06.21.08
Posted in General, Thoughts at 2:36 am by Nick
Why does this always happen?
It has been many months. Almost a year, actually, since it has ever been like this. Not since I lived with the guys. Dwayne and I used to sit out on the porch for entire nights just talking. I’d go on walks with Paul and discuss things. I’d go on midnight walks with Lisa, and sometimes we would bring other people. And we would actually talk about meaningful things. But that all went away…
Tell me, is it true that it is better to have loved and lost then to have never loved at all? To have a taste of love is enchanting, and enlightening. But no one tells you that you can’t go back. You will miss it if it goes. If you never love at all you can’t miss it, but you don’t know how to fill that void within you.
I’ve wondered what I will miss the most. It hits me hard every time I go to McDonalds or Panera, and every time I talk to my coworkers. The evidence is everywhere. I may miss being in a relationship and having someone to hold onto, but there is something I miss more, and it takes me by surprise quite often. I miss being a dad. I miss doing stuff as a small family unit. Sure, it isn’t always fun, but its hard to find that type of satisfaction anywhere else. I will miss the little kids growing up around me. I will miss watching them learn new things. I will miss laughing and playing with them. It is yet another example of me rushing into life and being completely disappointed when it doesn’t move as fast as I would like. I have a feeling my own dad often feels this way, and this knowledge makes me deeply hurt and sad. Time only moves one direction, and thus, we move away more and more.
With that comes another realization: the faster I move the faster I get towards the end of the line. Back when school was in session I had a freshman ask me how I knew so much more then him even though we were the same age. I proceeded to tell him it was a difference of time, priority, and life events. As I think more and more, I realize the advice I give is only applicable to people like myself. I may tout many ways to get ahead in financial security, college, or other future goals, but what am I sacrificing? I know now that I would sacrifice my knowledge if it would send me back in time and give me a normal life these past few years. Talking with the other interns only makes me realize how much I have truly missed out on life in many respects.
I can’t help but wonder constantly now. It has been a while since I’ve been this curious and this thoughtful. Three hundred sixty three days together. And now… now its all over. What’s more is that the decision was made while I’m two hundred miles away from home, three hundred away from family, and isolated in a new town with a new job.
It occurred to me when I decided to buy some cigarillos and take them up to my watching post in the park – I am far along the journey back to who I used to be. Shifting from ENFJ to INTJ, the need to make sense out of everything… I don’t know if that is good or bad. I can’t help but feel that even though I am in the midst of civilization, with large towns on the horizon, people of all backgrounds and races coming and going over head, that I am alone here. There is no girl waiting for me back in Cedar Falls. There is no family there… just many friends who have slipped away in the steam of life. I have many friends at work, and a lot of resources to draw on, but when the work day is done I return to my home only to figure out what I should eat – alone. What I should do with my time – alone. I’ve never had so much time for myself.
I’m not complaining. It merely baffles me to have such a sudden abrupt change to my lifestyle. It’s the weekend and I’m at a loss. There is no computer for me to jump and check Facebook or other networking tools. I can’t call anyone to do anything. I’ve lost my interface with the world. I can sleep in, read, program, and explore. However, I don’t know where to go from here.
Something is missing. When feelings revert to this state it is obvious that something is missing. One stage of life has completed and another is beginning. I’m in transition from one meaningful experience to the next. I know this feeling. It is me being lost and losing my resolution of the future. It is me pondering existence and wondering what life will be like in a few years. Most importantly, it is me looking for something to fill this chasm I feel. I need to do something that means something to me. I’ve been thrust back into the wandering slipstream and I’m looking for something to hold on to. I watch so many people do so many great things, and I can’t help but want that as well.
I think, perhaps, when I get back to CF for good I will do two things. One, I will actively participate in more clubs. Computer Club sort of died last year, but I hope it will come about this year. I also hope to get more involved within the Economics Club. More importantly, I think I will get involved in the Big Brother, Big Sister mentor program (or its equivalent). I think it will help me evolve more as a person, and perhaps do someone else some good as well. And maybe, just maybe, it will satisfy my parental angst.
I do have some bigger decisions to make, however. I like it here, and it makes me wonder if I should work on completing my Computer Science degree as fast as possible. Dropping my second major would be a big deal, but it might be worth it. It is hard to say at this point. I’ve also considered transferring to the University of Minnesota, but that would never really happen. Most days I wish I could just work here full time and finish my degree eventually at the U of M.
Another day. Another dream.
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06.11.08
Posted in Internship at 9:18 pm by Nick
Wow. How time flies when you are working. I finally got onto the net and I already have to go. Here is a small recap before I’m booted from Panera.
Monday:
Orientation. I got there on time and with a full stomach, and thank goodness I did! I was moving, talking, and reading non stop the whole day (minus lunch). I got to meet my team mates, manager, and have a lot of orientation time with Wayne Dahmes (HR Manager). I am the last intern to join, so I was going through it all one on one, which made it far more interesting and amusing. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.
The only problem was the night before all of this. I had slept in too long on Sunday, and when it was around 11:30pm I was not tired. Instead, I was bursting with energy. I had put off running all weekend because I didn’t have the gear for it, but I had gone to Kohl’s and gotten shoes and what not. I went running (and walking 
). I explored a lot. I did find a good spot in the park relatively close to where I live that I can go sit and the end. Its great. I got back around 1am and I still couldn’t sleep. I think I fell asleep around 2:30am, which left me very tired on my first day. Luckily Lockheed Martin is a pretty high energy and fast paced work environment (at least one day one).
When I got home I had planned on going out to buy more work clothes (because I felt far more dressy then I needed to be and because I didn’t have many things to wear). Instead I passed out and slept for four hours. I then woke up and decided it was time for food. I drove southwest of my residence to McDonalds. I decided to take a road to see where it led me and around 11:15 I realized I was twenty miles NORTH EAST of my residence, and I had found Verizon, which I couldn’t find when I was actually looking for it. I didn’t get back until 11:30pm or so, and again I went to bed late.
Tuesday/Wednesday
I was finally in enough of the system on Tuesday to learn about the fantastic learning experience of compliance training. LM requires every new hire/intern to take certain courses within their first week, two weeks, 30 days, etc. And this goes on for every employee for their entire time at the company. Wayne was telling me about the training he still had to do (some of it is renewable annually). I managed to get done with eight compliance training tests (which are easy, but time consuming and quite uninteresting). I’ve been lucky enough to be put under the wing of a co-worker, Paul. Each day has worked out to (roughly) having meetings in the morning and/or perusing the Common ARTS lab to learn things and get to know my team (Ricky and Paul anyway) and then in the afternoon I actually sit at my desk and do compliance training or various setup/required things.
Their computer system, while silly at times, is better then UNI’s in general. Your active directory password gets you into everything, and the TSS Portal (which gets you basically everywhere) is automatically known for your ID when you log in on the intranet. The only things that require other passwords are the timecard system and any passwords you require for lab machines / work assignments. Its wonderful not having one for email/web access, one for timecards and work functionality, one for my active directory (AD) work account, one for my AD school account, and probably others I’m forgetting.
I have also been lucky enough to start on a short week. Here in Eagan we have Flextime 9/80, meaning we choose our hours with our manager (I chose standard 8-5:30pm) and we work 9 hours, then we receive every other Friday off. I also found out we are payed weekly, which will greatly alleviate some financial burdens (I earn as much in one week as I used to during a whole month during school).
I’ve been getting more sleep. I’ve been eating more. I’ve been exercising. And, best of it all, I get up and look forward to working for the next nine hours! It is great fun, though the programming bit hasn’t really kicked in. The code surely is manageable, the only thing I’m worried about is learning the system enough to be a capable bug tracker, and then learning the CRAZY processes required for logging the errors. I think it will come together nicely.
I like it at Lockheed. Though this is still week one. But how can I dislike it when I get my first Friday all to myself? I don’t even know what I’ll do with myself…. laundry and other mundane things I suppose.
Well, hopefully I can stay awake long enough to drive home and crawl into the bed. I’ll try to update more this weekend.
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06.08.08
Posted in Internship at 2:31 pm by Nick
Sad start again today. Woke up at 8:30, went back to sleep. Woke up at 10:30, went back to sleep. And I proceeded to do so for every half hour until my stomach finally decided enough was enough, nearly 24 hours without food was unacceptable. After randomly moving around, I finally got the will to get up and drive around. I know my way around most of Eagan that I care to explore. There are only a few vital roads. Still, it was tricky to wind my way into Brueger’s parking lot. In the process I did discover where the Eagan Transit Station is,which will probably come in handy at least once (even if I just get on to ride it around for the hell of it).
Brueger’s has better wireless. Not nearly as many people and its faster because there is no web filter. They are only open until five, so I expect this will be a short post. Still on my list of things to do are pay Verizon a visit, buy some decent shorts at Kohl’s, and hop on Panera’s wireless (or maybe the Best Westerns) to see if I can’t take advantage of the rest of AV weekend on World of Warcraft.
I spent much of last night programming, and it went well. However, I realized that without the web I was without any real good PHP reference (even though I brought two books on it) so I was, for quite a while, running into many strange errors that were simple to fix but hard for me to figure out. Luckily I’ve gotten it down. Sadly the read line functions don’t remove line endings by default, and I can’t seem to find any other function that will do it for me (it seems like trim should be able to do it, but I guess \r and \n aren’t considered whitespace?).
Hopefully tomorrow will go well and I’ll have some interesting things to talk about. It will be interesting to see what my first day at Lockheed Martin brings.
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06.07.08
Posted in Internship at 6:04 pm by Nick
Exploration!
Sadly I didn’t get up until noon. I didn’t get to sleep as early as I would have liked (but I did read my -ENTIRE- intro packed and know far more about the benefits salaried employees receive then I should, and I’m pretty sure I signed my soul to the devil on one of the hundred forms I signed). It might have been because I was in a new place. I’m not really sure. But as soon as I fell asleep I was definitely out like a light.
I didn’t really feel the motivation to get out of bed and explore, but it was pretty necessary. Once I got out and about I started feeling better about it and was enjoying just moving around outside. I plan to do more driving around too, but I couldn’t pass up my chance to hit the net when I found Panera. After my usual poking around I couldn’t decide what to do exactly. I had picked up a MicroSD card for my cell phone to see if I could get some music on it only to waste an hour finding out I need (surprise surprise) Verizon’s special kit to get it to work. I plan to pay them a visit, because I’m not buying music from VCast and I wan’t music for running (and since my phone supports it, it will save me ~$150 for the same amount of space). Luckily my laptop has a n SD card reader. This technology is new to me and it is amazing! Up to 4gb on such a small chip. It makes me wonder so much about how it stores every thing. I wont even be mad if the Verizon kit comes with a MicroSD chip because that will enable me to use this one for other things. Its smaller and even more efficient then USB flash drives, though not every computer has a card reader (such as my computer at home). I also decided to play the DVD given to me by Lockheed Martin (LM), only to find WMP was missing the decoder and there was no real easy fix for it since it wasn’t an MPEG2 encoder. I originally found it annoying that LM had produced an relatively incompatible DVD for its interns, but I found it more and more amusing that it was almost like an unintended introductory challenge. If the intern couldn’t view the DVD then certainly they don’t have the problem solving capabilities required for the job. After a few minutes of work (that would have been impossible without the web) it was fixed. The DVD was inspiring, but kind of a let down. It had a lot of cool graphics based on their accomplishments though.
I realized last night during my unpacking that I was running low on just about all of my essentials (shampoo, toothpaste, etc), so I decided to visit WalMart as well. It is beyond backwards from ours (not to mention it isn’t of the “Super” variety), but the staff looked very studious and well trained, always making sure to direct people to their registers if they were not busy or standing at stations to help direct people. It gets far more traffic then ours does.
I’m not sure what I will do tomorrow. I’m sure I will come to Panera and use the wireless, but I don’t have too much else to do. I guess now would be a good time to get started on making up Microecon, and there is a lot of work to be done there. Tonight I will finish my incomplete in PHP programming.
Anywho, I think I’ll play some WoW in the mean time. I’m hoping these posts will become slightly more exciting as I start work, but I have to keep in mind too that I’m allowed to say almost nothing about what I’m working on. I’m curious what security clearance I actually received…
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Posted in Internship at 5:47 pm by Nick
I didn’t really come up with the idea to log my experience here in Minnesota until today, but I will write about the happenings yesterday. As I do not have broadband access (and I will not succumb to the horror of dialup), my entries will probably be infrequent (depending on how Panera feels ).
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The last two days were pretty insane. I feel like I could have done more, but I’m happy with the amount of things I accomplished before leaving for Minnesota. For the unknowing, I will be a software engineer intern for Lockheed Martin Transportation and Security Solutions in Eagan, MN. I start June 9th, will be working 9 hour days (but I have every other Friday off) and I won’t be back until August.
I was to leave Thursday but my employment package did not come. I postponed leaving until about 6:40pm on Friday, which was a blessing and a curse. Spending some time in my freshly cleaned apartment was great, but then of course I had to leave it only to drive 3 hours and 20 minutes or so. I drove it in one sitting since I was not hungry, I didn’t have to go to the bathroom, and I wasn’t tired. Even the weather was good. So instead of ruining my groove I just did the driving in one fell swoop.
The place I live is great (minus the fact that is lacks broadband internet). I’m trying to view the lack of internet as a good thing since it means when I leave the place that has internet, I will be cutting my computer connection with the world. This should leave me more time for reading, sleeping, and offline activity (Panera is my wireless hub of choice, but they close at 9pm). I also live just down the road from a park, so I’m hoping to get back into exercising.
Eagan is a great place. It ranked #12 on Money’s list of top 100 cities to live in in 2006 (Apple Valley ranked high in 2007, and it is just a ways to the south). I am located in between St. Paul and Minneapolis, just across the lakes from both the international airport and the Mall of America. I’m guessing this is how Cedar Falls will look when it gets up to ~60k people. Every road is four lanes with turning lanes, and its easy to get everywhere because the roads are easy to follow (and the speed limit is 45 everywhere it seems). That said, Yankee Doodle road will take me to WalMart, Kohls, and a slew of other shops on its south side, and on the north side is another plaza with my Panera that I plan to visit regularly. Target isn’t far away either. There is a lot of culture and a thousand possible things to do (not to mention the possibilities for entertainment that the twin cities present).
I don’t plan to take advantage of the entertainment too much though. I will go on intern outings, but other then that I plan to get into a nice routine of sleeping a lot, running, eating a good breakfast, working, interneting/dinnering, and then returning home for some peace and quiet. But not too quiet. I miss having my fans, but I live next to many busy high ways and the airport, so there is plenty (but not too much!) background noise to keep me happy.
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