in, it felt like an open, less organic, more contrived part of the city to lure people in. As I was pondering this thought to myself while sitting there in McDonalds, I saw a tour bus reading “See the city” on the side and it was filled with people. When it unloaded, it was like a mass exitus of a really bad amature paparazzi class. Teens were awkwardly angling their cell phones at buildings in hopes of an actual recognizable image being captured on their cell phone, grown adults were spinning around while pointing at stuff, and grandmas were rapidly spinning the clicking wheels on their disposable cameras in a mad fury against time. It was like the city of Chicago itself was going to drop off the planet at any second, never to be seen by mankind ever again. Folks, the buildings aren't moving...and if they are it's gotta be pretty dang windy in the Windy City. Take your time...man.

When I got back to work, I worked on a new script my boss gave me, and started going more advanced Keyword Queue management. Yay.

Also in the afternoon, they were doing construction, so the whole floor resonated with the buzz of a jackhammer. After the first blast of vibration and noise, a guy stood up and said, “Hey, did anyone hear that?”

So, I was talking with my boss and leaning against his cubicle, and as I walked away I felt the urge to feel my back pocket...and lo and behold...THE POP ROCKS FRUIT ROLLUP! Glorious! So, I rushed back to my desk, opened it, rolled open the fruit rollup, poured the pop rocks on the fruit rollup, rolled the fruit rollup back up (say that 10 times fast) and ate it. It was awesome. Kinda like a pop rocks burrito, except it was all candy. And, it fizzled and popped in my mouth. So, that was pretty much my mini happy moment of the day.

Yea, and I have a drinking problem. So, I'm in a dazed mood and drinking my Sprite Zero. Well, I didn't drink it quite yet. When I attempted to drink it, I spilled all over myself. What happens is, I tilt the can before it gets to my mouth. I mean, what normal person keeps the can perfectly level UNTIL it gets to their mouth, then tips it? It's like torture for a split second, you gotta wait until you are “allowed” to tip it.

Well...actually, normal people do that when the pop can is full. I'm not normal so I don't. I guess since I was engaging in a dead-on blank staring contest with my monitor (also accompanied by a dazed and confused mindset), I forgot to use my brain power to realize that the can was indeed full. So, I tipped the can before it reached my lips, pouring Sprite Zero everywhere. At least it didn't get my socks wet. I am still wondering how you can forget to use your brain since your brain does the forgetting, but whatever.

Sean (side note: does anyone read that in their brain as “Seen” instead of Shawn? I do...) saw me as I was wiping the mess up with my hands, and I said “It's just water with chemicals...not gonna hurt anything.” He replied, “That's what we all are...just water and chemicals.”

Yup, I have a drinking problem. I spill a lot. I guess I should go to Spiller's Anonymous.

The Dantern

2007-06-20T18:38:00.000-05:00

I am affectionately called the “Dantern” by a friend of Sean's. He works on the same team as him so he comes and visits sometimes.

Oh yea, yesterday I took the CRM training course. Customer Relationship Management it's called. The system seemed kind of a nuisance, and the lady didn't know what she was talking about, kept bumbling through the system and was constantly writing down things that “she didn't know” to ask someone else. She was filling in for someone else, so I guess that was OK. I still learned about the system, in it's infantile beta stages anyways.

Anyways, I finished the script for my boss today. Perl is really nice because if there are scripts out there that do what you like, you can open them up and look at the source code to see how they did it. That was helpful to connect to databases. Hurray.

Basically the Perl script ran a series of queries that grabbed stuff from the database, and output it into a format that into files the way that they were needed with header file data, things properly tabulated, etc.

I think I may have to put in some FTP functionality, so that would be nice.

I had soup and a sandwich from a bakery. Both were good, but nothing to write home about. The sandwich was really hard to eat because if I ate a normal bite and pulled away with the sandwich, all the veggies would get pulled out. I would have to bite and keep on grinding/chewing until the veggies were separated from the sandwich. So, that was annoying.

The soup was very fresh, and had lots of spices in it, but I think it banked on being fresh than adding some holding power to it. The flavor got a little old after a while.

Pomegranate

2007-06-19T21:30:00.001-05:00

Today I started the day with some pomegranate juice. Mmmm. After reading around on their website, I found that it had more antioxidants than red wine! Impressive.

So, today was the last day I had to do any OrderUpdates. It was officially being outsourced. Hooray!

Today I worked on writing a script for my boss. It was doing some things I hadn't done before, so that was good, I was learning.

Today was “two slice Tuesday.” And by now I've gotten up to the point where I'm violating that rule threefold. When I came and sat down one younger guy was like, “Woah, intern...really loadin' up there!” That I did. That I did...

And, that was kinda it. I did some tasks for people did, lots of site testing and dealing with the keyword queue. Yea, that was kind of it. Sean laughed a lot today.

Monday

2007-06-18T19:29:00.000-05:00

So I've officially been working here for a month. Yipidee doo da day.

I caved and went to Perry's again today. The sandwich was amazing, so it was worth it.

Today I kinda just did stuff. Yea. I'm writing a script for my boss tomorrow, that's exciting. Things to do. All I really did today was do Order Updates. Tedious work that needs to be outsourced.

Okay, it's Monday. Don't feel like writing much. So, there.

Graffiti

2007-06-15T18:27:00.000-05:00

I missed the train today. So, I was a little late. I took the train with all the train noobies on it. I think I was the only one with a monthly pass. Pfft. Amatures.

Oh well, I strolled in and no one really noticed. One of my coworkers who gives me lots of stuff to do was gone (from wednesday) and today was half day friday so at 12 everyone was gone except one newer coworker and my boss. So, I didn't have a whole lot to do.

For lunch I ate the other half of my deep dish pizza. I think the microwave sucked all the flavor out of it, but hey, it was pizza.

I did have a 1 on 1 meeting with my boss and we went over what I was doing and stuff. This was his first week back after being gone a week, so he was a little crunched so he couldn't really give me a lot of work to do. I didn't complain :-).

He did go over what I would be doing...I'd have plenty to do. Documentation updates, and I'd take some training classes where he said to have those things on my resume was “golden”. I believe it was CSM. Client something Management. Of course, something wasn't in the name, and I'm not even sure if the acronym was CSM, but I'm taking a training session on it. He also is getting us in on the DoublelClick Client Summit, with a keynote speaker who wrote Freakanomics.

Today I did some Order Updates, which is horrendously tedious, but sometimes I can get very creative with my messages. Basically, people submit orders that need to be updated, and since we are some of the few that have backend database access, we run them. One of my messages read something to the effect of, “I'm happy to report that all of your orders have successfully made friends with our database. Congratulations!”

Soon enough, the day was over. When I was walking out, for some reason the motion detector didn't detect me, and the door wouldn't unlock. So I was sitting there shaking this glass door, then pressed the red “Panic” button next to the door which unlocks them. Hah! I escaped. You can't keep me in here over the weekend! No siree! Not happnin'! Not a chance! No way Jose! Don't bet your beans on it Sally! Say it again Sam! Don't even think aaaabaaaat it! Can't keep a wild animal caged! The Drazbanian Devil will not be withheld by a simple inch thick glass door with metal handles and a red panic button to unlock it! I'm going to escape! You better believe it! And I'm excited about escaping! I really am!

Hey! Look at the cool graffiti drawings on the side of the freight train cars...they are almost like works of art. All colorful with intricate cool designs. Hmm. Maybe the lower class of gangs are receding into the stone age of drawing things on the wall. Poor Human Race.

It's Friday...and...Meesa goiiin hoooome!

Booger

2007-06-14T18:26:00.001-05:00

Today was the same old. So I'll spare you the grief and not say much about it.

I did go to Giordano's pizza, however. It was good. I've never had Giordano's Chicago-style Deep Dish before, but, I still liked it. Maybe not as much as Pizzeria Uno/Due, but it still was quality Chicago pie.

If you want a story, I'll tell you a story. When I got out of the train in the morning I sniffled my nose especially hard and choked on a rock-hard booger. There's your story. Let your imagination wander.

Did I make a loud guttural choking noise? Did people around me gasp and gaze in awe? Did I have a heart attack? Am I still choking on it now? Who knows.

Fashion Jeans for Me

2007-06-13T18:23:00.000-05:00

Today was boring.

I did some search SQL stuff.

I did some testing for websites.

I did some keyword queue clearing for our Paid Search synchronization with Google, Yahoo, and MSN's API.

And that's what I did.

For lunch, I went to BomBon, a Mexican restaurant that doesn't serve burritos. They serve mexican sandwiches. Essentially, burrito filling in between mexican bread. They were called some four letter word beginning with 'T'. I forget the name. All I know is, it wasn't worth the money. It tried to be “fancy” but in the end, wasn't worth it. I mean, it was good, but nothing spectacular, nothing out of the ordinary.

One sort of interesting thing happened. I did a test for DJ Premium, a clothing line. The Program Manger for this client didn't really know what she was doing, because she wanted me to test an order just because the website didn't get any affiliate sales for two days. So, away I went with testing. It was hard for me to find something cheap to buy, jeans averaged at plus $100 prices, some reading $475. If you want to pay $475 for a single pair of jeans, something is wrong with you.

Anyways, I placed a test order. The dummy credit card number (4111111111111111) wouldn't work, but one of our company credit cards for testing orders (3928371952193749) worked. You thought you would get lucky and I would be dumb enough to type out a credit card, didn't you. Well, today isn't your lucky day.

Within an hour I got a confirmation e-mail that the order SHIPPED. Of course, the name is Test Tester, but it shipped in under an hour which was impressive turnaround time. I told the Program Manager to cancel the order as soon as I placed the order, but obviously it couldn't get canceled that fast.

After I told the PM that the order had actually shipped, she said she tried e-mailing her company contact and then told me to call the company to cancel. Why do I have to call?!? She's the contact for the client. Whatever. So, I called, the voice message machine told me in a friendly message that I was “first in line” to talk to a representative, but obviously no one was there because I was stuck listening to bad rap music with dubbed out swear words for 15 minutes. Then I hung up. Then I called the company again, found out the order had indeed left the building (like Elvis) and we would have to send it back. Our administrative guys immediately reject packages that are listed with the name “Test Tester” anyways, but it's just an annoying process to go through, especially because all of this was unnecessary.

Whatever. I guess I might have a chance to try on some designer jeans. O boy

Caffeine buzz

2007-06-12T18:37:00.000-05:00

This morning I decided to try out Ronny's Steak (and something or another for the rest of the name) House for the 4.99 breakfast special. Steak, eggs, hash browns, and texas toast. What a deal. The hash browns were more like seasoned potatoes, after a while the seasoning on them got a little overwhelming, but the steak was tasty and the eggs were good. I've never had good steak for breakfast before, and now I had.

I went to one U of P class where the presenter wasn't the best in the world, and I already knew the material. So, it was a test of my patience.

Again, I had little assignments from people. One lady was leaving for the afternoon, so I took over a repetitive job for her. It helped a little bit for me to grasp what these data files I was editing did – they really just were direct inputs into the backend of our servers and other client's servers.

I did some testing for ralphlauren.com, one of our clients, too.

I wrote some more Perl for a new script that did something similar to what I had done before. So, that really wasn't a challenge. Just brushed up on technique. Yesterday, a guy from development talked with me and lent me a Perl book to look at. I haven't had time to look at it yet, but I will soon.

“Two slice Tuesday” was good as usual. It starts to taste the same and the eating time seems to not last as long, but it's always good.

That pretty much occupied my entire day. I put off writing another SQL query e-mail, mostly because I had more “time sensitive” things to complete.

I got the results of my Quixtar script and how it helped. My coworker (half boss, I guess) told me that it was “#*#(@ awesome.” He said it really helped and this was the first monthly report they had 0 errors when sending reports to this huge client. That was pretty cool to know that my scripts really are getting use.

And, that was my day.

Funny, even though my boss is here I really don't need to “go” to him for work. People just kind of meander over to me or send me e-mails, and I know what to do. I guess I'm getting the hang of this whole workplace thing.

While I walked out, I stopped by the Starbucks in the building to pick up an iced latte. Yum. Usually places are pretty empty around dinner time, and starbucks was no exception. While I was waiting to get my coffee, the guy behind the counter pointed to an iced caramel latte on the serving counter and said “You want it? It's free. I made an extra” So, with two drinks in hand, I embarked on my commute to the train station. Now I'm fighting off a very large caffeine buzz.

It feels like I'm half floating and things are bouncing around in my head in a gravityless groove.

I also have to pee.

Badly.

And the train is bouncing.

And I have to walk home after I get off the train.

And the train station is closed after I get off the train.

Too bad I don't give post-trainride updates, it probably would involve some grand, fit-for-a-movie adventure that would involve me dodging bullets, dodging trains, dodging cars, and dodging kids throwing dodgeballs at me while I sprinted home.

“Dan the Dodging Dodgeman who drives a Dodge Dodger that Dodges Potholes: In theaters now!”

This is the post that never ends...it just goes on and on my friends...some people...started reading it not knowing what it was, and then they kept on reading it just because...this is the post that...

Mmm...caffeine

Popcorn!

2007-06-11T18:09:00.001-05:00

Today my Quixtar script finally got used. It officially processed data that was relayed to a real company. Yay.

I spent the morning in a GTS meeting, then worked the rest of the morning on some little tasks people sent me.

For lunch, I went to Salad Spinners. It was really quite good. I had a mexican salad with chicken, rice, corn, tortilla chips, and other good things in it. It wasn't really really good, but it was great for a salad.

After lunch, I went for a walk towards the lake and found some neat nooks and crannies of the city that I'll keep in my memory for safe keeping.

After I got back from work, Sean, the guy who's desk was right across from mine mentioned he was going to Garret Popcorn to get...popcorn. So, I went with him. I got a mixed bag of caramel popcorn and cheese popcorn. Boy, it was good. My stomach didn't feel the best after I ate it, but boy, it was good.

The rest of the afternoon I just worked on some PHP programming for another website. I had little things to do that people gave me, but otherwise I made good progress on the PHP project.

Tomorrow is Italian day!

Time to sink in

2007-06-08T18:08:00.000-05:00

I guess it took my e-mail a full day to sink in.

I had all sorts of things to do. People were e-mailing me from departments I hadn't heard of, and started showing up to my desk like I was their best friend.

I had lots of database stuff to do. One query grabbed data from the far reaches of the database, it was pretty huge. I like to call that a “beefy” SQL query. What's for dinner? BEEFY SQL QUERY!!! Mmm...

There was some really repetitive manual parsing job I had to do to a data file. In SQL or plain text, it was freeking annoying. After about 5 minutes I decided it was a waste of time, then spent an hour or so writing an Perl script to fix that sucker up. It did, and I was happy.

For lunch I had so much to do I just ordered out for a Pockets Calzone. I broke the golden rule of going out to lunch, but technically I really didn't go out. So shoot me.

The rest of the day I did testing, more working with a couple beefy SQL stuff, and did the tasks that were given to me, so it was a pretty productive day.

Ironically, since I had so much to do I have the least to write about. So that's it.

Oh, I've determined the city smells like one of three things: a giant fart, nicotine mixed with fresh exhaust, or rotten chocolate.

Today is was a rotten chocolate day. I first discovered this lovely smell when I visited my friend at moody, which is a ways north of the loop, but still in “downtown” There is a chocolate factory near there, so it smells like really rotten chocolate, mixed with a sick chemical smell.

Today, the wind blew just right to bring huffs and puffs of the Stench of the North to the Loop, where it entered my nostrils, fired off some neurons in my brain, and reminded me of all the memories associated with that awful smell.

Hooray.

Getting Double Paid

2007-06-07T18:13:00.001-05:00

With my supervisor gone and officially nothing to do, I sent out an e-mail to my coworkers: “Intern for Hire: If you need any help with anything, let me know.” No takers for the entire morning. So, I conducted myself by doing some website work for one of my clients. Getting paid by both my website client (for doing work for them) and getting paid by Doubleclick (for sitting there and doing work for my website client at the same time) it was a double whammy. Good for me.

Lunch came, and I went to Goodwin's. Their motto is “eat healthy, live long” or something like that. The line was really long, even being there 15 minutes before lunch hour started. I eventually got a Key West wrap, which had chipotle mayo, mesquite chicken, provolone cheese, and pineapple. I had it to go and walked to an ice plaza with a huge fountain in it to eat.

Basically, think of a huge concrete slab 50 feet square and about 3 feet tall. There were gets of water coming out of the middle of the slab, and water was slowly falling and clinging to the sides of the huge slab. It was a warm day, so I sat on the steps leading down to the fountain in the shade. It was windy,too. It was a balancing act trying to balance my flimsy tray and keep my napkins and brown bag from flying away. This sunken plaza was like a wind tunnel, pretty amazing. The water was flying off the fountain and spraying me gently. That was a nice feeling.

Wow, all this time and I haven't talked about how good the food was? Well, it was good. I liked the combo that I got and glad I tried something different. It's funny, sometimes when I try something different I wish I went with the safe choice, and sometimes when I go with a safe choice I wish I had tried something different. Well, I was glad I tried something different, but still wanted to try a safe choice :-).

I had a few testing things to do later in the day, but that was about it.

Oh, a couple days earlier when I was walking to the train in the morning, I was walking about 20 feet behind this lady. All of the sudden, she starts leaning forward and completely wipes out on perfectly flat sidewalk. She even rolled around a little bit on her backpack. She was a normal looking woman, business slacks and everything, but it was really weird to see someone fall like that. Anyways, time to read the Onion.

Chase

2007-06-06T16:43:00.001-05:00

Today was kind of a blah day. No meetings, no real “purpose” of the day.

I did get a little done in the morning of some importance. I finished up my Perl script, experimented with some directory and file things in there, and fixed some overall bugs. I did do a few things that were given to me, like running link reports and such.

Lunch came soon enough. I went to a place called “Pockets.” They specialize in pockets and calzones. Calzones had a 15-20 minute wait time, so I passed on those. I got a pocket. Basically, it's a mini half loaf half pita bread thing cut in half (straight out of the oven) and they put this salad filler in. I had a southwest with chicken. It was pretty good, but kind of just tasted like a o mixed salad and bread. I'll need try the Calzones, they seemed to be especially tasty because they are baked to order.

After I came back from lunch there were some annoying people from Chase in the lunch room. I just wanted to get a coke, and this lady was following me around saying “Hi i'm from Chase...yada yada” I reply with a “I'm already with Chase” She says “but you don't have these rewards things!” Ugh. I looked at the sheet they advertised in their e-mail, none of it applied to me. Besides, I'm with another online savings company that gets 5 times the amount of interest their savings account yields. I didn't need any more Chase people.

However, one good thing came out of this. Shawn, my deskmate, commented that they left behind frisbees when I asked if the people were still in the Kitchen. I went and grabbed one of the two that were left. It had “Chase” written across the front of it. I broke out my sharpie marker and wrote “CUT to the” above the logo and “YOUR DREAMS” below it.

So, the frisbee looked like this:

Cut

to the

CHASE |+|

YOUR

DREAMS

I was proud. Since I'm on the hallway and my “wall” I hang things from is the outside of a cubical, lots of people see my frisbee now, which is strategically hung on a thumb tack.

The rest of the day I did a few little tasks, and ended up leaving an hour early because I had nothing to do and everyone else was either busy or in meetings.

Freddy

2007-06-05T16:42:00.000-05:00

I'm starting to wake up later, and later, and later. I'm also getting good at taking a shower and getting dressed faster, and faster, and faster. So, I guess you could say I'm evolving and developing my superhuman abilities.

Today was the day I finally kind of dove into things. At 9:00 AM I had a meeting with Brian, and three other guys. This was a meeting about one of our biggest publishers that we get half a million a month from. They have some pretty specific needs and wants for their clients, so we have to conform to what they want or we lose them. On top of this, they cater to two of our biggest advertisers, Barnes and Noble, and Circuit City. So, it's a triple whammy if we lose them. Basically, they have data that they need sent to them in XML format a certain way. Files can't have more than 1000 orders in them, they have to have a unique ID, they have to have a tally of certain things, etc etc. I didn't grasp entirely what was going on, but what I did grasp is that we were a little unhappy about the matter (and engineering, which was probably not going to make the deadline of June 10^th). Choice words were said about certain aspects of the program, so it was pretty apparent that this was important.

My job boiled down to taking a very large XML file and making it into several other XML files, all the while maintaining the header and footers, and editing the headers and footers a little bit to conform to some requirements. It would be best if I did it automatically, so I decided to write a script instead of doing mindless work.

On top of that, other people were giving me small jobs to do so I pretty much stayed on my toes the entire day.

For lunch, we had the usual Go Roma Italian food catered to us. I think I'm getting better at balancing and strategically placing items of food on my plate to maximize its edible capacity. So good.

So, to break up my work day and Perl script writing with an elevator ride in the State of Illinois Building. That was fun. Even though my ride was completely uninterrupted, I think they slowed down the elevator, so that hampered my fun and entertainment of the experience.

On the way back,, I grabbed some Coffee from the Starbuck's connected to our office building. I had an Orange Mocha. It was quite good.

By the end of the day, my script was working, so I was happy. I finally fixed a bug right at 4:58, so I shot off an e-mail to my coworkers that work on the files the script was for, and I was off. Time to go home!

An idea has been floating around in my head for a while: to make a website for a homeless person.

There's this one homeless drummer that plays on the north side of the Madison St. bridge every afternoon for the commuters ending their work day. He's out there every day, rain or shine.

I'm thinking of going to him early in the afternoon, if it isn't so busy, and ask him what his name is and how long he's been drumming. I might make a website called “www.freddyplaysdrums.com”. I would then make him some durable waterproof poster saying “Support Freddy! Visit www.freddyplaysdrums.com!” On the website, I would give a little background on “Freddy” and post vidoes and pictures of him with the sign to prove he's a real, breathing, person. I would make a donation link to raise money in getting him a new drum set.

Right now, Freddy plays on a snare drum balanced on a milk crate, he sits on a PVC bucket, plays on a PVC bucket, and his cymbal is balanced on a drum stick which is stuck in a milk crate. If this thing caught on, maybe I could eventually fund to give him food gift cards or something like that. It's an entertaining possibility that would be pretty cool if the site got famous. Anyways, yea.

Database For Me!

2007-06-04T19:48:00.000-05:00

So, today I finally got database access after e-mailing a few people, so that was good. My boss is gone for the week, so I have to report to others. Brian walked me through working with a lot of the database, so I just played around with it for the majority of the morning.

I even printed out an official database diagram for quick reference. It was printed over 6 pages, so I trimmed them and taped them together. I now inducted myself into a true database/GTS support nerd. Woo hoo.

So, today...lunch. Oh boy. So, I found my new best friend: yelp.com. It's a review site for pretty much anything, but it is equipped with a map feature, so I use it to find restaurants in the area. There was already a restaurant I knew about that I was going to go to: Perry's. It was next to Taza, the Mediterranean restaurant I went to on Friday. I learned from some of the reviews that I missed the specialty of Taza: Falafel..I think that is what it was called, something similar. Anyways, I couldn't go to Taza again unless I tried some place new, so I had to go to Perry's.

Perry's is a sandwich shop. I thought I had tried all kinds of sandwich shops. Boy, I was wrong. Sandwiches are usually comprised of three main categories: sub sandwiches (Subway, Quiznos, etc.), specialty bakery/deli sandwiches (Panera bread, Corner bakery, etc.), and hot sandwiches (Plenty of restaurants).

Perry's was none of these. Perry's was it's own breed of sandwich.

I go in, notice the blatant "No cell phone" signs, and walk in. I gather myself in the environment, look around, and deem this to be a no-nonsense-be-ready-to-order-when-you-come-up sort of place. So, I took a paper menu and stood to the side (no big menu is in the place). They had all sorts of tasty combinations. The food was a little pricey, with just about everything over $7. They had a "triple decker" section and regular sandwich section. A sandwich with ham, peanut butter, bacon, mayo, and lettuce caught my eye as something good to try, but I settled on a turkey salad, bacon, coleslaw, and Russian sauce sandwich. When I ordered, I was asked if I wanted white, wheat, or rye. I chose rye.

They piled the bacon on, piled the turkey salad on, and piled the coleslaw on. Before he compressed the sandwich between two slices of normal rye bread, it was over 6 inches tall. I can only imagine how huge the triple decker sandwiches were. When I bit into the sandwich, it was amazing. This is probably the most unique sandwich place ever, and they seem to carry a reputation. I came before lunch hour because I noticed this place was always packed with people. After I finished the first half of my sandwich (it was cut in two) I was ready to get up because it was that filling. I had another half left.

In the middle of my 2^nd half, the music was interrupted with a screeching alarm. Remember the no cell phone rule? They have a system that detects cell phone usage. Everyone looked around the place to find the noobie who was using his cell phone. Everyone stared at him and he had the most deer-in-headlights look ever. It was great. After I finished with Perry's, I decided I would go get some Falafel at Taza. Basically, they are glorified hush puppies if you've ever had one. Except, they are a deep fried mixture of veggies and spices. After waiting in line, I just said I wanted one Falafel - $0.40 The man gave me two, and shooed me away and said, "You order yet? Free sample, don't worry about it. Go! Don't worry about it." So I got to try Falafel for free, that was a great gesture of kindness by the owner.

So, it was back to work. I had a couple meetings after lunch, which were somewhat informative. The rest of the time I worked on some miscellaneous stuff, but I have yet to get knee deep in the database stuff. Hopefully that happens soon.

A Free Coke

2007-06-01T19:47:00.000-05:00

Today I had a shiny new June train pass. Yay.

So, this morning I didn't accomplish much, just went to a U of P meeting on the Remedy ticketing system.

I milled about until lunch. I ate at a pretty good Mediterranean place (supposed to be healthy) and I walked around the City (I have a system of walking so I go on a new street every day).

After lunch I attended another U of P meeting on Search Marketing, which overlapped some other things I was taught, but that's OK.

After that, I was supposed to have database access. I did, kindof, but I had some problem with my account, and my Remedy account wasn't set up properly. My boss wasn't very happy with the tech people, because I essentially had nothing to do. That's what I did during the afternoon – nothing. I was just waiting until 4:00 when Brian would brief Majid (a co worker) and me on working with the database on the backend.

The database was based on db2, which I've never used before. Apparently they are moving over to Oracle by October.

Another exciting thing is that I got my key card – a temporary one. I asked what was up and Jon (the lead Facilities guy) didn't know, so I asked if I could just have a guest pass, so I have one. And it opens the door. Hooray.

That was pretty much it for today. Oh, another story, it involves Flavia packets, which actually happened yesterday. So, I like the French Vanilla flavor the best. When Shaun, the guy right across from my desk...his desk is against my desk, had a visitor, the visitor saw my "stash" of French Vanilla packets. "So you're the one that's hoarding them!" he said.

Yea, it's true. When the main dispenser is out, I make trips to other places in the office (12^th floor too) where there are Flavia packets in other dispensers. I grab a few and put them between my monitor and the cubical wall next to me for later use.

Being the nice guy that I am, I threw him one today when I found a jackpot of them upstairs (I grabbed 4). These covert operations will continue until I'm sure I've scoured every available resource of Flavia packet dispensers.

Yea.

On my way out I grabbed a Coke, then took a piece of gum from reception and started chewing it, then decided I didn't want a coke before, so I gave it to a homeless guy near the train station. I think I might start doing that from now on. I mean, it's not money, but at least I'm sure they are going to consume it and be somewhat of a highlight of their day.

Perl saves the day

2007-05-31T18:19:00.001-05:00

So, it's the last day of May, and I can start using my Monthly pass now for June on the train. That's exciting.

This morning started off with a cup of coffee, and me and barnes and noble. At about 10:00 I decided this was a waste of my time and a poor use of my knowledge. So, I decided to write a perl script to do this all for me.

So, I did. It was exciting. I even used the CSS server for all my testing. My Perl dabblings lasted until lunch.

I walked around and around Chicago for lunch, trying to explore new areas. I found a few food courts, but food courts don't have super good food. The only reason people go there is the quantity and not quality. No one regularly goes to a food court because one restaurant is particularly good, it just doesn't happen. That's not how food courts work.

So, I went on my little adventure, and almost ran out of time. I decided to try the little "trailer" restaurant that was pretty much sitting on the sidewalk. I passed by this place every day, and I figured if it was surviving that means it had to be good, being a stand and all. I mean, a stand has to stand out from the crowd and make a stand showing that their stand has the best food that people can stand, and therefore has lots of people standing out the door to get some of this food from the stand.

So, I went in, realized it was a whole Chinese restaurant. There were 5 people crammed into the space a bunk bed normally took up. Two full size burners for the food with two cooks standing shoulder to shoulder, one yabbering cachier man, and two others doing whatever they do. Food cooked to order, unlike other fast chinese places where the food sits in a bin for a long time. The cachier man yabbered and yelled in a chinese/english fusion of speech right after you said anything.

"I'd like a Lunch Special"

"AAAAhhhh yaya foo yung Luh-Speciaa!"

"Curry Chicken"

"Soyo aaa Cuuuurrry Shimbaba!"

"With eggroll"

"Yoooo ya EgRul!"

*I say nothing*

"Aaaah! Ya ya...Kum da yooo!"

The weird thing was he didn't quite look at you and didn't quite look at the people he was yelling to, he just tucked his head down and started his vocal utterings.

I think the only time he stopeed when one black woman came into the...trailer and completely slaughtered the pronunciation of "General Tso's Chicken" She made it sound like she was ordering Mexican, or something.

Anyways, since I wanted to keep my lunch hour to an hour, I took my food back and ate there. It was good. Mmm.

Shortly after, I fixed my perl script and tested it. I was a happy man. It was almost like magic how well it worked. I sent it to Greg, who gave me the assignment, so I wouldn't have to touch this anymore. He could just run the script, which was great. I learned about Perl in the process.

After, I went to a meeting about the release of Connect Commerce, again. This time they were actually showing us examples. The lead Engineer, Larry, knows way too much. He just talks and talks and links everything in his head. It's pretty amazing, actually.

After that, I twas time to go home, so I did.

Building climbing men...

2007-05-30T18:13:00.000-05:00

Today was another day of classes, meetings, classes, and meetings. Four total today. Much fun.

So at 9 AM we had a class about our DFA product. Someone flew in from New York just to speak about it. So, by the time I woke up, checked my e-mail, and downed some coffee it was time to go to the meeting, which was on the floor above.

Going to another floor is always a unique expeience each time because I don't have key card to let me into anything. So, I inconspicuously pace back and forth until someone comes by to let me into the door, out of the stairs, etc. Since I had 4 meetings today on the 12^th floor, I would have to get creative with my techniques. Usually I just follow somebody.

At 10 AM there was a U of P class about Marketing. Not really much to say there, it was a short and sweet meeting.

At 11, after I had worked on some stuff, I went to a really nice Mexican Grille place, had a Burrito (you eat it on a plate with a fork and knife) and had a mexican rice drink. I forget what it was called, but it was pretty disguisting. I've decided since I have an unlimited supply of pop at my disposal at work, I'm not going to get a drink anywhere unless it's a cup of water. Saves money, and makes sense.

Anyways, back to the burrito. I smothered it with the green jalepano sauce and red sauce they had on the table, which looked to be home made. It was a savory melody of flavors on my plate, it was really good. I think I prefer Mi Pueblo in Marion near school, but this still was really good.

Anyways, that was all fine and dandy. I went to a 12:00 GTS-DTS meeting. GTS is my tech support group, and DTS is the engineering group. They were working on a new release of ConnectCommerce for the Affiliate side. So they went through all what they did, and ran into some interesting bugs. It was amusing watching so many engineers scrambling with their laptops to get the bugs ironed out. I learned a little about organizational development right there.

At 1:00 was another U of P class, this time about Natural Search. This was interesting because I had done stuff with this before. I'd love to try my hand out with what they were doing sometime too. Maybe I could shadow someone for a day.

After that, it was the usual stuff. I have backend access now, so I should be doing some more interesting stuff tomorrow.

Walking to the train, I saw some guys washing windows on ropes way up on a building above. I couldn't believe that they wern't on a scaffold or anything. Just ropes. I would hate the job. Or I'd love it because I could throw things at people from up there.

You have to see it for yourself.

2007-05-29T19:44:00.000-05:00

Well, today was a wonderful day because I had a three day weekend. The fact that I had an extra day of rest and only a four day week ahead of me is like a double whammy – for me.

Today was full of meetings.

In the morning I worked on some boring Barnes and Noble stuff again. And acquired some other Excel-related work to do. I was finally understanding where these things were coming from, so that was good.

Basically, first was a release meeting, which I didn't feel like going to – especially because it was in the middle of lunch...today was a Tuesday! So, instead of going to the launch thingy, I dialed in from my desk. It turned out to be a good thing that I dialed in, because I didn't miss the lunch (got there before most everyone else) and I really didn't miss much of the meeting because some guy dialed in from London who had no idea what people were saying, so he made everyone rephrase things for him. This just reiterated and reinforced the fact that everything that went on in the meeting was almost irrelivent. It was kind of like "Does anyone have any questions about all the bug fixes we did?" "Ok great, bye."

So, I had lunch, which was glorious, as usual.

Then, there was a GTS meeting (my group) which was a basic recap of all the clients, what they were doing, and etc. It also was about some administrative stuff. This was kind of small meeting, so that was good.

I had two other "U of P" meetings which stand for University of Perfomics. You can actually "graduate" from the U of P. Basically, it's just a bunch of classes about the company functions. Both of the meetings today were taught by guys I worked with, and both of the meetings were about things I was already forced to learn last week, so I guess it was two, one-hour breaks from work for me.

One thing I did realize during the classes was this...Let me reference (and edit) a Matrix quote:

Morpheus: "Unfortunately, no one can be told what the ConnectCommerce is. You have to see it for yourself. "

That was the lesson that I learned today. ConnectCommerce is the system the company uses.

Then, after the classes were done, I finished up some stuff, and was out of there.

On the elevator ride down I realized that there was no 13^th floor.

A Week is Done

2007-05-25T18:12:00.000-05:00

Today was a longer day to work. The morning started of fresh with the Yves Rocher crap. Their site still didn't work. Eventually we got it working in IE6 but we couldn't get a credit card to get accepted and we tried 3 of them. So, that took up much of my morning. At 10:30 there was a Search meeting which was mildly entertaining. I learned about the search side of things, which was good. I did have to sit on a vent where the ridges were digging into my behind. That was uncomfortable. The largest room available for conferences can really only seat about 30, and there are always at least 30 more standing or sitting not in chairs.

After that I continued on doing the very tedious Barnes and Noble work with the excel spreadsheets and data. That was my primary "assignment" throughout the rest of the day. The guy who gave it to me was gone for the day (I stole his chair for the day, acutally..hehe) but I tried to finish as many days of data as I could.

At 12 I went to lunch and went to a Mexican Grille. The burrito I got was pretty good, and I tried some of the hot sauce bottles in a bin that were all labeled as "Very Hot, try at your own risk" The one's I tried weren't that hot. Too bad.

After the burrito I had a craving for a hot dog, so I got a Chicago Style hot dog. Everything, no pickles. That means mustard (NO Ketchup), Onions, Relish, Hot peppers, and tomatoes. Harry's hot dogs was the joint, and Harry was there, in his prime at 96 years of age. There were a few newspaper articles about him on the wall.

I want to go there again, but that means I'll be missing out on a new place to try lunch. I guess I can make the rule that I can go somewhere else and get something not huge to try something new, then go and pick something else at a place I've already been to. Sounds like a plan, and I still accomplish the feat of trying a new place every day. Win-Win.

After lunch one of the TAM's who deals with Paid search (Ads on google, yahoo, MSN) walked me through the system, which was neat to understand.

For the rest of the day I worked on the Barnes and Noble data. Whoopie.

A thing I forgot to blog about yesterday was in regards to printing. On my second day I wanted to print something, so I asked the guy across from me which printer to add as my default printer, and then printed away to it. I asked him which printer I just added, and he pointed behind him and said (a couple pillars down). So, I went to the first printer I saw in that direction, and nothing had printed out. I pressed buttons on it, went back to my computer, printed again – no errors – but nothing showed up. Yesterday I finally asked him "are you able to print, can you do a test for me to make sure I'm not crazy?" "Sure! He says." He prints something out, and I walk with him to go get it – except he walks right past the printer I had been going to and goes to one behind a pillar. "Yep, all printed." When I looked in the printing tray there were all my documents that I had printed earlier in the week. I felt really stupid. It turns out the big printer I first saw was a huge commercial color laser printer, but I had no clue.

But, it is the weekend. My boss told me to leave early. Yay.

The Busywork Begins

2007-05-24T18:20:00.000-05:00

Today I almost completely fell asleep on the train. Luckily I have to walk to work, and that wakes me up a bit.

While walking to work, some excentric guy (shaven head, black rectangular blasses, soul patch, and ear rings that expanded his ears in huge holes) was handing out copies of The Onion. This guy was the ultimate character of excentricity, almost the perfect person to be handing out The Onion – a newspaper with a fantastic blend of dry, dark, satiristic humor about real life stuff. I read a few articles before work started, brightened my day – one of them involved comparing a pug dog to a car make and model with one of its defects being "Folds of skin eventually smother dog." There was a whole diagram pointing to various parts of the dog describing similar "defects" of the dog.

When work actually started I had to test the links for some Canadian website that sold skin products. It didn't work in IE6, and whenever I tested it in Mozilla Firefox the shopping bag seemed to have a terribly large hole in it because when I went to check out, none of my items were there. Stupid Canadians.

I later found out that all the other TAM's (technical account managers) absolutely *loved* (hint of sarcasm) working with this company. The contact for the company's first language wasn't even English, it was French.

The site was coded pretty heavily in Javascript and AJAX. If you added an item to your cart it would automatically add it and update your screen without refreshing.

After forwarded my response e-mail to another TAM that informed the company that their website didn't work, they shot back and told me I didn't clear my cookies or cache files. Neither of these things should have anything to do with the problem. Stupid French.

I later discovered that whenever the secure server started up, it sent me to a completely different domain, which is why my cart would magically empty. I don't know how they didn't realize this because of that fact that this prevented ANYONE from being able to buy ANYTHING on the website. I sent a polite response to tell them the problem. I hope the French and Canadian comments didn't offend anyone, hey, we need a little country rivalry sometimes.

Later in the day I did testing for another site, went to lunch at an Asian takout place (next on my list). The food wasn't super good, so I decided I wouldn't go there again. Actually, the fact that I won't be going there again isn't really an insult, because if you read my earlier post about my lunch philosophy, I can't go to the same place twice anyways, so interperet that comment as you wish.

When I ordered, the girl behind the counter was desperately trying to convey her thoughts and feelings about the lunch specials of the day to me, but it came out as a jumble of mismatched phonetic sounds, and the words I could pick up didn't make sense anyays. I tried some positive reinforcement by asking her a yes or no question, just so she didn't have to explain everything and we were kind of on the same page.

Most of the people in the place weren't Chinese. Usually you can judge how good a Chinese restaurant is by the ratio of Chinese to other types of people and/or how many people are using Chopsticks. The total using chopstick/Chinese conglomerate of demographics in this place wasn't above 20%. Some of the better Chinese restaurants I go to, you'd be hard pressed to find a day where that number is below 70%. Oh well, another day another restaurant.

After lunch I talked with my boss a little about various things, still waiting for backend access.

Another TAM gave me the assignment of some really boring excel work. Basically there were these data files where some fields were too long, and I had to truncate them. Usually they were orders were someone bought a TON of books or books with super long titles. All books were put in the same field and were separated with a ^. I had to go over several days of data files that each had some 2000 orders in them. This was the start of busywork I'd have to do.

There was a company meeting in a hotel that we all had to walk to about 6 blocks away. This was a quarterly update, with its main focus on how to get clients to use some Web 2.0 strategies. Some things they presented were pretty cool, like a search engine from the creators of Wikipedia called Wika that allowed users to rate how they liked the turnout of the order of results. If a site was good, it would have more votes and better ratings than the other ones at that keyword. The basic premise of this was that it undermines Natural Search services, and we should get clients to adapt. That meeting took up the rest of the day, and it was now time to go home.

Old Newfound Memories

2007-05-23T18:19:00.000-05:00

Today started with me walking around the block before going to my work.

To give you some background on an experience I had, back in Senior year of High School, we went on a field trip to Chicago. To make a long story short, me and another guy both missed the train that the rest of the class took to go home. In that hour we had to kill to catch the next train, we went to the Illinois building because it was a cool building. Basically, it's an all glass building, cieilng and all. When you go inside, the entire inside is one huge open space, that extends 16 stories high...on the inside! The whole building is made up of glass and mirrors so it's really neat to look up. In that time we went on the elevator...which was glass too. The elevators aren't enclosed in an elevator shaft, rather they are pretty much suspended in mid air on the side of the rails they go up and down on. On top of this, the elevator goes pretty fast. So, it's really exchilerating to go and look down at the ground from 16 stories when you are going down at a pretty fast speed. It's almost like an amusement park ride.

Becaouse of that delightful experience I had back in high school, almost every time I went to Chicago I tried to find the Illinois building again. I Googled it, walked around, looked on maps, and could never find it. It even had a unique sculpture in front of it that you couldn't miss.

Well, this morning I just decided to walk around the block in a direction I usually don't go because I have to walk past my work.

So anyways, I'm walking around, and I see the sculpture. How ironic that this building is RIGHT acorss the street from my work! The entrence to it was just around the corner. A huge smile crept across my face as I quickly darted inside the building and headed in the general direction of the elevators. To my dismay, there were security guards checking ID's before people could go on the elevators. Bummer. Distraught, I went to work at around 8:45.

So, today was the day that I got some hands on experience. So, thats what happened. Tiffany walked me through testing an advertiser to make sure they were linked up properly to ConnectCommerce with their affiliate links.

That took up most of the morning, and before lunch I took the initiative to look up the Yahoo javascript variables that I was interesting in coding. My boss never got around to sending them, so I decided to just do it myself. Basically, Yahoo Stores is stupid about allowing functionality with other 3^rd party applications. Anyways, I figured it would be good experience to make the image tag that linked up with ConnectCommerce because it would force me to familiarize me with that side of the system.

Before lunch I just found the documentation where all the ConnectCommerce variables for the image tag were, then I was off at 12:00.

I went to some Indian place to eat. My new lunch-place philosophy is that I need to go to a new lunch place every day. I can't ever go to the same place twice, that includes burger joints and other chains I've already been to. This is going to force me to get a diversified lunch experience.

Anyways, this Indian Food was alright, it was more spicy than anything. And by spicy, I mean it was just spicy, no real flavor. I like spicy food, but this really didn't do it for me. I remember I had some Indian Food in London that I really liked called Swarmaras or something like that. Basically it's meat on a spicket that goes around and around, just like how Gyro meat is presented, except it's slices of chicken or beef. This place's style of it didn't look like it was any better. There were tons of Indian people there, so I guess it was authentic.

On my way back, I ran into the Illionois building again, and couldn't resist trying the elevators again. This time, there were no elevator guards...Yes! So, I entered the elevator, along with a couple other people. Being only in it for the thrill, I hit "16" on the elevator. No one else chose that floor. I noticed that there were security guards sitting in chairs that were on each floor when people exited. Soon enough I was the only one left in the elevator, so I discretely hid in the corner of the elevator so the guard couldn't see me and it would look like the elevator was empty and someone merely pressed the wrong button.

Then the elevator went down.

It was a little hair raising going down watching the very distant ground get closer and closer pretty quickly. Unfortuanately, another elevator user ruined my experience around floor 10, and I don't think the elevator got to the same speed again. I'll have to try this again tomorrow.

Maybe I can get a custom ID for myself that reads "Allow for pleasure riding only. Floor access prohibited."

Anyways, on the way back I picked up an ice cream treat for myself to get rid of the Indian food aftertaste.

When I came bakc to work, I got to cracking on the Javascript code. I completed it and tested it on a web client of mine who used Yahoo! Stores. I wrote up some professional documentaion on how to impiment it for DoubleClick Perfomics advertisers. I forwarded it to my boss who liked it. I completed a second draft but he was gone the rest of the day in a meeting I assume.

The rest of the day I kind of milled around, looking at the systems and trying new Flavia combinations.

Soon I will be cleared to have backend access to the servers, then my boss said I will have, "Lots to do." So, once I get access to a few more systems, I'll feel like I have a purpose most of the time.

Today I was proud of myself for developing a script for a professional company. When I talked to the testers to figure out how other Yahoo! Stores customers did this, they said they hadn't worked with it, one of the most experienced guys said he almost did one. They were impressed that I actually implimented this for the one client and made documentation for it. So, that made me feel accomplished.

Oh, for the past few days I had been playing with the colors for my E-mail signature (approved colors of green to go along with the DoubleClick logo) and now it's complete and looks nice. I look professional now, I kinda like that.

And the first real work day begins...

2007-05-22T18:36:00.000-05:00

Today was officially my first day of real work. As per my previous instructions, I came in a little after 8:30 so I could catch someone coming into the office so I didn't have to bother anyone to be let in. In the morning I went over more of the Fileprog (the error log thing).

At 10:00 we had a conferance call with the Indian outsourcing company. It was pretty neat software, you could see the presentation, but you had to call in to hear what everyone was saying. There in lay the problem. This was officially the first time I used the phone, so I was a little stressed when I couldn't connect to the conferance call, but I could see the presenter's desktop on my computer. Eventually I decided to not bother my boss any more and just call with my cell phone. It was interesting to see what the outsourcing company did, it helped me understand the e-mail messages that were sent to us. Basically they do really tedious stuff, but something a script can't do because they have to compare data across several different systems. Anyways, I hardly use my cell phone for calls other than my family (besides nighttime and weekend calls) so I figured a 60 minute call wouldn't hurt.

When that was done, it was about 11:05 or so, so I continued to chip away at deleting all the error log stuff.

At 11:35 a very exciting thing happened. I'll give you a clue: it was Tuesday. A PARADE of 6-7 people carying bags, pushing carts, and holding pouches quickly zoomed by my desk. My desk is pretty much just set next to a cubical on the main hallway, so I can see the general goings-ons of the office. At 11:45, The E-mail came. The E-mail says a very special thing as a Subject: "The food his here!"

Within seconds, heads poke out of cubicals, bodies rise from their chairs, and people stream into the hallway in a mad rush to the kitchen. I had about a 30 second response time (Fileprog was freezing up Outlook trying to delete stuff at the time). Even with that speed, the kitchen was filled with people. It was only a a minute or two to get my food, though.

They had italian style pizza (Not your average dominos) it had lots of flavored spices, vegatables, and looked authentically Italian, they weren't even in normally shaped pizza boxes. They also had italian-style sandwiches on panini? bread. It wasn't normal bread, kind of like flatbread. Maybe it's called flatbread. Anyways, those were filled and dotted with spices and leaves. Beyond the pizza was pasta, which looked amazing, not your average american-style slop you usually get...no this was great Italian. I sat down at my desk and chowed down. It was really, really good. For free too! How 'bout that.

At 12:00 it was time to join a huge conferance call, with the same software WebEx and conferencing system I had to dial into from my desk. It wasn't working and I didn't want to use my cell phone again. I went through the ticketing system, and at 1:10 someone finally cleared up the problem. It was because I had a newer extension on the system, so something was wrong with me calling the conferencing system or somethign. Anyways, the end of the meeting, which lasted until 1:30, was a recap of what happened anyways, so I'd like to think I didn't miss much. From the powerpoints I was viewing when I couldn't hear anything, it seemed like just stats and figures. At the very end they went over some cool things about the Google buy I was interested in and some other things about the company that helped me understand more. That was over soon enough, and so was me cleaning up the Fileprog thing. Hooray!

At this time I found out something amazing with the Flavia machine. When I went, I saw that they restocked all the dispensers, and I saw that they had milky way hot chocolate. So, as I was clicking through the LCD interface, I saw the selection for a "Milky Way Mochalate" What's this?!?!? I clicked it. I put the packet in like before, but then it opened up and asked for ANY other coffee packet. MIX AND MATCH COFFEE?!?! Wow. Now I not only had the liniarly expansive choices of 12 or so flavors, but the exponential number of 24. I was excited, and it was good.

I was informed my boss that I was to review the the ConnectCommerce Documentation. This is the system of DoubleClick. This is the software that connects everyone through everything and everything to everyone. Half the ads on the internet go through this system, so it's pretty dawnting. It's a 158 paged manual of features alone.

So, I did just that.

On one of my many "beverage runs" I ran into one of the other TMS guys (works under my boss as a GTS Performics guy...kind of the same job as me but much bigger). I said I was learning ConnectCommerce. He said, "Yea, it's kind of like eating an elephant, it IS the internet." He's a nice, guy who shaves his head, so he's a little quirky in a way. He was one of the guys that interviewed me, so I kinda sorta know him. Well, I only kinda-sorta know about 4 people in the whole company, so I'll say we are on a first name basis.

So, besides going to the bathroom a lot during the day, I learned more about Performics as a Function of DoubleClick, and how the huge system of Connect Commerce works. They also were pushing outsourcing across all departments of the company. The company is really growing rapidly (something like 10% of all employees have been hired in this calender year) so they really aren't replacing jobs by outsourcing, they just don't want to pay someone big bucks to click the same thing three thousand times.

Right now I'm in a little state of cluelessness of where to go, sometimes my boss will give me awkward silences between "um's" when I ask him what I can do. Tomorrow I get to do some testing for a client tomorrow morning with another lady, so that should be good hands on experience for me to understand more. It might be a good change from my boss, who is kind of to himself.

Until tomorrow...

My First Day

2007-05-21T19:05:00.000-05:00

So starts my blogging of my job. Note to readers, this is a direct brain-to-keyboard dump while I'm riding home on the train, so read accordingly.

Today was my first day. So, first day taking the train, first day walking to my job. I also had to get up at 6:00 AM to get to work by 8:30 which was a stark change from school times. That's a full 2 and a half hours before I even start working. Anyways, my morning consisted of going through with the HR representatives what the company was, with full tours included. The most exciting part of the entire morning was finding out that we got FREE pop, coffee, and flavored coffee via a Flavia machine. If you don't know what a Flavia machine is, it probably is one of the greatest inventions known to mankind. Basically there are dispensers that hold packets of flavors of coffee, tea, and cappuccino next to the actual Flavia machine itself (which is about the size of a small desktop computer tower). When you have selected your packet, you take it out of the dispenser. So, lets say you picked the delicious flavor of French Vanilla. So, with packet in hand, you go to the Flavia machine, press "Tea/Coffee" on the cool LCD screen, and the front of the thing pops open like a tape dispenser on a boombox. You then insert the beverage packet into the slot like a credit card, and the thing automatically closes and starts making your drink. Oh yea, it puts it into the mug that Performics supplied for me. It has a friendly "Your beverage is being prepared" message as it is making your beverage. After it's done, you don't have throw away the packet, you don't have to worry about a powdery mess, it just gets sucked into a magical neverland that you don't need to worry about, all you need to do is drink your wonderful cup of coffee. Oh, and besides the coffee machne, they have FREE pizza, pasta, and salad on Tuesdays.

From what I've illustrated, you may think learning about the food available at this fine establishment was the highlight of my day. I think it was.

At around 10:30 or so I met my manager, who I had met before. Basically he gave me one Intern-like job to do while I got myself settled at my computer. Basically there was this huge Outlook Exchange folder (Which was really deep into the company's exchange folder hierarchy, it took me a few minutes of him going "ok, click this folder now" to navigate to them) Since Mark (my manager) and his team are so busy, they hadn't had a chance to clear out this log – it had 365,000 error logs dating to January of this year. After he explained what they did later, I understood the shortage of time, I'll talk more about that and its effects later. Anyways, navigating this folder is slower than frozen molasses. My instructions were to work on deleting all the logs up until a month ago. It isn't as easy as selecting all of the old messages and pressing "delete". No, that would take half a century for the server complete, besides the fact that Outlook has a 4,000 message cap on the amount of items you can delete at once – that sure came in handy for me.

I got into a system of estimating how many messages I could delete based on the location of the scroll bar on the right side. I'd press delete, Outlook would completely freeze up for 5 minutes, so I would review the large stack of technical documents that were on my desk about the system (2 inches thick!).

After I was done with that, it was time for lunch. I found a pizza place that sold slices of pizza the size of a baseball pennant, except twice as wide (I'm not kidding, this thing was at least 2 feet long and a little less wide). The slice of pizza and a coke totalled in at $5 exactly. What a deal. Normally if I was carrying around a slice of pizza of that grotesque magnitude I would feel like a pig, but since everyone in the joint was doing the same, (even skinny girls) I felt alright. Oh, that was the other highlight of my day, and it had to do with more food – I guess I'm a food addict.

I came back to Performics, which was on the 11^th floor of the building. They are also on the 12^th floor and the 15^th floor, but I work on the 11^th and reception is on the 11^th anyways. My ID badge hasn't come in yet, so that means I can't get into the building without someone letting me in. If the receptionist isn't there, no one can see me, so I have to ring a doorbell. From later experience, I learned that the doorbell is REALLY loud and resonates through the whole office. So, I hope I didn't make anyone mad, I'm sure it's everyone's pet peeve. Well, someone let me in and I was good to go.

After I disturbed the entire office, it was time to join in a company meeting with the sales and marketing department. The VP of the Performics division of DoubleClick (I wont explain the company hierarchy because it's pretty in-depth) showed all the sales figures and announced that Google was buying the company, which was pretty cool. It was a great orientation because he talked about everything the company did sales-related. At the end of the meeting, my manager Mark announced to the very crowded conference room that I was a new intern, everyone applauded for me. Hooray. The VP asked where I was from, then asked me what school I was going to. I said Taylor University and he responded with an "Oh, that's a good school....good school." It was kind of impressive that a guy like that knows about a place like Taylor.

After the meeting, I continued to delete more and more out of Outlook. I really had nothing else to do, so it felt like I was wasting time and doing nothing when Outlook would freeze up for 2-3 minutes every time I deleted a batch of error logs. So, I used that time to pick a nifty background for my computer and set up some programs on my computer, like Mozilla Thunderbird and such. After clicking the download link for Thunderbird, I went and did something else like I normally do anywhere else when I'm waiting for the download to complete. To my surprise, it downloaded INSTANTLY which was awesome. It's cool having a super-fast connection at your fingertips.

Anyways, at the end of the day I had a 1 on 1 meeting with my manager who went over the whole company hierarchy, made sure I understood everything, made sure I knew what I was going to be doing, and etc. One interesting note is that he actively outsoruces stuff to India. This isn't stuff that requires any skill, however. He does this so the Techincal Account Managers (the people I'm working with) can do what they are being paid to do. The Indian company looks through error batch logs and figures out if they need to be reported or not to the company. It's tedious work that's the same all the time, so they outsource that. Anyways, then it was 5:30 and it was time to go home!

It was a good first day I would say!