Welcome to liveblogging from SFO, which has recently announced it will provide free wifi over the whole airport!

Well, sort of. Upon logging on, I found that Tmobile is providing 45 minutes of free wifi, and after that you have to pay their daily pass fees. Oh well. 45 minutes is enough to get a blog post off.

Now, I’d like to share my best tip for long days of travel, airline or otherwise: bring a loaf of bread. On the international terminal around gate A7 in SFO is a store with a rack of Boudin sourdough bread. Whenever I fly from San Francisco to New York, I make sure to buy a half pound round loaf for $2.99. When traveling all day, a loaf of bread is the best insurance against $15 sandwiches.

This tip has saved me more than once. When I was stuck on the train between New York City and my college for two hours with no dinner last year, that loaf kept me from going crazy. The same thing happened when my friends and I were stuck waiting for customs for hours on our train to Montreal. They had teased me about the bag of mini bagels I’d been shlepping around, but they sure were thankful for it later.

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’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?

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.

I’m taking a computer animation course using Maya this semester, and our second project was due today. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out, and I thought it was worth sharing here. The assignment was pretty vague; the professor basically wanted us to experiment with pushing and pulling, using the methods we’d used in the labs. I decided to go with a corkscrew.

If anyone has any comments or suggestions for improvement, I’d love to hear them. I will probably have to modify this animation anyway before I turn in my whole portfolio at the end of the semester.

When my roommate brought back about 15 puzzles after Christmas, I knew she was serious about completing them. I didn’t realize just how serious she was until I came across her method of sorting the pieces.

Apparently once she had gotten to the point at which all the remaining pieces were the same color, some more organization was required to complete the puzzle. Still, that’s dedication, right there!

I seem to have developed a muppet addiction this week. The Muppets Studio released a new youtube video on Monday in which the Muppets do Bohemian Rhapsody. It’s been insanely popular, and even became a trending topic on Twitter today.

If you like that, you should check out the 1981 TV documentary, “Of Muppets and Men,” which can be found in six segments on Youtube. It goes into some detail on how The Muppet Show was produced, and has a lot of classic clips and great backstage footage. Here’s the first part for you:

• “Of Muppets and Men” Part 1
• “Of Muppets and Men” Part 2
• “Of Muppets and Men” Part 3
• “Of Muppets and Men” Part 4
• “Of Muppets and Men” Part 5
• “Of Muppets and Men” Part 6

Have you ever watched a commercial or seen an ad and thought, “Are they serious? They can’t be serious. There’s a problem there.” I find myself riding this train of thought fairly often. One of the main contenders is Duracell commercials:

Duracell claims its batteries are better than competitors’ batteries because important people like EMT’s and rock stars use them because, “It just has to work.” I can’t be the only person who thinks this claim is greatly exaggerated. Duracell batteries don’t have any special properties that make them less likely to die than other batteries; on the contrary, they expect the batteries to die, or else there would be no market for fresh replacements. These commercials are misleading because they make the consumer feel that Duracell batteries are somehow safer than other batteries, when there is really no guarantee that when your power goes out and you need a light, that a Duracell-powered flashlight is any more likely to work than any other. If the batteries had some kind of alarm that sounded when they were about to die, I would feel much safer about the batteries that power my defibrillator.

Of course, if you ask me, they would be better off advertising with the Duracell Bunny.

7:56AM, waiting in SFO to board

I have completed the first leg of my trip: making it to the airport I’m departing from. I accomplished this via BART, which I’m a big fan of. One of the best parts about living near a BART station is easy, driving-free airport access. I’m flying Virgin America today, and if it hadn’t been in the international terminal, I could have taken the airtrain to the right one, but the SFO BART station is conveniently right inside the airport, next to the international terminal.

Checking my bag took all of about one minute, since I pre-printed my boarding pass. The security checkpoint took a little longer. Even though there were very few people there (for a security checkpoint, anyway), the line was backed up because they were using (one of those new machines that does a full-body scan). They said no papers in the scanner, so I left my boarding pass in my bag, but then they wanted to see it when I got through the scanner. I’m not sure how they expected that to work, but they sent me to my bag to get it. It was then I found that they’d taken my bag, the new Timbuk2 bag with my computer in it, to be scanned again because I didn’t remove the computer from my bag. I was not pleased about this, because as I’ve blogged previously, one of the main selling points of this bag is that it’s TSA compliant. I will be calling Timbuk2 about this. That said, the TSA dudes were in a patient mood today, and didn’t seem to be particularly bothered that I didn’t have my boarding pass or that they couldn’t see my computer; they just asked very nicely for me to fix it, and I did.

The last thing I did before sitting down to write this is buy a loaf of sourdough bread to last me the trip. I expect to be traveling until at least 10pm tonight, so the bread should last me the day with no time to stop for meals.

My flight boards in 25 minutes. Here’s hoping it goes smoothly.

11:28 PM: safely on the ground

The flight did go safely, if not smoothly. There were a few summer storms to go through and around, so there was some turbulence. We arrived in JFK only 45 minutes late, though. I count that as not bad. I was fortunate enough to encounter a friend at the baggage carousel, and since she was planning to take a cab into the city anyway, we shared a taxi and I had an easier trip to Grand Central Station. From there, I hopped on a train back to school, and I am now settled in my dorm room, safe and sound.