06.07.08
Eagan, MN - Day 1
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…