Friday, August 21, 2020
hello from seattle
hello from seattle hello from seattle! Also, another nerd circus. (re: Chris (M)âs post from a while back) Oy! Welcome to the much-belated âwhat Iâm doing this summerâ post. Iâm working at Microsoft! Ok, post over, back to work/weekend (maybe both, Iâve got a lot of work to do this weekend). Just kidding. Unfortunately, the only ones of you who mightâve believed that my post ended there are likely the ones viewing MIT admissions on smartphones, to whom I say âptooieâ because I donât have a smartphone and I think data plans are a rip-off. And because I wish my desktop computerâs LCD screens would have a reasonable pixel density compared to your phones. Yeah, text-scrolling-based humor probably took a severe hit when screens started growing beyond 8024 (characters, not columns â" durned kids today, always thinking in pixels). Back in my â" err, my dadâs â" day Right. Moving on. Back in January, when I was enrolled in this yearâs Silly Robot Extravaganza 4000, I looked at my to-do list and saw the item that had been sitting on there for at least a month: get a job. Eww, jobs. Anyway, being extremely lazy and procrastinatory, I decided to tell myself I was going to do it and proceed to do next to nothing. My interview process went as follows (note that I am too lazy to use ul and whatnot): -Talk to sponsor corporation representatives at MASlab sponsor dinner, meet Guy Steele (!!!) -Drop in on a random career fair at the student center completely unplanned schmooze collect swag (too many free bags! Companies: more flash drives and USB gadgets, ya hear? I have enough bags!) drop off resume at Microsoft table and chat with representative. The last subitem on the list wasnât one of my intentions. However, I canât say now that I regret it at all. Although Iâm saving that topic for another post (perhaps when my internship is over and Iâm not working around-the-clock to meet my own personally-set deadlines), it comes up here because: Microsoft sent me to Redmond! Huzzah! Although Iâm a field intern at their Cambridge office â" a mere unfortunate stoneâs throw from MIT (your stones would hit the roof of MITâs building E60, probably (not (yet) tested), where I spent almost three summers working with MITs Edgerton Center, and where I spent the third quarter of my sophomore year of high school working on MITâs FIRST Robotics team #97. Which comes up as a point of discussion several times a month and probably will for the rest of my life, for better or for worse (same goes for this). Uhh, sentence fragment from two sections above resuming too much C++, not enough english recently. (gdb) step *just kidding Iâm not working at a primarily-gcc-using-company **this blog post probably leaks memory, I donât free anything and thereâs no RAII ***really moving on now ****quadruple pointers: youâre probably doing it wrong. Anyway, although Iâm a field intern, Microsoft this past past (past) week flew most of their field interns out to the main Redmond, WA campus for some âintern eventsâ! Hooray, summer camp! Or something. Yes, I actually saw this. No, I didnt take the image from a recent gizmodo post. We six interns from Cambridge (host to more than six interns, but we were traveling as one unit) got to Redmond on Tuesday the 6th, where I proceeded to make all sorts of plans to explore the town, which definitely did not involve watching TV and falling asleep (relatively) early. Wednesday and Thursday were the bulk of the trip; apparently traveling cross-country takes the better part of a day out of you. News to me, as this was my first time on the west coast! I loved it, although I donât know if Iâd rather live there than Boston. All I know is that Iâd like to see some more of it. Who knows, maybe Iâll go back again and explore a bit, this summer On Wednesday I caught a cab from Microsoftâs campus into Seattle to visit my aunt; my aunt and uncle live in Seattle and Iâd never been able to visit them in their state. After an excellent walk on trails that went right under the highway â" something so urban-ly (not urbanely) weird to me, compared to parks in Boston â" and delicious sushi for lunch, I caught another cab to amazon, where I met up with a friend from school to go rock climbing at a gym somewhere in Seattle. Thereâs a large group of MIT interns at Microsoft this summer, and itâs pretty cool to be able to find people from MIT â" even people in my grade â" working in amazing internships and jobs all over the country as early as freshman summer. After rock climbing I scrambled (called a cab without hesitation, and proceeded to sit and wait calmly for fifteen minutes) and made it back to Microsoftâs campus in time for the real highlight of the week: the nerd circus. Microsoftâs intern program definitely takes care of its interns when it comes to benefits; I had a cost-free (except for souvenirs and the cost of the non-Microsoft-planned rock climbing) week in Washington, and to top it off, this: they bought out an entire showing of Cirque du Soleilâs Kooza. Whatâs more, I had a center seat in the front section; lucky me! The show was personalized, but not at Microsoftâs request, hint, demand, or furtive eyebrow-waggling; no, the circus performers threw in tidbits like the occasional well-placed Windows sound effect or iPhone 4 âyouâre holding it wrongâ joke, just for us. The show had me doubled over laughing repeatedly, but thatâs not whatâs special â" an episode of Psych can occasionally do the same thing â" and that wasnât throughout the performance. It was the scariness, fluidity, and 8.012-tacular (check OCW if you donât get it) awesomeness of the acrobatics that blew me away and kept my heart rate semi-unhealthily hig h throughout the performance. Iâll admit, the acrobatics seemed so dangerous that at times I started (minimally) nervously sweating solely out of fear for the performers. The show wasnât just a robotic display of gymnastics, though; the performers reacted to the audience quite well after their stunts. I hope we were a good audience; they deserved more than the standing ovation we gave them. ANYWAY, I believe theyâre performing in Boston now and all yâalls should go see them when or if you get a chance. My seat is, in my opinion, more than worth the near-$120 price (only a few months of your fancy shmancy smartphoneâs data plan. Yeah, Iâm talking to you, silly people with locked-into-data-plan-smartphones)* (see end of post for a far too relevant footnote), but there are cheaper seats available for the less enthusiastic. The madness does not stop there, however. Yep. Introducing: my new media player. (the âhello from seattleâ is engraved on every Zune) (this partâs not) At the end of the show, Microsoft gave out 16GB Zune HD players to all of this yearâs interns. I had been looking into buying a portable FM radio with a large honkinâ antenna for the past few weeks, but the radio reception on this (with the additional benefit of an HD radio receiver/decoder/thingamajig) blows away my other portables, and it stores a hefty amount of music. I am much impressed, although Iâve found (and internally reported â" massive field test, eh? ;) ) a problem/complaint or two with it. I donât know if Iâd have bought one on my own, to replace the $1-from-woot.com Sandisk 1GB mp3 player / FM radio Iâd been using, but receiving it for free was certainly nice. Iâm not trying to sell you on Microsoft â" there are a small number of things I havenât liked about my employment there, and a few things I still donât really like; for example, I am writing this on the T (Bostonâs subway) on my way home from the office, at about 10PM. However, some of those things are my own fault, and others are to be expected with a large company; I dont have the time to paint a full picture for you just yet. If this post was to be about jobs and internships in college, I would highly recommend checking out positions Microsoft, along with the rest of the âbig dogsâ â" Google, Amazon, Apple, et cetera. However, I may do a post about working at Microsoft later on. This post is just supposed to be about my four day trip to Seattle, including an amazing visit to the (nerd) circus. The Microsoft-heavy content is hard to avoid, though, when I seem to be spending all my time working at or traveling with Microsoft. Regardless, I hope you enjoyed my post and are thinking about going to see Cirque du Soleil. Itâs a very impressive show, and I wanted to give the performers some recognition. They deserve it. Since I donât think I managed to clap enough after the performance â" thank you, Cirque du Soleil, for a great experience. And a special thumbs up to Mr. Circus Unicycle Man for a really cool unicycle mount that Iâd never seen before â" not more memorable than the rest of the show, but it stuck in my head (Iâd give a thumbs up to another set of performers, but if I did I might give away their act because I donât know how else to describe them). Anyway; if any of the circus performers from that show read this blog, theyâll probably know what Iâm talking about. If not, Iâll just go on rambling and wasting your time; if youâve read this far, who knows what else I can get you to read ;) -Cam *footnote: word on the street is that weâre getting more than just Zune HDs â" woot woot!. Ironically, as a very-tired-that-day field intern, I found out about that from an Amazon intern and then from Gizmodo before I found out from Microsoft. **double footnote: the subtitle for this post, and the delay in bringing it to you, was because I needed to check about Microsoft confidentiality before posting it. Smart thing to do. ***actually, I just found this blog post on a bar stool in California, disguised as an iBlogPost 3G. ****enough with the pointers theyre driving me crazy why do I memory leak I dont even
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