Today I resumed the normal activities of an internship day. Both college and high school were back in session, and so I headed over to Edwards to start my first internship day of the semester.
Not only was Steve back, but Emily apparently now also works on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Hopefully this means I’ll be a lot less bored, since now I’ll have more people to follow around to learn from and/or help. However, today I followed Steve around during the entire work period.
== Exact Date Unknown ==
Today was an interesting day. It began easy and ended confusingly.
We started by fixing a professor’s keyboard on a Mac. Well, it wasn’t really “fixing” but more of an instruction thing. The professor (as well as me) learned how to delete both forwards and backwards on a Mac keyboard. They keyboards aren’t like a PC keyboard, which have both a Delete and a Backspace key. In order to delete in the other direction with the Delete key, you have to hold the Apple key.
After this, we went over to the Telecommunications section of Allen, to fix someone’s computer. He had a weird “generic host error” that Steve had never seen before and couldn’t figure out. We finally went back to Edwards and did some research on it. While at Allen, I saw Colin (from last year’s NV class) but didn’t talk to him.
== Exact Date Unknown ==
Today was yet again a slow day. Our only task today was to go to Tower and fix a problem with one of their computers. The ticket wasn’t too specific, and none of the people at the office knew what was wrong either. However, one of the printers was having a problem, and we fixed a paper jam. Once the paper was out, the printer worked fine again.
Looking forward to the IT Student party tomorrow.
I have spent 5 days at Foodlink: one day with the whole class, and four Thursdays with a couple of other people from the class. Since the days were all very similar, I’m going to combine them all into one post.
Day 1: Today the whole class went to Foodlink for the first time. Some of us managed to get lost on the way, but we all made it eventually. We then go to work sorting food items into different boxes of specific categories. We went about this for an hour or so, and then went to Dinosaur Barbeque.
Day 2: Today was the first day I went by myself. I met up with Matt, Colleen, and Theresa there, and we went to the 3rd or 4th floor to seperate categorized boxes. We finished that quickly, and then went downstairs to do the same thing we did on Day 1.
Day 3: Today we sorted food into categories again, as on Day 1.
Day 4: Today was Matt and Colleen’s last day at Foodlink. Theresa wasn’t there. We sorted foodstuff again as on Day 1, and then we stuffed envelopes during our lunch break.
Day 5: Just myself and Theresa there today. We went to a new area, where we sorted specific drinks into different categories: similar to Day 1, but much more specific categories. We got through about 5 sets of boxes, and then went to lunch and left.
As usual, things around the ITS office were slow. This was to be expected of course, because college hasn’t started up again. However, there was virtually nothing to do until noon, when Tanasee and Emily finally thought of something for me.
My task was to take 7 computers apart and remove all the important parts: power source, ZIP drives, CD drives, Floppy drives, hard drives, and RAM. I was then to label every piece, and put the gutted computers in a pile.
I started out slow, but gained speed eventually, once I was used to how stuff needed to be taken apart. I finished the task in a relatively fast amount of time, even going at a speed that I thought was slow.
Gary thought of something for me to do at the end of the day, but I didn’t have time to do any of it effectively before I had to leave.
Today was an unusual day. Steve was working the Help Desk, so for once I couldn’t follow him around to watch what he did. This left me at Edwards for a while, just relaxing and talking to a couple of the IT people I don’t usually see.
About halfway through the day, Emily decided to bring me along to “help” her with her tasks, though it was more just to keep her company, since the tasks were so easy.
The first of two tasks on our list was to set up a new computer in an office. We brought the computer over on one of the carts, and within 5 minutes, everything was hooked up and ready to go.
We then headed off to a different location to work on our second problem, which was an Adobe issue. A professor could not get .pdf files to load, and couldn’t figure out why. For a while, neither Emily nor myself could figure out why as well. Emily finally uninstalled the current version of Adobe and reinstalled it from scratch. Once that was done, all the .pdf files loaded just fine. We then went back to Edwards and relaxed the rest of the day.
Today, Steve and myself paid the third visit to a person we previously thought had a very minor problem. On two other days where I reported slow work, her computer was actually the only work we had, and it was so minor, I felt it wasn’t journal-worthy.
Today was a pretty slow day, though I did learn how to do more stuff. I went down to Edwards as normal, but then went to Lathrop myself to meet up with Steve and his friends, since Steve is doing lab work over the entire college winter break. There was four of us total, to update a small lab of 8 computers. Since two of the computers didn’t work for some reason, we only had to update 6 of the 8. It was productive… when we actually did work. Most of the time was spent waiting for the computers to do whatever they wanted to do.Once the computers were updated, which was really easy, we went to Dailey, which is where the lab support is headquartered. We fixed a small typo Adam (the boss) made in one of the labs in Dailey, and then took our lunch break.
By the time we got to doing anything again, it was time for me to depart.
