I love my internship. I’m doing fun, challenging coding work, I’m absorbing office culture, and I get to sit in on seminars about business practices. It’s great because I feel like I’m learning what I need to know about the software industry that I can’t learn in a classroom.

But moreover, my internship is great because I don’t have signs like these on my door anymore. As much as I’m excited to go back this fall, I’m so glad classes are out for summer!

Here’s my final project for the computer animation class I completed this semester. My goal was to simulate a binary search tree in a somehow artistic fashion. I tried to use as much MEL scripting as I could for this project, but it seemed like Maya was fighting me at every turn. In the end, I managed to write only one working method, but even that one method saved me a lot of tedious animating.

I’ve been using a Mac for the past three years, so when the slick Windows 7 Snap feature came out, I admit, I was a little sad I wasn’t in the market for a new Windows OS. Enter ShiftIt, a utility for Mac which replicates the behavior of Snap. The Shiftit dropdown menu sits in my menu bar, and I can resize windows using either the dropdown menu or shortcuts. I use it primarily when I’m writing outlines for papers, so I can have my outline, notes, and research windows sized well together.

Admittedly, you don’t need this app to resize windows such that you can see more than one at once, but it makes the process much more zippy, accurate, and convenient.

(ShiftIt works with Mac OS 10.5 and 10.6.)

I’m pleased to say that this year I’ve secured a summer internship. I am happy to be working this summer for a local tech company I’ve interned with before, and they seem happy to have me on again. I started work this week, and things are going great.

Well, for the most part.

On my first day, my supervisor invited me to lunch with him. There was good food, but afterwards I didn’t get my cash in quick enough, and he footed the bill. I thought that maybe lunch on the intern’s first day was a company thing, and he would seek reimbursement. No big deal. But yesterday as I was eating lunch at my desk, he came back from a fast food place, said cheerily, “I brought you back something,” and put a cookie on my desk.

To be frank, it made me uncomfortable. Something didn’t feel right about my superior buying food for me. The question I wanted to ask, but obviously couldn’t, was “Would you have bought this for me if I were a guy?”

It probably wouldn’t have bothered me so much if a similar situation hadn’t occurred at my last internship. My supervisor at that time noticed that I preferred not to accompany him and our coworkers to the coffee shop, so one day he said, “Here, you should come with us more often,” and handed me a gift card for the coffee shop. I accepted it, assuming it contained a token amount. I was shocked when after my first purchase after work, the cashier told me I had $47.29 remaining on the card. I wish now that I had gone back to my supervisor, given him back the card, and told him I couldn’t accept it. Instead, I was embarrassed, so I didn’t say anything and kept using the gift card.

I know my supervisors were trying to do me a favor, but their actions felt patronizing. I like cookies as much as the next person, but accepting gifts from my coworkers makes me feel belittled. They’re saying with their actions, “Even though you’re a competent person we’re glad to have on our team, we’d like to help you out with food, and that’s okay because you’re a girl.”

So in response to my supervisor’s generosity yesterday, I grimaced and said, “Oh, I’d prefer if you didn’t buy food for me.” He said, “Oh, okay,” and the day went on. I’m glad I spoke up for myself, and I’m sure it won’t be a problem with him going forward, but I can’t help but wonder if I handled the situation appropriately. I would love to hear what other people have to say on the matter. Does this kind of thing happen to other female interns?

It’s the age of criticizing PowerPoint, and everybody’s doing it. Last November I wrote a wildly popular post on why I have trouble learning from Powerpoint presentations in college classes. This week, the New York Times published an article dramatizing the problem, writing how Powerpoint is hurting the United States’ war in Iraq. Officers’ time is too tied up in making bullet-pointed storyboards, to the extent that some of them spend more time on Powerpoint than anything else. I think the NYT chose the example of armed forces to make this story especially dramatic, and it goes a little over the top. The article even mentions that Obama was briefed with PowerPoint slides in last fall’s Afghan Strategy Review, as if to say that because the President sees it, PowerPoint is a scourge that has penetrated our deepest levels of government. Still, the article says out loud what many of us are afraid to: everyone is bored by Powerpoint presentations, and yet everyone expects them to be used.

I try to avoid the cursed Office product as much as possible. Sadly, a few of my professors actually require Powerpoint decks for class presentations. Having pity on my classmates, I try to make my presentations as interesting as possible. I have a rule of thumb, and it goes like this: when I consider what I need to include in each slide, I ask myself, if I were making this presentation without the aid of a projector, which visuals would I print out in hard copy because they’re that necessary to understanding the topic? These images, along with a caption or two, are the only things I’ll allow in my slide decks. If it’s not worth spending money to print out, it’s not worth wasting my audience’s time on. If there is something important to say, I think the best thing to do is just say it, and reserve the projector for images that aid understanding.

I think most people do not understand that their slide decks do not have to stand on their own. Instead, they copy half their speech into their slide deck, as though hearing it and reading it at the same time will increase the audience’s attention. This not only takes up more of the audience’s time, but the speaker also wastes more time making the presentation, as the officers quoted in the NYT article did. I think we’d save a lot of time in meetings if people would learn to just say what they wanted to say, instead of writing a storyboard about it.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when friends say, “I don’t know anything about computers.”

This sentence irks me for a couple reasons. The first is that it is blatantly not true. I’ve met folks who have never touched anything more complicated than a solar-powered calculator. Compared to them, my friends — who use their computers constantly for schoolwork and practically live on Facebook — have considerable technical experience. It is disheartening to hear how little they value their knowledge.

Moreover, the context in which I typically hear friends say, “I don’t know anything about computers,” is as an excuse when their computer does something unexpected, they don’t know what to do, and they would rather back off and let someone else fix it than try to solve the problem on their own. My friends are afraid of their own machines. I think this sentiment is a symptom of ongoing trends in the industry towards a closed-box style of consumer computer design.

Cory Doctorow explains it better than I can in his iPad rant on BoingBoing:

The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+.

[...] Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

While Apple’s closed-box style contributes to the ease of use which is the hallmark of Apple’s products, I’m afraid that it is changing consumer attitudes in a negative way. Apple wants to keep the inner workings of their products a secret to the point that they want to make it illegal for consumers to alter the software running on their own property. Preventing users from controlling the software on their own devices is dangerous for several reasons, but it scares me most because it discourages users from learning about their devices. In effect, Apple is profiting from its customers’ ignorance, and the consequence is that more of my friends profess, “I don’t know anything about computers.”

Apple’s products are a timely example, but other manufacturers are guilty too, and I think it’s the generation just now learning about technology that will suffer most for it. Curious kids will never be able to tinker with the insides of their iPads as they could with the Apple][+. I think we as technophiles have a responsibility to kids to pick up the slack. Get your kids a garage sale computer to take apart together. Find out if your teenager’s high school offers programming classes. Donate to or volunteer with groups such as TechBridge, which offers after-school programs in technology and engineering for underprivileged girls in Oakland, CA. But most importantly, make sure kids are not afraid of tinkering with technology. How else can they hope to make it better?

Here’s my latest computer animation project: Cage Puzzle. The assignment was to “create a unique world with its own rules: A world where what is possible, though seemingly impossible, is possible.” I chose the world of a little caged creature, with props in his cage with new rules he has to learn in order to get an award. This was animated in Autodesk Maya.

My first homepage - names and images blurred to protect the innocent and embarrassed.

Last month, Fred Wilson wrote an article on the importance of online branding for young people, especially those of us prying our way into the job market. He agrees with David Karp that the best way to secure a positive online presence is to sell yourself well and market yourself frequently. Examples include posting copious flattering pictures on Facebook to overwhelm the unflattering shots and spreading links to your LinkedIn profile so that unrelated flotsam doesn’t get a higher search ranking than your professional profile does.

I completely agree that pains should be taken such that when the prospective employers google your name, they never find unmentionable content before they find your homepage. When I google my own name, at least the top four results and two more of the top ten are actually about me, and moreover are pages I’d be comfortable letting a recruiter see. While I haven’t secured the domain for my full name, I do have a versatile domain that I like and that I’ll be able to use for my future portfolio.

I didn’t go about domain shopping until halfway through college. Wilson, on the other hand, brags that he bought the domains for his children’s full names a few years ago, and his daughters maintain photo blogs under theirs. He doesn’t mention how old his children are, and while a quick scan of the girls’ blogs shows that they’re probably college students, one might get the impression from Wilson’s article that he advocates kids begin to build their brand as soon as their early teens.

I’m all for building positive content, but I remember the kind of content I created when I was a teenager. No, I wasn’t a wild party girl, but in high school I did have a website dedicated to obscure and decidedly dorky interests. Sure it helped me learn HTML and CSS, but it’s far too embarrassing to showcase to potential employers. While I was proud of it at the time, I’m very glad I never promoted that website under my real name. Kids who start branding in their teens will be stuck with cached content that they probably won’t want associated with their names when they want to impress someone with their online presence. For this reason, I disagree with Wilson that kids need to start their branding early. I don’t think kids need to worry about self-branding until they know what they want to showcase. Until then, anonymity is a kid’s best Facebook friend.

Here’s my third computer animation project. The assignment was to animate two walking figures such that they describe a particular kind of space. I’m pretty happy with the way this turned out, and I’d appreciate any comments or criticism.

In response to cluttered news sites that contain far more flotsam than actual news, Arc90 Laboratory has created a browser tool called Readability which restyles articles from busy pages into something a little easier on the eyes. After you choose how you want your articles to look, Readability installs as a bookmarklet in your browser toolbar. As you come across an illegible article, click the bookmark; Readability pulls only the text of the article and relevant pictures into one clean, neat page, styled as you chose in setup.

For my bookmarklet, I chose Newspaper style with medium size font and medium margins, and I’m very impressed so far. I would strongly recommend Readability to anyone who peruses any amount of articles.

Readability transforms articles from this,

Into this,

I’ve only had a couple problems so far. Readability identifies the longest chunk of text on the page as the article, so if the article is very short, Readability either might not find it, or may substitute something else (I once ended up with a very readable set of Google text ads). Still, I anticipate that the demand for this sort of service is strong, and will continue to grow especially as screens become smaller and more cluttered.