Week Six

So week six is here already, and a lot has happened that has, at least in my own opinion, made me grow as a person. Work has finally given me the opportunity to expand my horizons, as I’m now essentially heading my own project, and it’s a major one at that. While my work was slow at first, it has really picked up lately, and for the better I think.

Plus the past two weekends have been extremely fun. Last weekend, a 5 of us interns went for a walk around the monuments late at night, and it was amazing. Some hilarity did ensue however, as a misplaced foot on my part caused me to go swimming in the water pool at the top of the World War II memorial. It was completely and totally accidental, yet hilarious when I think back on it.

My father is also in town for the weekend, which is cool because I get to experience July 4^th in DC with him, which is pretty cool. Next weekend I head back to my hometown of New York City for a long weekend, my cousin just graduated college and my other cousin just graduated high school! So let me end this post here, because I have to go drop my aunt off at the train station (she’s in town too for a few days).

Later!!

Happy Independence Day

From the Safeway Barbeque Battle, to the Smithsonian Folk Festival, to the Museum of Natural History and its breathtaking mineral and gemstone exhibit, to the culinary delights of Chinatown and Gallery Place, the District of Columbia continues to fulfill its promise as a place of constant adventure and discovery. The 4^th of July will present another opportunity to enjoy the cultural offerings of DC. I’ve always pondered about what it would be like to celebrate our nation’s independence, along with my fellow Americans, in our nations Capitol. To watch the fireworks against the striking silhouette of the Washington Monument, or welcome the holiday with a festive parade, I’m extremely fortunate to be able to have these experiences. Growing up in Kansas I would wake up each holiday to watch the coverage of festivities on TV, particularly the watch the Thanksgiving Day parade. This Independence Day in DC I will have the opportunity to witness an event that the nation anxiously anticipates with my own eyes rather than through a camera lens and a screen. A chance to celebrate and commemorate the actions our forefather’s took to secure freedom, independence, and the pursuit of happiness for all citizens of these great United States.

Week Five - The Fifth Adventure

Boredom is beautiful but spending time alone freely is even more beautiful. There is no such thing as loneliness, people are everywhere. It's never too late to make new friends when we are capable of change. The path to hermitage isn't as depressing as people think.

Cooking is the word that describes the fifth adventure. Most of what I had in mind was cooking. Never before did I start to learn how to cook on my own this long. I have used logic to hack vegetables such as bokchoy, broccoli, onions, and green peppers. My hacking skills has reached to another level despite earning another scar on my index finger. I have learned that eating out does not always save time. I will be stir frying more, eating out less. I don't know what to say to people who continue to eat unhealthy microwaveable food. I think I understand vegetable cruelty, plants do have feelings.

Another word to define this week at work is meditation. I attended to a SharePoint meeting about migration of the web service with new web application technologies. Then I have received a book to learn more about Microsoft SharePoint in-depth. Not very exciting, its work. I meditate on it and do my best to make progress. All I can do now is smile, work hard, make progress, and complete whatever I have on time.

Besides cooking and work, bloggers talked about hacking, let me add some sense to it.




According to Google, anyone who plays golf poorly is a epic hacker. That's me because there are no words that explains how my cousin who losses all the time beats me in mini-golf blindfolded. It destroyed me. There's more hopelessness, my devastating defeat to my mother made me such a hot head. No rematch needed before she's too old. It feels good to be a professional hacker.

It seems that I am running out of good quotes to end this blog. I had my fun researching quotations of the moral issues related to disabilities. There's not a lot of that on the internet. Instead of posting another quote from Hellen Keller, I choose simple proverbs that make little sense to the readers. Making experiences fun to read, this is what blogging is about? Right? Happy Independence Day travelers.

"Chop wood, carry water." ~ Zen Proverb

Fun week!

This week I started learning sub-theming for Drupal, the web based CMS that I mentioned in my previous post. I have been working with html, css, and php to customize a theme to my liking. So far it has been going great and I really enjoy it. Unfortunately I only have it installed as localhost, otherwise I would link to it for everyone to see. Eventually, I plan to implement Drupal for my parents bed & breakfast and other personal implementations. I hope that by the end of the summer I will have a certain level of mastery over Drupal.

Besides that, I went to the AAPD board meeting earlier this week, which was hosted at a Verizon Wireless corporate office. It was a great experience and it gave me perspective as to what a board meeting is like. I have ambitions for eventually joining a board for either my church or my or the local chapter of the Autism Society of America or both and this experience definitely reinforced those ambitions.

In addition I gained a contact at Verizon, Mary Crespy, AAPD's disability point of contact at Verizon. She agreed to try to get me a preview of the Motorola Droid X, which has not yet been released. I am very excited to be able to meet someone from Verizon as well as get an exclusive preview. I hope that this opportunity allows me to build a professional relationship with persons at Verizon.

Good week, looking forward to next week.

-Benjamin Tshudy

Fourth Week of Joy and Joy

Fourth Week of Joy and Joy

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen,

Hiya everyone, I noticed that everyone is busy in Washington D.C. with everything. I am a very busy person with my internship because I been working on Database and editing the information. Also, I have to work on my presentation that I am going to present when my co-workers inform me with their time and date because I will present the meeting about Knowledge Management, Content Management System and other information regarding to United States Coast Guard.

There are no events this week, except I went out with my roommate, David Cardenas with other interns to meet with AAPD intern, Charla Wright, a law student for AAPD. We met at Slizzing Express (If I remember correctly). I had a good lunch; I had Chinese foods with two drinks (Ice Tea and Mountain Dew).

Otherwise, I am working on a research at how to improve my agency since we are facing too many of security flaws in the organization, hackers is riding high, and cybercrime rate is going up but I am trying to figure out how to protect the information regarding to my agency because I want them to have a good business with other government agencies without being attacked by cybercriminals because being an intern for Information Technology, you can also do your own research at how to improve the organization with your knowledge and educate yourself, and educate others. But I am ready to help my agency with my knowledge and information that I found and share with my co-workers, but I hope that my research will benefit me for the future notice.

In closing, I hope that everyone have a good week and good vacation. Have fun with your families and I hope that other interns will have something fun to do. I will see you all when I am back for my fifth weekly report for this blog.

Take Care,

Kevin T.J. Whetstone

At a Slower Pace

Monday is too long ago. On Tuesday, I had trouble getting up, but had a nap at lunchtime which made the afternoon go better. I should have eaten more breakfast, or maybe coffee. After lunch I went to the Help Desk. Terri was there that day and she let me shadow her as she tested a website for accessibility. She used JAWS screen reader to listen to how it was read. On the first page, the logo had alternate text, but the title was also a JPEG image that didn’t have alternate text and I caught that. She went through the login steps testing it. Then she got into a table of information. The screen reader read the table header twice, which wasn’t too bad accessibility-wise but took a long time to listen to. Then she turned off the screen and said we would try doing it just by sound to see what its like. She showed me how to use Ctrl + arrow keys to navigate around the table. Then I tried it myself and it was interesting picturing the table in my head, and moving through the different rows and columns, told only their number and contents. She tested some of the links in the table, they went to fake record PDFs, and she converted them from images to text. Then she had to talk with someone about an accommodation, in North Carolina. They used ZoomText, for low vision. It was nice to learn something new and hopefully we can do more when she comes in next week. Wednesday I was still tired and it was kind of a slow day. I didn’t read my email for awhile and then found I was actually supposed to be doing something, so I went around to the cubicles collecting work station checklists. Luckily the remaining people were mostly there, so I was able to get to Yoga on time. After lunch there was a pile of the same checklists to scan and turn into PDFs. I used the scanner in the Help Desk and listened to conversations. The person temporarily handing out property passes to take laptops home was similarly bored so I found out more about them. Also there is a contest that 7 people, including Help Desk manager, joined to see who can lose the most weight, and there is a prize, so I listened about that and who is doing the best and the last possible moment to weigh in. I would have joined but it is almost over. Then I told everyone about my weekend and going the wrong direction from Foggy Bottom to Virginia and two people gave me directions on how to get around DC. I learned that DC has a diamond shape with a grid of streets across it: first in each section there are the letters A through W, then there are a set of 2-syllable street names, then a set of 3-syllable street names, and last a set of those with names of trees and flowers. To finish, Thursday was more of the same, scanning and talking and listening to people at the Help Desk.

Not a hacker... just... creative

As another week is winding down I read Yair's post and laughed because I feel the exact same way. However I tend to be the quiet type and try not to bring attention to myself. In highschool I got asked if I can "hack" this or "hack" that, and I would laugh and shake my head. Hacking isn't what is portrayed in the media, although nothing is how the media portrays it. As Yair said hacking isn't about being evil and controlling the internet, it's about learning what causes problems and using that knowledge to shape information assurance. However, even if we were to look at "black hat" hacking as portrayed on tv, its not even close. To hack a physical application you have to "decompile" a program into what is called assembly. This assembly is basically a text representation of binary.. Then you need to pour over thousands of lines of assembly code and find a problem in the logic, if any. That is why there aren't billions of people getting hacked everyday because it's not as easy (or hard) as people think, it's on a whole other level.

Anyway ending tangent.

This week I really got down to work and everyone thinks I'm a genius (insert evil laugh). I am migrating data into an online database, so that involved pouring over 250 lines in excel and matching dates and pdf's. Then I would have to write code to parse the excel data into xml files for uploading to the database. However after doing about 40 of these I got a better idea. I decided to write a program to parse PDF files to the xml data I need to make it simpler to upload to the database.
That's usually how my life goes.. I write software to do my work for me ;)..

So no, I don't consider myself a hacker... I'm not even close to that level. I'm just a security conscious, creative "code poet"

peace+love always.