Ice Cavern Studios

It’s been kind of an interesting weekend. It’s had good parts, it’s had bad parts, it’s had parts that well�were kind of crazy. I mean, in the aftermath of the last week, it makes sense when I think about it.

Firstly, there was the whole Microsoft Internship. Friday afternoon, before racing to make it to a Women’s Lacrosse game, I had to make the call to camp. I informed that camp that for the first time in six years, I would not be coming to Ann Arbor. It was kind of a sad thing. The administrative assistant, Stephanie, was a little sad to hear that I wouldn’t be coming back and that I choose Microsoft over Camp. Mind you Microsoft will pay me three times what the camp would pay, and also the fact that Microsoft will have me working with much newer technology. But yeah, At least everything worked out for everyone.

See, what I didn’t mention before was that things at the camp had been�um�yeah. Apparently, there was a budget cut to the camp, so they were making cuts everywhere, and one of them was staffing and pay. This caused problems because one of my friends wanted his best girl friend, Robin, to come work for the camp. Due to strange happenings at camp with money and hiring, she was not offered a position. Of course, the camp was waiting to hear from me, because apparently, if I didn’t work there, they would hire Robin, and move my friend, Tiffany, into the spot I would have occupied. It’s a really stupid situation. At one point, it was made clear that my presence at camp, while nice in a �Hey, he can really teach the material kind of way,� wasn’t going to be helping with the current staffing disaster. (I’m not going to go into details, but let’s just say that the current situation with staffing at the camp is INSANE) Fortunately, though, everything worked out, all thanks to the Microsoft Corporation.

So what was bad? Well, Sarah and I were having a fight. I’m not going to say about what, but it just wasn’t really pleasant. I can’t imagine I was too much fun to be around at the time and I apologize to anyone who had to deal with me at the time. Thankfully, things have been resolved and I can go back to being normal.

Finally, while this may not seem important, I found my sketchbook. Well, found isn’t the best word, retrieved is a better word. I left it in the photo lab and had been to lazy to go get it. This was bad though because without my sketchbook, I had no real desire to draw. This was making my ELE lecture hard to deal with (see past Swordman in the art gallery for more details). The other problem is that because I’m weird, I refuse to go on to the other sketchbook I have because I want to fill one then move on. Mainly so I can see my progress (which is going to have a hiccup due to me not having really practiced drawing in two weeks). But, I found the book and I am ready to draw again.

Before I go, I would just like to point out that I have new artwork in the gallery. I’ve started working on some desktop wallpapers. Right now, they are all at 1280×1025 (my desktop resolution) if you want them in a different size, just shoot me an email. Also, I plan to get comments for the blog entries working soon. Anyway, night all.

Life and Times, Microsoft, Princeton, Work

See that picture to the left. It’s a picture of Seattle, Washington. Why is this important? Because that is where I will be living this summer. That’s right, I did in fact get an internship with Microsoft. I will be working in Redmond (a suburb of Seattle) with the Microsft.com group. As you can probably tell, I’m really excited. It’s going to be really cool.

Although, I know that the hardest part of this week is going to be telling the guys in Ann Arbor that I won’t be back this summer. This is actually a big step for me. This is the first summer in six years that I won’t be there. That’s actually very scary�I’m going to miss my friends, and I’m going to miss the kids, but this is probably for the best. And I know everything will be fine. I’m leaving the camp in very good hands. Still, it’s definitely going to be a new thing.

*shrugs*

All that being said. I’m sooo ready for the summer to start. I’m ready to move, ready learn, and ready to earn.

So yeah, that is not the only cool that hat happened this week. This week was also room draw (well�at least for my draw group). For those of you not in Princeton, room draw is possibly the most traumatic experience with the possible exception of Bicker. I’ve watched room draw just trash friendships. Personally, I don’t see what all the fuss is about; probably because I’ve never had a bad experience relating to friends. I’ve had some bad rooms, but not incidents with my friends.

Anyway, the gist of room draw is you and your friends enter into what is called a �draw group.� This group is then entered into a lottery where you prey to get a good draw time. Why do you want a good draw time? Because the earlier you draw, the better the chance you have of getting a good room. This is because there is a limited pool of available rooms. Yeah, lemme just say, it’s all kinds of fun.

Well, we had room draw Wednesday, which was nice because it was the first day. It was even nicer because we were lucky enough to have a good draw time. With this in place, my draw group began the process of scoping out rooms, as well as trying to figure out what would possibly be available. Much of this fell upon my roommate Penn. Penn is an economics major, so he got a real kick out of predicting people’s behaviors and doing all kinds of scenario number crunching to determine our choices. After much work we found a few rooms we (along with everyone other person on campus liked). I’m going to spare all the mundane details, but lo and behold Penn managed to correctly predict that we would be able to get one of the rooms we wanted. Personally, I am very impressed by this.

So what room did we choose? Well, a luxurious quad on the fourth floor of the recently renovated Dod Hall. What I didn’t say was that this is a 735 square foot split level quad. I also forgot to mention that Dod is one of the only buildings on campus that happens to have an Elevator. Yeah, its pretty sweet. We’re actually going to have two common rooms (one for fun, one for work) two doubles, and our own private bathroom. Fortunately, we are also across of the men’s bathroom on the floor so we will have that readily at our disposal as well. *nods* Yeah, people really hate me when I tell them what room I have. Mainly because it’s viewed as one of the four best quads on campus due to its size, location (center of campus) and the fact that Dod was recently renovated. Yeah�it’s uber. Alright, Sarah is here and she’s ready to go, so yeah�gotta go.

Life and Times, Microsoft, Princeton, Work

Man o man. It’s been a long time since I’ve made any kind of real update. I guess in a way it’s a good thing. I mean, if I haven’t had time to make an update, my life must be filled with all kinds of exciting things. Yes and no.

To begin with, part of the major reason I wasn’t making updates has been that I was gone for Thursday, Friday, Saturday and most of Sunday. Where was I? Seattle. What was I doing there? Interviewing with the man (read Microsoft). Well, that and hanging out with my friend Meghan and her crazy Seattlite friends. Then it’s been work and Sarah since I got back to school. I don’t mind this. Both are intellectually stimulating, and they are both good for me. Although I haven’t had the urge to throw Sarah from a fourth floor window yet. Anyway, the past week�

Travel

I am going to begin this with the fact that I no longer like flying. I love to travel, but I really don’t like flying. It’s a long, boring process. Sure it’s fast, but I find that I actually prefer to drive. *shrugs*

That being said, my flying experience to Seattle was ABISMAL. I was flying United and this will be the only time. Unless M$ hires me. Then they’ll probably fly my United again. But it will not be on my own free will.

The main reason it was bad was because of my trip from Cincinnati to Chicago. I arrived at the airport at 8:40 or so, two hours before my flight. When I got there, I was told I was put on stand by for the earlier flight because they were delaying and If I didn’t get on the earlier flight (which was delayed) I probably would miss my flight to Seattle. So I raced through security and raced to the gate only to find a massive line of people waiting to get on. Apperently, delays had caused an earlier flight to be canceled. So there were going to have to try and fit two plane loads of people onto one plane. This caused me to get worried. I got even more worried the flight was being delayed more and more. It gets better, though. When they start taking people from standby, they start with the people who are flying ONLY to Chicago. Of course the people who need to make connections are all getting pissed. It became very clear why they were going bankrupt. Luckily, I was able to get on the flight, but by the time we finally left, it was 10:25, 25 minutes before my original flight. Sigh�all this, and the most stressful part was yet to come.

The Interview

First off, I am going to say that I have never had such a pleasant experience interviewing as I have with Microsoft. Now, by no means should you think it was easy. It wasn’t. I’ve also never been through such an exhaustive interview process either. Let’s just say�it was fun.

To start off, the onsite interview process for an internship at Microsoft is long. When I say long, I don’t mean like, it was an hour and a half long, I’m talking, don’t make any plans for the evening. I met with a total of 5 people, spanning six hours. Fortunately, the first interview included food. So on to the interviews themselves

Risa

The first person I saw for the day was my interview coordinator, Risa. Now I find it very interesting that Microsoft has people whose sole purpose is to make sure the process goes smoothly. Hell, there is an entire building on the M$ campus devoted to recruiting. These people are serious. Risa literally told me that it was her job to make sure things went as smoothly as possible so I would have the best chance of getting the job. This is probably because she gets some kind of commission. Personally, I don’t care, if she wants to help me work for them, then I don’t care if she does or not. I’m just glad for the help.

So yeah, things with Risa went pretty smoothly, she just kind of gave me an overview of the process, asked if I had any questions, and just generally chitchatted with me until it was time for me to move on to my first actual interview.

.net Client Group

The first group I met with was the previously mentioned .net Client Group. After being schlepped over to the Development Tools building, I was met my a nice lady from Belarus named Helen. She was one of the Software Design Engineers in Test for the group. For her interview, we went to one of the onsite cafeterias and ate while she went over my resume and asked me different questions. It was fun to talk about some of the more�interesting things on my resume. After that we went into the main dev tools building and she asked me some design and test questions.

As soon as Helen and I finished, I was then introduced to Will, another SDET in the group. Will was going to be my next interviewer. I would love to say that this was my best interview, but it really wasn’t. After explaining to me what the .net Client Group was (they make sure buttons are buttons and such) Will began to ask me questions. Now, unlike with Helen, when I was able to really answer the questions well, Will asked me things that were just plain evil. Well, not evil, just very thought provoking. I was able to answer them, but I definitely needed help with one. The problem was that it was the testing question I needed help with. The coding one, I was able to step through and answer his questions, I just needed a little of time to do so. Fortunately, I was able to learn from the experience and Will gave me some advice that would definitely help me on my next interview.

Microsoft.com

After finishing with Will, I was shuttled over to building six where the Microsoft.com group is. Now, as the title suggests, these guys are in charge of the Website. But not it’s content. Instead, these guys are responsible for the back end stuff to the website that is uber pretty and makes everyone all tingly inside. Seriously, all the database and XML based stuff is done by this group. This was a pretty fun interview. I’m probably saying this because I got along well with my interviewers and I was able answer the questions without needing that much help.

The first interviewer I had was Kirk, and that was a typical interview for the day. I tested a pen and wrote out the data structure I would use to test if there were anagrams in an array of strings. It was a pretty fun interview. I got a good vibe from it. Especially after Kirk said he had never seen my solution to the problem before, but found it to be very interesting. It made me smile to know that.

The final interview was definitely the odd one out. For this interview, I met with George, another member of the Microsoft.com family. I say this was the odd question out because I wasn’t answered any straight up testing or programming questions. Instead, George and I talked about what qualities a good SDET would have as well as how I think I faired in those categories. What was really weird was that George through out the questions related to testing and coding he had and just asked me if I had any questions for him. I had a few, but mind you, I had already seen a bunch of people and had been asking them questions pretty constantly. *shrugs* We talked for a while, and I eventually got the opinion that he was trying to sell me onto the idea of Microsoft. Kind of interesting really.

After that, I went home, had some dinner, and crashed in front of the tv. I was a tired boy. What can I say.

Seattle

So how was the city of Seattle itself? Awesome. I had a great time. It helped that Meghan and I hung out and she showed me around. But besides that, the city itself is also great. It’s green everywhere. Mainly because it rains�a lot. And by a lot, I mean, all the time. But that’s ok. Because even in the rain, is gorgeous.

We walked around this really part of the city and talked, caught up, and just generally enjoyed each others company. I also got to meet some of her friends; which was a big treat. Finally, Meghan and her friends took me to a really cool club down in the city called Club Medusa. We danced, had a good time, and just cracked a lot of jokes.

So yeah, that’s what the past couple of days have been like. Well, that and the typical school stuff. Not much new on that front other than I’m really liking my photo class. My professor has been very impressed with my printing skills, especially because I’m just doing this for the first time. That’s cool. Alright, I have other things to look after. Don’t worry, there will be more to come.

Life and Times, Microsoft, Work

So yeah, I'm back to the daily grind. I'll make an Uber update about the end of spring break, the trip, the interview and other such things when I find some time today. As of now, I'm just getting back to speed with everything.

Life and Times

Ok, quick run down. It's late as all hell. I'm dirt tired. I'm about to go to bed. Today was good. Got stuff done that i needed to before leaving. Secured new headphones. Got my teath cleaned. ….um…did more stuff….oh hell. I was going to talk about my sister and her show, but I'm just too damn tired. I'll talk about it in the next post.

Life and Times