maloki

I haven’t blogged for a while and so, I’m going try to cram it all here in this one…

I forgot the exact dates too bad for me…but oh well.  All I know is that these events happened between March up until last week.

Let me begin

Imagine Cup

Imagine a world where… and so on.  Well, 12 Ateneans joined the Imagine Cup this year and I was one of them.  There were eight of us from our batch.  The 12 was divided into 3 teams, with four members each.  We had different ideas and fortunately, two teams made it to the local finals (only five teams are selected out of those that have submitted).  Our team, wasn’t one of them.  It seems pathetic that we’re the only Ateneo team that didn’t make it.  But then, I’m also relieved.  I already have a lot of things going on and I don’t think I can handle making our Imagine Cup proposal a reality in a matter of months.  Of course, there are other team members to help but then I don’t think we’ll be that productive as a team.  Now, I can focus on our thesis, a SOMBA project, CompSAt, my other OJT and so on.

I really thought our proposal was going to make it into the local finals.  Maybe we lacked a web service or whatnot.  Either way, it’s over now.  But since I like the idea, I’ll leave the finer details for another time.

Update: One of the Ateneo teams placed 1st runner up!  Congratulations!

Headstrong

I applied for an intern at Headstrong.  I think this was the first company that contacted me.  Maybe some others tried to contact me but I wasn’t available on the phone so there x.x.  Right now, I’m wondering what happened to my application.  I was interviewed by two people who seemed to like how my interview went.  They were considering me for the e-learning department at that time.

In the interview, I was asked why I said I loved programming yet I have a strong background in graphic design.  Well, I consider graphic design and other art-related stuff like photography or poetry a “hobby” or a sideline.  What I really love doing is programming.  I love the challenge, I love the thinking.  I try to avoid the documentation.  But there.  I was forced to seriously consider wheter I wanted to do graphic design or software engineering for work.

*Sigh*.  The interviewers asked if that was my first interview.  And well, yes it was.  They congratulated me for a great interview but never contacted me after that (or at least I thought they didn’t).  I wonder what happened…

Chevron

Gretch, Neill and I went to the Yuchenco tower to attend the Chevron company talk.  It happened during finals week so Bawang wasn’t able to come with us.  Gretch and I were picked up at Ateneo, together with other Ateneans.  At first I was feeling a bit paranoid because this felt a bit suspicious.  Imagine: a van picking up students from Ateneo.  Sounds like a kidnapping scheme.  When I got to Ateneo, there was a sign on the van that said “___’s Van” and so it seemed a bit weird.  I was expecting “Chevron” or at least a Chevron logo.

Later on, the man explained that putting Chevron’s name would put everyone in the van at risk considering Chevron is commonly known as an oil company.  Makes sense, especially if one of their core values is safety.

(I didn’t have the chance to have a good breakfast but it was okay since we were treated to a Delifrance breakfast before the talks started )

Aaah, safety.  The buzz word of that day.  What company focuses on the employees safety?  Consider that if anything happens to you, the company could just hire another person who is more capable.  Safety is really about the person.

At about 10 in the morning, a Fitness First trainer was there and led the employees to exercise.  It was pretty interesting to see all the employees, young and old, stop working just to exercise.  Well, they said that it’s not everyday that a trainer comes in to lead the exercise but they come at least once a week.  Otherwise, they have these rubber tubes that they use for stretching exercise.

The office seems really nice.  The pantry is huuuuuge, the desks can be elevated (just in case you want to work standing up), seats are very adjustable…everything seems ergonomic.  My day there made me want to work there.

After the morning talks and office tour, we were brought to Powerplant to have lunch at Burgoo.  At the end of the day, I went home with some Chevron Goodies and with a strong urge to work there.

Solegy

I also applied for an internship position at Solegy.  I forgot what the name of the buildign was but oh well.  My driver and I had a hard time finding the building and by the time I got there, I didn’t really know if I was in the right place.

Anyway, the interview started a bit late but it didn’t immediately start with questions.  I was first asked to solve a puzzle wherein there are differently-shaped bricks and all the bricks should fit into this container.  After quite a while, I was able to solve the puzzle.  Deep inside, I was wondering whether there was a good “algorithm” to use since I could just be repeating the same solutions over and over again.  Also, I was wondering whether I would be able to solve it.  Anyway, I did.  The interviewer said it was to test my patience and said that I was able to keep my cool while solving the puzzle.  Whee!

After that, he went to the general questions about me.  Then, there was a technical interview which I wasn’t really prepared for.  It was quite surprising though that the different questions were those that were recently taught in CS124.  Pretty cool.  Hahaha, I forgot what the difference was between a Thread and implementing the Runnable interface in JAVA.

Well, the interviewer seemed to like how the interview went.  He just said that they might not get me as an intern because I won’t be free until after April 20 (when the Ateneo Summer Programming Camp would end).  Well, really didn’t get me.

In a way, it’s ok for me since I was quite unsure about their office.  On my way out, I tripped by the door and almost fell close to the stairs.  (yes, there were stairs going down, directly in front of the front door)  Good thing was that I was able to regain my balance in time.  At that brief moment I thougt that working here could mean the end of me, literally.  So I guess not being accepted at Solegy wasn’t that bad.

Solaris

Last week, I played the somewhat buggy flash game: “Temple of the Sun” that was promoting the Sun Studio & Solaris.  Either way I was curious and asked for a Solaris CD.  In about a week, I got the this CD in the mail, Solaris Exress, Developer Edition DVD:

I don’t really notice much of a difference between the other Linux flavors and OpenSolaris…Except maybe in CDE.  Looks clean & and it seems a lot has been programmed using JAVA instead.  Unlike in Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE (& SUSE Linux), it wasn’t able to detect my Wireless card

Update: Last May 3, three other DVDs just arrived in the mail: Solaris 10 Operating System (SPARC DVD & x64/x86 DVD) and Developer Tools (contains Sun Studio 11, Sun Java Studio Creator Update 1, Sun Java Studio Enterprise and Netbeans 5.0).

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Hahaha, this is getting pretty long.  I’ll cut it here and then continue on another post.  Still to come: MOA, Chikka, Joost, ASPC and Mactan

Filed under: Uncategorized by Loki