WorldLee

I never realized how important buffers were until today. I mean, you really don’t see them much when programming in languages like C# where most of that stuff happens behind the scenes. Basically, what was happening was that I was working on a Chat application in Silverlight, when one of my co-workers came up with a scenario of multiple private messages coming through before the private message window has fully opened.

Hmm… I thought to myself, that’s a tough one. I’ve never come across that problem before. And sure enough when I tested it, it broke my application all sorts of ways. But then something another co-worker said to me that got me thinking was that it was sort of like writing to a disk. You don’t just write all your information straight to the disk. The disk is waaaaay slower than the computer’s RAM at reading and writing, so there has to be something to hold that information. Now when you’re writing in C# you almost never see this because it’s handled for you, but adding some sort of cache to hold the information and checking to see if the receiver is ready for it made the application work correctly and as expected.

Way to go for buffers!

It appears that while I was gone over the weekend, having a very very dramatic Friday and re-self-discovery on Saturday and Sunday, my website WorldLee.com was hacked!

I spent the better part of Sunday evening and some time at work today going through and cleaning up the mess, and there’s still no guarantee that things are as they were (I did everything short of reinstalling everything from protected backups.)

The long and the short of it is, several months ago I was naive enough to have one password for all my internet sites. I thought, like most, that if I had a secure password I shouldn’t have to memorize dozens of different passwords. Unfortunately, I was tricked into putting my MySpace information onto a bogus page, and from there the hackers got into my Yahoo! mail account and started spamming people. Worse, they got into my PayPal account and tried to transfer several hundreds of dollars into their own personal bank account.

I don’t suppose the law ever got up with them, I thought the issue had been resolved and I had, like a good boy, changed all my passwords to a new, constantly changing and very random password choice. No one should have been able to hack my passwords again. But guess which password I forgot to change? That’s right, because I never actually type in a password for my FTP account, I forgot to change it. Welp, I guess those people took their revenge by using that password to compromise my site. Hopefully they didn’t get a hold of any of my other passwords, because if they did, they’d have access to…. well, just my site… since I’ve changed everything else to something different.

Let this be a warning to you! Password theft is real… be careful where you put it.

Sometimes, only a music video can say it best.

So this marks the end of my 5th week at FedEx and I have to say that it has been a resounding success so far. I’ve made important contacts, proved my capabilities at my work, and for the most part shown that I would make a good addition to their team someday. Unfortunately, I feel like I haven’t done nearly as much as I could have to make higher level contacts. I know *of* the Vice-Presidents, but I haven’t gotten a chance to show my potential to them one-on-one.

This is sorta hard for me to do, I’m not the kind of person who just wants to walk up to someone really important and talk about my life. God, if my boss’s knew what I did on the weekends, they’d probably never want to be seen in public with me, much less hire me. So I can’t talk about my personal life (especially in a conservative company environment) and I don’t like playing sports, so that’s out too. I mean, if you don’t know how to play golf in this town, it’s like you don’t even exist. I know how to play sports… like softball, tennis, even golf… i just find absolutely no enjoyment out of them.

So here I am, with no way to converse with someone without making an ass out of myself. So I must resort to talking about my work. Well I have all these great ideas, but corporate life doesn’t lend itself well to new ideas. If I said “hey, let’s do everything in Java” they’d immediately point out that department A or B wouldn’t like it because they have their own pet projects. So I guess talking about new work ideas are out, though showing that I know about their existence is probably a good thing. Maybe I could talk about the work I’m doing? That seems the safest bet for making good conversation that’s relevant, but then I appear too one dimensional… it’s so hard to make a good impression overall I don’t know how people ever succeed.

So in other news, I found out that I’m really really special. Most of the other interns got their positions by who they knew in the organization. Someone’s aunt, or friend of the CIO or someone high up helped them get the position. I got the position strictly on my own merits and achievements. That makes me feel really really good, and at the same time makes me want to kick myself for not taking the inititive sooner and getting my computer science degree when I had the chance.

Speaking of chances, let’s talk about that. I’m about to get unceremoniously dropped from school for taking too many credit hours and not having a degree to show for it. How sucky is that? All those times I had to drop classes for one reason or another have finally caught up with me. Now I have to face the music. The reality is, I’m amazed I’ve made it this far in school. I really am. I have one degree and am on the verge of getting a second one. I don’t doubt that I will succeed in anything I do, but given all the obstacles I have had to overcome, both mentally and physically, I should give myself much more credit than I actually do.

Alright, so to sum up this month… life is good, things going well, can’t really ask for more from FedEx than what they’ve given me, and I really hope this leads to a job opprotunity, if not with them, than with another company.

I really don’t know what to expect or what to do

Despite all my fears, despite all my self-handicapping and doomsday predictions, I actually survived my first week at FedEx and did relatively well in the process. There’s not a whole lot to say. My first day I was really nervous about being able to program in C#, and was even more surprised to find out that I’d be developing desktop applications instead of web applications. Which, of course, meant that I would have virtually no experience to draw from. At least, that’s what I thought. But it turns out that either designing an application isn’t as hard as it looks, or the work I did tinkering around with ResEditor with the Mac helped me out a lot… course that was almost 10 years ago. I managed to finish my first assigned project today, despite all my ravings about not knowing how I was going to do it. I even managed to throw in some extra, but helpful, features. My manager seems impressed with my work and my co-workers, I think, are warming up to me.

I thought you guys might be interested in seeing where I work, so I am posting some pics as well!

This is the outside of the building

This is the World Technology Center for FedEx

This is my little corner of the world… a cubical.. isn’t life almost perfect?