Summer job blues, a lightweight Amazon and some interesting forecasts

My summer job at the College of Computing has me labelled as a Tech Temp (aka temporary employee at Georgia Tech). The job started off with a little project with MySQL and PHP and introduced me also to the kind of politics one would encounter in a multitier bureaucracy. Speaking from a platform-independent geeky point-of-view, they should all probably find their identities in classes or modules that comprise the J2EE framwork and become beans in an Enterprise Framework that implements numerous interfaces like ICanGetItDoneNowButWillActuallyTakeMyOwnSweetTime and MyHandsAreTiedAndTheyExpectMeToTypeCode. Aah, well. At least I learnt more about MySQL and PHP and met some more interesting people.

Since that project reached its completion, I have been spending more time with Enkia. Of course this got my bosses confused about my employee allegiances, but I guess it must be expected. So I spent today working on my summer job with new task assigned to me: delivering campus mail. This, to be honest, was the kind of work I had expected to do when I took the position. It's a great thing to take a break from the pretentiousness and false sense of power moments of coding lines of machine-readable code and do stuff that gets you back to reality and closer to your own kind.

It's been just a day since Amazon entered the web services arena {previous post} and Kokogiak Media has come out with Amazon Light. More about it here.

That campus runaround in the hot sun does wonders for visibility when you return to closed air-conditioned indoors. Everything appears dimly lit for a while and spots pepper your vision. Not to mention the drying sweat in the icky spots of your white T-shirt (aren't they supposed to be perfect for the summer?). A good time to have something great for lunch. It was time to try out the Classic Cuban sandwich from a nondescript little place on 14th and Atlantic. The barricades on the road made it a park to walk through with James for company, except the hot sun (beating down) didn't help matters much. Excellent sandwich in crisp bread. Highly recommended for revisitation.

A surreal twist to the day: F*d company's top blurb today is about rumours that Microsoft may buy Yahoo! in November 2002. Jeepers! Yahoo.NET I don't want. That's scary. One step closer to TWD for MSFT. Look out for a brand new slowed-down more insecure version of your favourite mail domain ... and a new integrated instant messaging program to boot. Shudder!!!

Music for the day: Thanks to Planet Rock. It's strange that Van Halen, a band driven by the amazing technique of guitarist Eddie Van Halen, actually turned superstars with Jump (off 1984, released on New Year's Day that year) driven by the synthesizer and not the blindingly fast licks of Eddie... Of course, we must not forget Eddie's famous appearance on MJ's 1983 hit Billie Jean.