originally posted june 24, 2001

it's still work

Week four of my internship is about to begin. Hopefully.

I work for Computer Associates, the company which at one point made "Software Superior by Design" but now instead makes "the Software that Manages eBusiness." Although I do not have an eBusiness which CA's software can manage, my job involves testing products to the point where they crash, display error messages, or lock up. I find problems, I tell people, they fix the problems, and people are happy.

I work for Computer Associates, a company which has made headlines lately by virtue of one Sam Wyly, a man who received nearly $5 billion (that's billion with a 'b', folks) from Computer Associates when he sold two companies to CA. Now, like any rational person who has just been handed several billion dollars by a multinational corporation, he's doing something that he considers rational.

He's trying to take over the company.

Am I the only one who considers this guy to be the most arrogant, self-centered asshole in creation? You do not take billions of dollars from people and then flip those same people off. As an entrepreneur, Wyly might want to try and start another company. He already has eight people lined up to serve on the board of directors. Who knows? It might just be good enough to be bought out again.

As always, I speak for myself. The aforementioned comments are just a brief rant and are not indicative of any inside information from Computer Associates or the official opinion of the company itself. Please don't kill me.

work is work

With that out of the way, the internship is going well so far. CAMP (Computer Associates Mentoring Program) starts with a full week of training about everything from time sheets to mainframe computing. It reminded me a lot of CS lecture back at school, but I'm not permitted to sleep. A total of 57 interns have come to CA this summer, including three others from Carnegie Mellon. Six or seven of those interns are women, including one who is married already. I sit near one of the female interns, and can't help noticing that there is always a male presence at her desk during the day. People constantly come up to her and chat with her, offer help, or just otherwise get in some "face time." Meanwhile, most people in my group keep to strictly business matters.

In a way, CAMP training reminded me of being back in elementary school. The first week is very rigorously structured, with students in one classroom. We even have name tags on our monitors so the instructors (mentors) can get to know us. There are many breaks as speakers set up, during which time we can surf the web, grab a snack, or just talk with classmates. Little anecdotes of college happenings are pretty common conversation fodder. All in all, I felt that it was a very open atmosphere. Already, there have been a few times where groups of interns have planned outings. When I went to see "Swordfish" and "Tomb Raider" with a few other interns, we managed to have a good time despite the bad movies.

life back home

At 20, it feels like I'm getting a little too old to be spending summers at home with my family. However, there are many interns from Long Island who still live at home, so I don't exactly feel alone in that regard. Thanks to the home LAN and air conditioning, I can still spend time by myself when I need to. That's good, because yesterday I managed to wipe out a lot of data during a botched install of Progeny Debian GNU/Linux. Word to the wise: if the installer can't read the partition table, and asks to create one, say no. Most of my valuable data was backed up, but my 181-year-old Sim City 3000 city was razed to the ground by that cursed installer. Time to start anew.

Although CA has an excellent fitness facility on site, they also have free breakfasts and dinners. (I recently learned that they serve free lunches on Saturdays, too.) I guess it's a subtle way of encouraging people to live in the building, or at least the hotel next door, but I've been partaking in the food more than the exercise. Maybe I ought to get into a better routine of some sort. It all comes down to how much Krispy Kreme's invasion of Long Island affects me. Already, they've provided my family with some 9000 calories of pure sugary goodness.

Not much else to talk about now, it being summer and all. Keeping a normal sleep schedule is weird indeed. See you next month.

Back to June 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.