The internship has begun. Actually, one of the eleven weeks I have here is almost over. I'm also under an NDA (a non-disclosure agreement), so I couldn't tell you what secret project I was working on. Unfortunately, so far, I have seen nothing here that's so revolutionary (or even borderline interesting) that would make me want to break the NDA. This ain't Apple.

However, it would be wrong of me to say that I am not enjoying my internship here. Microsoft really takes care of interns. There's the pay. There're the perks. But then, the actual place is really nice. They give you a boss and a coach/mentor. The awesome thing is that I'm not playing around in a sandbox. The project I 'm doing for Microsoft is something that you will probably see in the next version of Windows. So, I basically get the same privileges as normal employees but also the same responsibilities, which is awesome because getting the feel of working in a big company is a good thing.

Also, Microsoft is big. Very big. In this campus alone, they have 75000 employees and gosh, every third person here is Indian. Like, no kidding. I haven't even seen these many Indians in India. They're freaking everywhere! But, another good thing is that there are a ton of Chinese people here,. I've found that, compared to the Chinese, the Chinese Americans generally tend to show a great deal of reluctance in speaking Chinese. And that's sad 'cause I like speaking Chinese (at least the little I know).

A lot of bash on Microsoft saying that, even though it has so much money and so many people, it still can't make good software and they talk about Apple which is such a small company but makes such good software. I've always said this and I'll say it again now. It's not as if the people who work at Microsoft are stupid or incompetent - far from it. No, the fact is that Microsoft carries a lot of baggage. Do you remember old games like Monkey Island 1 or Grim Fandango? They run on Windows Vista. How much software from the mid-90's can you run on a present day Mac running Mac OS X without using a virtual machine? Thanks to all the processor and OS transitions at Apple, zero. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I'll refrain from judging that at the moment. However, one of the things that really restricts programming efforts here at Microsoft is that they try to make sure that, by introducing something new, they don't break all the old stuff. I know this because I'm currently using a book about Windows 95 Programming to get introduced to Windows programming. Every piece of code in that book is not only relevant to Vista programming but it also compiles and runs flawlessly. You can't say that about Mac OS X. But, it also makes programming for Microsoft not easy, and even I am going to run into those hurdles pretty soon.

And the fact that Microsoft actually has very competent engineers working for them is easily verified when you see what they make when they don't have a ton of baggage to carry around. Look at the Xbox, Windows Mobile, Office 2007 and you'll see that Microsoft is certainly capable of making good stuff. I personally believe that they should drop the baggage that is Windows and rewrite it from scratch (not the whole thing of course - that would take a decade). Sigh... more updates after I have Internet at home.

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Wow, another extremely short year passes by. The years at college just seem to go at like four times the speed of the school years. It's very odd, mostly frightening and borderline interesting. Basically, it makes me feel really bad about all the time I've wasted (like all last summer).

End of term exams didn't go terribly badly from my point of view, although I'm sure they did from a grade point of view. Will be lucky to get a handful of B's. Sigh... anyway, at least it's over. And I've now taken my last physics class for the entire college career. So, now, strike out maths and physics from the list of subjects I need to do. From now on, it's just CS and Chaa-neez. Cool.

Joota Polish Days...

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All right, so I won't be able to give an accurate description now because I really should have written this out on Thursday when the elation was actually flowing. But... basically, it turned out to be a very interesting day.

I always get the feeling that my Chinese teacher hates me a lot or is genuinely annoyed by me but I went to her office hours today and really good conversation which completely dispelled those beliefs of mine and I saw myself in her eyes in a completely different light. And even though she gave me some bad news about grading policies, I walked out of the room happy.

Then, in calligraphy class, I think I got another very interesting and insightful peek into this eccentric professor of mine. For the better part of the past three months, in these calligraphy classes, I have been trying to figure this man out because I really want to know what are the thoughts behind his actions. Anyway, regarding the class itself, it is one of the very challenging ones I'm taking this quarter actually because I'm really interested in succeeding in it and getting it right (more so than most of my other classes) and so sucking in this class is really not an option for me. However, I have not been particularly good with the brush and ink up until now. I've been of the opinion that my characters look pretty ugly and I think the teacher agreed because on his rounds (while we wrote), occasionally he didn't even bother to stop by and suggest improvements.

However, today, just a few minutes into the class and my having finished my first character, 心 (xin, heart), he comes by, looks at it and says that it is a very well-balanced character and I'm like, wow, I guess that's actually a compliment, because the best I've got from him before is a 不错 (not bad) or a 很不错 (very not bad). Anyway, it gets really happy when I was writing the last stroke of another character 金 (jin, gold) and he looks down at it excitedly and says "Please-a... finish-yit". I get really anxious when he's watching me draw strokes because (a) I think I'll make a mistake, (b) I think my strokes are ugly and (c) I tend to "correct" my strokes because I don't get them perfectly right on the first sweep and that is a total no-no according to him. Anyway, I finish the character and he says "well, for this a-character, I will giwe you three circles." Then, he of course proceeds to draw three circles near my character, and says "yin Chinese, this means an A. Yeach yindividual stroke is perfect and the balance and proportion is perfect. You can-a cut it out and put it up on your wall." And yes, vain as it may sound, but this gave me immense amounts of happiness, because it was such a culmination of eight weeks of trying to get it reasonably right and a lot of frustration. Anyway, I will reproduce the character that I drew/wrote here below and a yardstick computerized semi-calligraphy font as a yardstick:


So sure the computer one looks a lot more impressive and I could make excuses, but instead I'll just ask you to cut me some slack 'cause this is an enormous improvement from yesterweeks.

The rest of the day was less eventful, because 5pm to 1am nearly continuously (break for food) were dedicated to a CS problem set.

I feel I should find time to write about the other goings-on but there just is no time! Even now, I cut into my precious weekend sleep. So, I should go. 拜拜!

Labels: English