I am much happier about my productivity over the past two weeks. My first intern project is waiting on another developer to come back from holidays and my second project is letting me program up a storm.

I have no confidence in the day counts now. Not being zero based and combining with variable month lengths I am not even attempting for accuracy. Day 24 if my math is correct denotes the fourth Friday of my internship.

Day 24

Every developer in Windows Sustained Engineering went curling!

No one had curled before! We except me and some others since Microsoft has held morale events at the curling rink before. My curling experience dates back to childhood when my parents attempted to have me participate with some friends in after school curling. The rink was cold and I remember hating it.

It turns out curling is a fun game. We split up into four groups and each group split into two teams apiece. Before we started a staff member took 40 minutes and introduced us to the game’s basics.

A full curling game consists of 8 ends. After each end all the curling rocks have migrated to the other rink end so things reset. The most interesting and confusing aspect of curling is the scoring. The target is bull’s eye shaped but the scoring is all relative unlike darts. The team with the rock closest to the centre will get a point for every one of their rocks between the centre and the closest opposing team rock. Thus getting a rock in the perfect centre can turn an end from 4 points in the opposing team’s favour to one point in your favour.

Our first of only two scores =(

In the end my team lost 2 points against 5! We had won the first two ends by one point apiece but then the other team flipped the entire game with 3 points in the third end. The fourth end almost gave them an extra 4 points until Ramesh landed one rock and invalidated three of their rocks! It does not sound like much but the curling scoring rules create a dramatic dynamic.

Despite the physical sores a sport like curling inflicts on my lazy physic I went to intern apphack event that night. I intended to work with someone else but as I sat down in the back of the crowded food court all I cared to do was play Pikmin with my new xbox controller. Ten minutes into the presentation and half a pikmin day later someone pulled the fire alarm. I thus not only got to go home early but also got to take photos of cool fire engines!

The rear cap houses the rear wheal’s driver. It is not attached to the ladder.

Apple sells the clip in their company store which is accessible without a company badge. This makes it accessible to freed geeks’ odd sense of humour.  Photo of a co-worker’s badge after a trip to Silicon Valley.

Day 25

My mother came to visit! For atleast half a year after I got the internship my mother has been plotting to visit Seattle while attending a linguistic’s conference in Victoria. We spent the day visiting Seatle’s downtown’s sights. Beyond anything it was nice to see my mother again. I still have two more months so I better make a note to video chat again before much time passes. It is amazing how long a month is. I remember arriving but it feels like a distant past.

We took a monorail to the Seattle Needle. I paid full price but my mentor later mentioned that there are discounts from Microsoft employees which I forgot to use.

Top of the Seattle Needle viewing south over the downtown.

Day 27 to 32

Lots of work! Lots of fun work! I wrote parser and interpreter, gave a presentation on printing, got a new bug assigned to me, watched my first bug getting marked fixed. A full week and good representation of what I hope my next two months will be filled with.

Update 2013-10: If you are still interested please consider reading through the overview of my internship.