Fleeting Reality

In front of me is a road. Cars and pedestrians pass by at four times their normal speed. I pass the time by imagining stories for these people while always looking intently for any bicycles. The cars start to blur, their headlights have ghost images in my brain, the pedestrians look like bicyclists, bicyclists look like pedestrians, and the time slowly ticks away in the corner of the screen... then all goes black. When I come back to, I realize that I just watched 5 minutes of traffic footage, and only have about another 4 hours to go.

But enough about my gradual loss of sanity. The important thing is that this week I did complete those 4 hours of footage, and am entirely done with the traffic videos that I need to watch. A joyous occasion to be sure, but having just finished all of that, it doesn't seem like much of a victory. I still have the road flashing through my head, and look back with confusion of the excitement that I had once experienced in seeing a 14 large group of cyclists. They should have rehab clinics for this.

Change

First of all, before I tell you about the titular change that piqued your interest, I have made one change that was good. You probably noticed it already. Thats right, all the posts have non-robotic titles now- not all witty, but they have more life than a blog title that reminds me how long I have been working. Now they give the general mood of each blog post, as I am sure you have always wanted.

Now the change that has got me down is the always dramatic job change between Connor Weeks and I. He went back to scanning, but I did not have the ArcGIS to go back to-- that job had already finished. My new job is to count bicycle travel over certain intersections, and the only way that I can do this is by watching video feed of that intersection. The two roads that I am keeping track of are Murlen and Blackbob on the intersection of like 119th St. or something. In total, I have about 4 hours of sped up road to watch. Makes me wish that I brought some popcorn. From what I am told, my findings will be used in order to convince against building extremely expensive bike lanes on these roads. To be honest, what is extremely expensive to me could be a trivial matter to the City.

Bacteria and Me

This week was fairly simple overall. It was my last week of scanning, so I had a lot that I had to try to get done before the fabled job switch. I went through Monday and Tuesday without a hitch, but I woke up feeling quite unwell on Wednesday, so I called out of work for the third time in my life. All that left for the week was a short day on Thursday and a nonexistant work day on Friday. Needless to say, I did not get completely done with all the scanning.

I don't actually recall whether or not I have  fully described what I am scanning. I am scanning for a man in the traffic department named Guoqiang. And in that large shelf full of documents that he gave me there are traffic files for certain intersections. Basically they are a packet titled some intersection, and the subsequent pages show different traffic information for that intersection, like turning rates, volume of traffic, and many more complex things that I could not decipher. After scanning them, I pass the files by Guoqiang, and they go in the recycling bin. It is good at least to see tangible progress in the pile of papers.

Mistakes, Posters, & Smiles

This week I missed a day of work. Basically what happened, is that in my mind a Thursday and Friday off of school still feels like school and schedule should be there, and thus I remember that I have to work. However, when school is off on Monday, specifically Halloween, it is still very much the weekend in my world. I didn't realize that I should be in my cubicle until 3:00pm, and by then it was too late. It is a mournful passing, but at least I learned from it. Morel of the story, I found that I do not need to go to work on days off of school if I choose not to, but my supervisors would like it if I told them what I am planning on doing those days.

The actual scheduled event of the week- A&E Open House- went quite well. I had a booth with my fellow interns from the school, Connor at the Public Works Department with me, two from Black & Veatch, and one from Kiewit. It was nice to talk to people legitimately interested in what we do, but I got the feeling that the public felt that the other internships were more impressive than mine. Everybody's a critic.

Outlining the Future

This week of work was entirely normal, just back to the old grind. I have reached the milestone of passing the halfway point in the shelf full of scans behind me, but that is not cause for celebration yet. However, there was one significant happening for the week. The presentation for Aerospace and Engineering Open House was next week, and I had to complete the outline for that presentation with Connor Weeks. So we divided the work up and finished it all in one day. All that is left to do is to take pictures and assemble the poster board for the actual presentation by next Thursday.