Week 1 @ Google

I’ve finished my first week at Google. It seemed to go by so fast. They had a lot of new hires this week so my equipment still isn’t all available yet. But luckily I got enough of it to get started on some actual work by Friday.

I made my first submit to the Google server on Friday! That means I made my first change to a web page on the Google server. It was just a small change on the about page for Gmail. All I did was change the languages from 38 to 40 and add Hebrew and Arabic to the language list. But I feel pretty special about it. I also got to work on my first icon. I also have a meeting for my first real project on Monday :D!

I really like the atmosphere at Google. By the end of my first week I was feeling really comfortable. I no longer feel nervous or anxious. My co-workers are really nice and have been a big help in getting me up to speed on how to use the Google file systems and learning the procedures. There’s a lot of documentation I’ve had to go through and read. I sort of felt like I was cramming for a final :lol:. It’s been a challenge though because a lot of it is centralized around Unix and I only just started learning Unix a month ago.

Anyway, I just really love it there. I like the people, the food, the equipment, and the work. I just know this is going to be the best summer of my life.

 

Spring Break recap

I did work on my vis dev work but not as much as I should have.

I didn’t touch my short film or Surviving Together.

I did work a lot on Zarbon’s Masterpiece Theater. We released two episodes and have recorded three more that are ready for animating. I will work on these slowly though the semester.

But mostly what I spent my time on was PaperDemon.com. I decided that it was time to build all of those nifty features that I’ve had in mind for PD and prepare to sell Premium Accounts. I still have some more work to do but Premium Memberships will be offered some time in mid to late February. I’ve spent a ton of time on it and I can’t wait to offer the Premium Memberships and see what people do with the cool new features. I don’t want to get into the details of the features because they are already explained on PD.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about what it is I want to do in life and what it is I enjoy doing. I spend an awful lot of time on my website and it makes sense to me that web design or web programming is where my future is. Even though I don’t have hardly any formal education or training in it, I have a lot of knowledge and experience on the subject. I really enjoy organizing information and designing an interface to display that information, which is exactly what the Paper Demon website is all about. People upload their artwork and writing and it is categorized and organized into sections. Then that information is displayed for the viewer. I don’t know why but I really enjoy doing it and for the past month I’ve been working at least 40 hours a week developing new features for PD. I often work late in the night until I can hardly think strait or keep my eyes open. And then I just collapse on my bed and sleep. So that’s what I want to do.

My Mom sent me a link to an article on Monster.com recently that was really encouraging:

http://technology.monster.com/articles/webdesigner/

It says in there that your ticket to getting into the field is to build something. Haha! I have PaperDemon.com as well as a few other websites. It’s encouraging to know that the hardest step is already done! I do think I need to spend some time improving the user interface of PD though. I know that some of it is a little plain and confusing so I’ll need to get a book on UI design principles and look at other websites for ideas.

 

ZMT might be saved

On thursday night, I discovered that the data for all of my websites on my old hosting account was deleted. This put me in tears because it meant I lost all of the data in the database for

Zarbon’s Masterpiece Theater

since it hadn’t been moved over to my new hosting account yet at micfo.com

But today, I was relieved to find out that my old host has a backup and will have it restored tomorrow. So hopefully ZMT will be up and running just as good as ever tomorrow.

 

The First Of Many

This is my first blog entry here at my personal website BogusRed.net.

Since the Paper Demon community moved to another domain name, I figured I’d use BogusRed.net for my own personal space on the web. Once I get everything up and running, you’ll find my sketches and fanart as well as my music. In the meantime, you can view much of my artwork at Paper Demon.

Well, just yesterday my boyfriend bought me a new hard drive for my upcoming birthday on Sept. 8th. It’s 200GBs woo hoo! My old drive was only 80 and it was getting pretty full. So full that it slowed down my computer’s performance. Now I can use that extra 80GB hard drive for backups :D.

 Just this passed weekend I moved over the Paper Demon site to its new domain name and server space at micfo.com hosting. I’ve never tried this host before but I heard from a friend it was good and they gave me a free month trial! I’ve only had minor setup problems so far and I’ve found the tech support to be extremely fast, unlike my last host Apollohosting.com. That’s one of the major reasons I decided to switch. I have a whole list of reasons why I switched which you can read about in the Paper Demon News Post on the site move.

Hopefully I’ll get the art and music sections up within the next few weeks.