Working in a gift shop at a major tourist attraction leads to some interesting thoughts. Never mind the people who can't speak English, the drooling toddlers, etc. I'm disgusted by the level of waste in our society. I'm selling things which are completely unnecessary. They're mostly cheap trinkets, useless toys, and so forth. Most of this merchandise is likely to break within a year, if it even makes it that far. It's more likely to end up thrown away. Very little of it is useful in the first place. (How many shot-glasses can you use? Do you need another refrigerator magnet? Is it even possible to put all twenty of those iron-on patches on your clothes without looking like a whore?)

And yet yesterday I sold a thousand dollars worth. On Wednesday. That's a slow day. At one of four registers.

And here's a completely unrelated fact, to round out your day! Every day, the city of Seattle sends a mile-long train full of trash to eastern Oregon.

I ammmmm tired from work. But I have money! I want to go to a movie. Would anyone like to take me to a movie on Monday? I'll pay, all you have to do is plan it.

I started at work today. I'm a Visitor Services Sales Associate Level One. I work the cash register, essentially.

This afternoon when I cashed out, my register had $0.01 more in it than it was supposed to, out of something like $183.78 total cash delta. It's not a perfect cash-out, but it's quite close. My mother says that it's amazing, but it really wasn't that hard. All you have to do is be careful.

Yesterday was my fourth day working at Microsoft this summer. I'm sharing room 2600 with my boss (Bill M) in building 119.

The first two days (Tuesday and Wednesday) I did an excellent job of not pressing the Big Red Switch mounted on the wall inside my group's computer lab. (Sounds silly, eh? Computer labs at the world's largest sofware company.) Had I pushed it, I would also have brought down MapPoint, which shared about 55% of the lab space. Would have been a problem. Also, it was my first time inside a datacenter. It doesn't have the raised floors so stereotypical of datacenters, but rather the same industrial-pile carpet that every single building at Microsoft is paved with. They air-condition the rooms to about fifty degrees Fahrenheit so that the machines don't overheat. Nevertheless, in the side of the room give over to MapPoint, the ambient temperature is about eighty degrees. There are the big fans in circular metal cages sitting between rows, moving hot air towards the intakes for the air conditioning. Every server on the rack has almost exclusively blue lights for indicators. I guess they just look cooler than the yellow-green that was so popular before they invented cheap blue LEDs a few years ago. My reasoning is that it makes red LEDs stand out better, so they can be used for warnings.

Friday I went to the Recycled Office Supplies Center in the garage of Building 16. The intent was to get a suitable mouse. The mice (about a thousand of them) live in a rather large cardboard box. It's the size of a standard cargo pallet (about four feet on a side) and filled to a depth approaching three feet. As people root through the box in search of The Perfect Mouse, they tangle the cords of all the Non-Perfect Mice. So there are about a thousand mice, all tied together. I think I'll take a picture of it soon.

I'm working in the group that brought you such innovations as Windows Embedded for Point of Service (also known as WEPOS) and POS for .Net.

Yesterday as I was walking through Pioneer Square on my way to catch the 27 at 3rd & Yesler a homeless man asked me for some change. He pulled out a pitiful collection of nickels and pennies from his pocket and halfheartedly sorted through them as he asked me if I had a little money to give him. Out of habit I lied that I only had fifty cents and needed to get home, and wished him better luck later. He seemed disappointed. After hearing today's sermon on sloth, I felt bad that I had done that. I want to walk around downtown and give away hundreds of sandwiches that have five-dollar bills taped to the bottom.

Yesterday (in Building 9) I saw a man wearing a shirt that said:
Longhorn
[heart]
RSS

Another:
If only you and dead people can read hex, how many people can read hex?

Today is MSN's 10th birthday. Consequently, all food in the RedWest cafeteria is free for people who work in RedWest (like me). Hardware people get orange armbands (food only); MSN people get blue armbands (everything). Joseph N colored the back of his orange armband blue with a dry-erase marker. Nobody knows what sort of everything the MSN people get to do/have. Joseph N also named my component "DuncanRay", which I think is a bit disgusting.

Last night I had my first nightmare in about 7 months. It was so terrible I don't want to say what happened. Suffice it to say that I felt miserable when I remembered it just now.

I'm writing this from work. I like work. I'm about halfway through with my internship, and am almost done with my current project. I'm not supposed to tell what it is because it's Microsoft Confidential. It's really cool, though. Everyone I've showed it to says, "I want that!" or something similar.

This is the first in a possible series of intermittent blogs about my experience at Microsoft as a High School Intern. I will be working today, June 28th, through September 2.

08:00 -- 16:58

I show up and went through New Employee Orientation. The first form they want is the I-9, which I fill out. Slightly confused because the box to write in is below the label, I cross out a few letters. The lady asks me to initial and date with the same pen, then circle it all. She takes the form.

I have a thick packet with a ring-bound initiation book. There are also three labeled folders in the packet: green, for Resources; blue, for Benefits; and red-orange, for Forms. Several of the sheets in the Resources folder are labeled ``Microsoft Confidential''. I also am given a red T-shirt that says ``Microsoft Intern 2005'' in white.

Two other Garfield students, Phun and some boy I don't know, are interns. A total of eighty interns are being ``onboarded'' today, approximately 35 from high school. (Microsoft employs 800 college interns yearly.) There's a talk about practices and legal issues, including a talk by Mr. Steve Ballmer (who looks slightly like a frog).

A Microsoft lawyer gives a talk to us. He addresses some important issues such as intellectual property and (vs.?) Open Source, confidentiality, and so forth. I learn that it is best not to bring Free Software onto campus in general, to avoid ``source taint''. Bringing source code to anything, especially Free Software, is especially discouraged. He mentions the various types of licenses, which ``run the gamut from the Berkeley license, which only requires attribution, to the GPL, which is the sort of license we really want to watch out for'' (not his exact words). Check with your manager if you want or need to use Open Source products on campus. He asks how many people have ``reviewed'' Open Source code. About a third of those present raise hands, myself included. According to that presentation, there are two confidentiality cultures. Information is public unless it isn't, and information isn't public unless it is. Microsoft is the latter, in case you didn't already know that.

On the shuttle to Red West B, where I will be working for the rest of this summer, I talk to a fellow intern and learn that I am not the only Linux-user in the group. It seems that there are 3--6 habitual (obsessive? compulsory?) Linuxers, yet we all applied for (and got!) internships at Microsoft.

I'm already privy to some ``confidential information''. As I intend to not get fired tomorrow morning, it would not be best to plan on obtaining interesting tech news. Accordingly, as I get deeper into interesting projects, I will probably write less.

Today I went for an interview for a (paid) summer internship at Microsoft. I was interviewed by two people: one in the keyboard/mice drivers division, and one in the department that writes custom database applications for the legal staff. They paid for me to take a taxi home.