w e e k 2

Weblog: Week 2

Monday, May 26th, 2003 19:00

Memorial Day!! Cleaned my room instead of working.

Tuesday, May 27th, 2003 18:00

Today was my first day at Nortel. Traffic on 40 was surprisingly not as bad as I thought it would be so I got there half and hour early. Jason met me and another student, Steven at the front door and took us to the lab where we would be working. Steven is a Computer Science major at UNC Chapel Hill, but I try not to hold that against him.

First we were to go and get ID badges. I wasn't able to get an ID badge because I don't have an ID number with Nortel because I'm not an official employee of Nortel. So someone is going to have to sign me in every morning until I can get a badge.

We started out learning about the software that the development team is working on. To do this we ran through the reference manual for the software and went through the examples.

In the afternoon, Jason went over some of the automated testing stuff that I'm going to be working on specifically. I was really lost about what exactly he wanted. I'm worried that I'm not going to do a good enough job at Nortel.

Wednesday, May 28th, 2003 18:30

Today was much better at Nortel. I understand better what I'm going to be working on. I also learned about a few new software programs that are really cool, in particular cygwin, which is a Linux terminal window in a Windows environment. What's super cool about it is that Perl and many other things are built in. I can't wait to download it on my home computers.

I also set up the testing environment on my computer at Nortel. It took a little while to get everything set up correctly so that the tests run and all, but we got it working right before quitting time.

I spent a little bit of time working on the Perl scripts that I'm working on to get there old test data into the database. The work is slow because it's been a while since I've used Perl.

Thursday, May 29th, 2003 17:30

I was back at school today, which was very nice. Everyone was expecting me to be at Nortel again. It's funny how everyone gets into the whole Tuesday/Thursday class idea.

I made some changes to errors that I made in Tutorial 1 and I also started on Tutorial 2. Tutorial 2 is about class diagrams. Hopefully this tutorial will go faster since I have some idea of how I want to format things now.

Lynn, the other girl sponsored by the DMP program, started yesterday, but I finally got to meet her today. She's incredibly nice and I think is going to add to our office area very nicely.

I started to download cygwin, but had a few problems with the download. Then I tried to do a full install, but realized that it would be insane to get everything. I had to leave early because of doctors apt.

Friday, May 30th, 2003 16:30

Spent most of my time finishing up the tutorial and downloading cygwin to my laptop. Realized that starting at a computer screen all day is bad for my eyes. Need to get up on occasion to reduce eyestrain. I think that I am going to get new glasses this summer. I don't really like my current pair so I don't wear them in public, but this summer I think I will treat myself to a stylish pair.

Started working with some Perl stuff. Unfortunately, the Perl program that worked at Nortel is not working here. Am going to try and figure that out on Monday.

I have a little bit of research that I need to do on tutorial 2 that I'm going to look up this weekend or early on Monday morning. I beat everyone in my office here by at least an hour, which is nice b/c I get some quite time to start the day.

Saturday, May 31st, 2003 22:15

Proctored an E115 exam first thing this morning. I'm not teaching E115 over the summer sessions, but one of the LI's that is couldn't proctor today's exam so I volunteered to cover for him. Was a lot of fun. Didn't have to proctor in the room, so I manned the printer and made up the key. Also, got in a great discussion about the Matrix.

Later, there was a party at my grandmother's house for my mom's and aunt's birthdays. They were both born on June 2nd seven years apart (my aunt is older). What I think is extra cool is that they are Gemini which is symbolized by the twins. It was great fun and good food (BBQ.)