I did in fact...

have a happy birthday. Thanks, all of you who wished me one.

I'm predicting a slow day at work; It's almost 9:00 and only myself and one of the VP's is here. Granted, that's 20% of the company and I know Ernie'll be in around 10, but still. This whole past week has been slow. Most exciting thing I did yesterday was vastly improve my Powerpoint Animation/Layout skillz. Stan, the president, has Sarah (Miles' daughter) and myself recreating a presentation he used to make with glass and then 35mm slides in powerpoint, taking advantage of animation and whatnot. Unfortunately, he hasn't really given us any direction beyond two specific slides. But those two slides are damn good! We've spent a combined total of over an hour, I think, working on them.
Next week should be much better, Tricia (the engineer who I most closely work with) and Kevin (production/manufacturing manager) will both be back on monday, meaning that things'll actually get done. Kevin did want me to work on inventorying the molds this week, but I've forgotten/not really felt like it. Eh, I'll just blame it on Ernie if Kevin complains.
Work is nice though, it's like my CMU away from CMU. Here's an example:
On Wed. (day after my B-day) they had a cake for me, and when Stan asked what kind it was Harvey replied "Composite" because it was a marble cake. They're nerdy enough here that everyone thought that was brilliant. I also spent several minutes determining how they had encoded my age in candles. I originally went with color-based, but apparently it was some location-based encryption. I still don't get how, but the cake was good regardless.
I do wonder, sometimes, if there's something wrong with me. I mean, I got bluetooth mouse for my birthday and I was positively giddy that I was gunning down Battle Droids wirelessly shortly following syncing my PDA with my laptop while it was still in my pocket.
Most people at home don't appreciate my nerdiness. Even Ben, the CS and Math double major gets disgusted by my nerdiness sometimes. Oh well.
I'm actually really looking forward to next year at CMU: Classes should be really awesome, I'll be surrounded by people at least as geeky as me and I will not be getting up after 6 every morning (that's when I need to get up now, what with my 1+ hr commute). Heck, I'll be able to wake up at 9 every morning and make it to class, even though Mudge is further from everything (and I think I have a class all the way over in Scaife) than 'schlag.
Speaking of geeky, I've become somewhat of the on-site IT person around here, mostly because I'm about 1/2 the age of any of the regular employees. I also got to shop around online for a laptop for the engineering VP, it was awesome getting paid for something I'd do in my spare time anyway. In some ways it's more fun when you're given a max pricetag. I'm apparently the most qualified person around here to install USB devices as well; apparently the other engineers here arn't. I've installed two wireless mice and a laserjet printer as well as install/remove a ZIP250 ATA drive since I've gotten here.
In my adventures in IT I discovered something very odd: I'm beginning to suspect that some IBM workstations store their OS on a PS/2 mouse. I was installing a new wireless USB mouse the other day on the receptionists' computer and the thing shut down when I unplugged the PS/2 port. I shrugged, convinced I hadn't hit any power buttons or breakers or anything and installed the USB receiver. I walked around to the keyboard and then hit the power button. The thing booted up and installed the SCSI Bios and then proceeded to inform me "No Operating system detected, please insert disk." That really freaked me out because last week something vaguely similar happened to this very computer at work that I'm e-mail blogging on right now. It booted up and claimed it needed a boot disk, then refused to do anything useful besides letting me select 'safe mode' and then rebooting again before reaching windows. Turns out the harddrive was like swiss-cheese, with the holes being good sectors a!
nd the cheese being bad ones. Anyway so I unplug the receiver and plug the old mouse back in (an ancient scroll-deviceless (no wheel or IBM-syle nub) non-optical, 3-button mouse) and the thing boots up no problem. Eh? I repeat and same issue. I ended up getting a USB->PS/2 adapter from home (I have like 9, they come with every wired USB mouse, it seems) and then running the mouse through the PS/2 port and all was fine. I mean, refuse to boot, that's fine. It's easy to figure out why when it spits out a 'Pointing device error' during startup, but to lie about having an OS? That's just wicked sketchy.