tala @ so-phobic

Third Day Funk

It’s our third day here at PCI Asia. It’s me, Nix, Jane, and JP/Piolo. Mog’s over at Smart (off-topic: whoa, Smart WiFi Internet!) with Ian and Gotangco. We managed to spread JP’s Piolo nickname, much to his dismay. Sorry, Piolo, looks like you’re stuck with it.

On our first day, we were tasked to come up with a concept layout for an ad. We had to produce something electronically using GIMP. I’m no graphic artist. I can come up with some creative ideas, but implementation is beyond me. So we did a couple of sketches, and the ever industrious Piolo took the work home to do them in Photoshop and/or Macromedia Fireworks. That guy may have a future in advertising.

The next day, we were herded to the Testing department and were asked to try wreck a piece of software. We found a couple of bugs. Piolo found some of the more mind-boggling ones that had to do with character encoding. His favorite shape is now a ◘. The bugs were squashed by software developer Margaux, and after a couple more rounds of testing today, I think they’re ready to submit it as a release candidate to the client.

Aside from more testing, I was asked to compare Google Desktop and Microsoft Indexing Service. I’m supposed to search a folder full of CVs and compare the relevance of the search results. The machine for this activity was Win2k powered, and I had a devil of a time trying to figure out how to activate Indexing Service for IIS 5.0, and how to make the st00pid Query Form appear. LOL.

The rest of the afternoon was devoted to reading up on SharePoint because we’re supposed to come up with some test cases for this project they’re developing using SharePoint. I signed up for a hosted trial version. It looks like a nifty Project Management Tool. Praise for an M$ product, hurrah.

We’re not coding yet, but we will be in the future. We were given a background on the app that our OJT team is supposed to develop - in .NET.

PCIT Vocab:

• snagit - taken from the print-screen tool Snag It; means swanget, panget/uglee as hell. ex: Ang snagit mo Piolo!
• flock - from the FLock key on the M$ keyboard we use at the office; meaning: that swear word, yes, you know which one I’m referring to. ex: Flock you!
• AIDS - As If Doing Something (thanks, Eds); pretending to be busy with the task assigned.
• gimping - From the GIMP; verb form of using GIMP. ex: Stop bugging me, I’m gimping!