weill aspects

originally posted july 19, 2001

the intern that manages eBusiness

Today I received my fourth free t-shirt.

Life is good at Computer Associates: free breakfast every day, free dinner at night (I haven't tried it, but it's supposedly good) and free lunch on the weekends (ditto). In the wake of Sam Wyly's proxy battle to take over Computer Associates (as vented about last month) there has been a great effort to rally the support of employees in Islandia. On Tuesday, someone slipped a little something into HR's coffee: handwritten signs reading "VOTE FOR CA" were going up all over the circular hallways that surround the atrium. Until today, when professionally-printed signs started to appear alongside these magic-marker creations, I thought that CA was running for class president or something. I'm still waiting for the "IT MAKES CENTS to VOTE FOR CA" signs to appear. (The signs are actually encouraging employee stockholders to vote in favor of CA's current management, as opposed to Sam Wyly's Ranger Governance board, on August 29.)

All the geeks will heap scorn on me for not blindly trashing a Microsoft product, but Visual Basic 6.0 is quite useful when your group says "no" to Perl. (Nobody else in my group knows Perl, or wants to download the ActivePerl distribution so they can run my scripts.) VBA doesn't support regular expressions, but its little brother VBScript does; a $119-and-up add-on offers to fill the gap. Fortunately, ActivePerl still works quite well under Windows 2000, so I keep it on hand for simple tasks that I won't need to duplicate after I'm gone. In any event, VB offers a lot of simple functionality and an excellent IDE; it's also useful for automating Office apps. Flipping through MSDN and looking at all the technologies available using VB, COM, and other such terms is like brainwashing, until I realize that (1) some of these technologies aren't available yet; (2) most, if not all, of these products will be out of my reach until I work for another large company; and (3) the solutions are almost always Windows-centric. In a Windows-only group that's fine, but in the Real World that's not always the case. Nobody wins a language war anyway.

Speaking of brainwashing, the CA cheerleading continues at work. Every week, all interns are required to attend "Tech Talks" in which current employees speak at length about what they do at the company and why they like it so much. Some of the talks are interesting, like one about the legal implications of working at CA (my web site could become property of CA if I develop any more software to automate it), but others are very dry engineers reading from unfamiliar PowerPoint slides. We're not permitted to sleep during these talks.

With plenty to do at the office, and plenty of reasons to stay (today's exhibition beep baseball game featured free beer, for example) it has become easier to spend 40-plus hours at work each week. This is in stark contrast to previous years' internships, where I was one of only a handful of interns and as such was relegated to less demanding tasks. While I'm not doing the same type of work as my fellow group members, I still feel that I'm accomplishing something. One other reason to do work: CA's web proxy keeps blocking web sites that I like. Fortunately, there's always the intern-run intranet IRC server and AIM 4.7 run through the HTTP proxy, although we've been warned explicitly about the risk of getting caught using one's computer for non-business purposes. I rarely run AIM at work anyway; besides the unreliable connections and the risk of Getting Caught by the IT folks, there's always a chance that a message might pop up when I'm demonstrating something to my boss.

thump

When I was driving home from work one day, I noticed that there was an cone lying down in the middle of my lane, with absolutely no other cones nearby and no sign of road construction. Not able to get out of the way in the half-second of reaction time I had, I ran over it, thinking nothing of the satisfying "thump" sound that it made. The gentleman in front of me started waving his hands around and signaled right. At the nearest rest area, I pulled over. The other driver explained, using expletives every other word, to describe how that [expletive] cone, which was right [expletive]ing in the middle of the [long expletive] road for no [expletive]ing reason, knocked out my front [expletive]ing fog light and damaged the front end. Total cost? About half my first paycheck, but not enough to bring the insurance companies in. I'm still pissed about it; I might have had a case against the Suffolk County D.O.T. had I written down the address of that very angry man who flagged me down.

random closing thought

The coffee is better downstairs. Gotta get coffee. Go downstairs. Today is Thursday. Thursday is biscotti and pecan roll day. And fruit day. I don't like Thursday breakfast. Today they had waffles downstairs, but they cost money. Tomorrow is Friday. Friday is Entenmann's Day. I like Entenmann's. Monday is doughnut day: Dunkin' Donuts day. Tuesday is cereal day. They have lots of cereal. Wednesday is bagel day. Bagel day is my favorite day, except for Monday and Friday.

Gotta get coffee. Coffee better downstairs. Coffee good.

Back to July 2001, or to the year 2001.

Where am I?

This is Weill Aspects, the official news archive of Jason Weill Web Productions. All articles posted to the front page end up here. This page was generated automatically by a series of Perl scripts.

Articles in Weill Aspects are organized solely by date. You may find the Google search in the left column to be useful if you are looking for an article but do not know the date on which it was posted.

Weill Aspects is composed of static web pages generated as appropriate when a new article is posted. It was developed in May 2001 as a way of managing the content on this site. I also used it extensively while in Japan, during which time I did not have continuous access to the Internet. I was able to write daily updates during July and August 2002, pack the files onto a CD-R or memory device, and upload them from the Internet-connected computers at school.

These scripts are all hacked together in less than elegant fashion, and I don't plan to release them. Some of the design that went into Aspects also was used to develop Livestat, a suite of Perl scripts to process statistics for academic competition tournaments. Livestat is available freely.