rodzik@www

So for the last 4 weeks of work I've been working extra hours. What do I mean by extra hours? Well, this past week I clocked 50.5 hours of work, including an awesome 0700-1830 on Thursday. "Wow, that must be brutal" you say. Not at all! I use to think I knew what I wanted to do when I graduated - work for some corporation that will pay me craploads of money. As I recently realized, I didn't have a clue, and being able to work 50+ hours a week and still love it is a testament to that fact.

But the main point of this post is the reason why I'm working so much. Next week is my yearly trip to Hilton Head Island, something I've done every summer basically since I was born. Two weeks from now is E3. A month from now is my yearly trip (though I think I've missed a fair number of this one) to Ocean Isle with most of my mom's side of the family. I could only really afford to take one week off of work this summer, partly due to the fact that I want a full-time job offer and partly because I have a lot of work to do. So I looked at my options and decided a week at Hilton Head was too much to pass up.

Unfortunately, the July 4th holiday falls mid-week this year, meaning only Wednesday is a federal holiday. That meant I had to figure out a way to get four full days of work off, but still get at least most of the work for those days done. Fortunately those two things were able to work together as every hour over 80 hours (40 hours/week; 2 weeks/pay period) for the last two pay periods has been counting towards credit time, which I will be using next week when I'm not there. So at the end of work today I turned in my timesheet with 50.5 hours of work this week + 8 hours of holiday (the 4th) + 18.5 credit hours + 3 hours of vacation time = a full 80 hour pay period with me being at HHI all next week.

I fly out tomorrow afternoon, and I can't wait.

This past Saturday night at midnight I finally turned 21. All I can say is it's about time. The artificial age barriers and age discrimination that exists is ridiculous. I mean I'd really like to see legitimate justification for why someone can vote for the leader of the free world and why that person can die defending this country, but they can't drink a beer. Sure, it's a cliche question, but has it ever been satisfactorily answered?

Right, so anyway, now that I'm able to actually go into bars a couple of my co-workers invited me out to a bar with them. I'm going to disqualify the bars from Saturday night from my record, so with that done this was my first "real" trip to a bar. At the same time, despite living just outside of DC it was my first time using the DC metro and really my first time in DC not as a tourist (seeing as I'm seriously considering living here full-time, I'm starting to consider myself at least somewhat of a "local").

So I get back from work at around 6 PM last night, look up where I'm going and how to get there, check email and take care of some other business and then head out at around 6:45. I grab the metro at around 7 PM and we head into downtown. About halfway there I switched trains and I must've gotten to the other line's platform right after a train left, because it was a fairly long wait for the next train. A few stops later and our train was literally so full you couldn't move (fortunately I had a seat) and nobody could get on. Unfortunately one of the cars was so full that the doors couldn't close, and instead of the extra person or two getting off the metro they decided to delay our train by 15 minutes while security a) figured out what was happening, b) figured out what to do about it, and then c) fixed the problem. So after that delay we finally got to my stop at around 7:45 PM.

I head up the longest escalator I've ever seen in my life (ok, it's probably comparable to the one out of the train at Hartsfield) and find myself on the wrong side of Dupont Circle. I had a vague idea of where Buffalo Billiards was so I started walking. Long story short I got lost and didn't find the bar until about 8:15 PM. I met up with one of the guys and it turns out he had been told the wrong bar (and then relayed it to me), so we ended up walking a bit and arriving at Brickskeller where everyone else was. A quick note about Buffalo Billiards: this was a rather large bar. They had a ton of pool tables (imagine that) as well as shuffleboard and darts and it seemed like a fairly popular place, so I'll definitely be trying to make it back there sometime this summer.

Brickskeller is a bar with the tagline of "The world of beer." While some places might use it as a gimmick, these guys meant it. They literally had a magazine of beer choices, and not wanting to waste this opportunity by ordering something that would probably get my hand chopped off (Bud Light?) I decided to give Grolsch Light Ale a shot. I'm not even going to try to rate or compare the beer at this point, as I don't have much of a variety of reference points...maybe some other time. A while later after finishing that off I figured I'd try something completely random, so I asked our waitress which of the Polish beers she recommended and she picked out the Okocim O.K. beer. Similar to the Grolsch Light Ale it's a light beer, which was good news for me because I'm not really a fan of dark beers.

It was nice to finally be able to extend my social life into the one realm that was still off-limits. Taking a risk and trying two completely new things was also a great experience, and I'm glad I did it and plan on continuing to see what else there is that I like (and at some point, of course, what I don't). I've done a lot with the group of interns from work but it was great to socialize with some of the full-time guys in my office as well in an environment outside of work as well.

Overall it was a great night, but the transit time made it a bit rough getting out of bed this morning, as I was already not getting quite enough sleep before and then getting at midnight last night didn't help much, but it wasn't a huge inconvenience. Work from about 7:30 - 8:30 this morning was a bit rough but I didn't even notice the time go by after that and eventually I was stunned to look at the clock to see it was 5:45 PM and that I should probably go home.

I've been really slacking on updating this thing in the last 7 months...there's some big stuff I never got around to posting and some things coming up I want to write about, so here's to hoping I actually end up posting it.

For the past two summers (plus this one), I've held an internship somewhere in my field. In 2005 it was at Elastic Image in Terre Haute, IN through Rose-Hulman Ventures, and last year it was at GE - Consumer & Industrial in Louisville. I spent much of the summer of 2005 programming and testing software, plus working on production projects for Pixar (we did work for them relating to the movie Cars) at the very small company of Elastic Image in "downtown" Terre Haute. Last summer I worked on fixing and upgrading some Java web-software, as well as an excruciatingly boring enterprise printing project at one of the largest corporations on Earth.

While those two jobs might seem as opposite as possible, they both share some very common traits. First, I learned a ton about applying my knowledge in the workplace, as well as learning much of the soft skills necessary to be successful in the workplace. Yet they also shared the trait that many times I would get through the day by reminding myself that I was getting paid and thinking about what I could do with that money. Sure, there were times when I enjoyed what I was doing (some days more than others), but nothing could compare to this summer.

It may be too early to say, as I've only been in the office for a week, but I absolutely love my job this summer. I seriously don't even care about getting paid (ok, when I have to pay for food/rent I care, but that's about the only time I even think about it), and on multiple occasions during every single day of work this past week I've either had a stupid grin on my face or thought to myself about how much I love what I'm doing. Sure, it's extremely tough and challenging, but also great fun and extremely self-satisfying. I've always been trying to figure out for sure what I want to pursue as a career, and while I still have a lot of possibilities rolling around in my head, at least I now know what I'm looking for.

About seven years ago I bought a book on C++ and taught it to myself over the span of a month or two during the summer. That set the basis for my time preparing for my career (a whole lot more than high school classes did...) until I got to college. Throughout high school I bought numerous books and read tons of documentation and tutorials online in order to teach myself various things (e.g. computer graphics, game development, etc). Then something called College happened, and there went the massive amount of free time I had to allow for both work, play, and self-taught endeavors. Now this seems really random, I'm sure, but I'm now getting to the point...

In the last two days I taught myself network programming. I really wanted to take Computer Networks at Rose this past quarter, but couldn't fit it into my schedule, and it turns out it would've been useful. But there was nothing I could do about that, and it's too late anyway, so I borrowed some books on networking and poured over them. I looked through them, flipped back and forth, found more books, read documentation, and bam: two days later I consider myself fairly well-versed in networking. Of course, I'm exhausted and my head felt like it might explode at times, but I needed it so I can delve into more important things and have time for learning that. Not to mention how awesome it feels to have taught myself an entire subject in two days though.