Billy treated me to lunch at the Broadway Cafe in Ashford. He knows that I plan to graduate after this semester and he’s been very proactive in helping me decide what I want to do after I graduate. We discussed what my goals are as I’m preparing to graduate, what I’m looking for in a company, and how Southern Company did or did not fit into that picture. After talking to various people and doing a lot of listening over the last few months, I’ve decided that I’m looking for a growing company with opportunities for me to continuously develop as an employee and as a professional. Southern’s conservative presence in the low-growth utility sector doesn’t exactly fit the bill, but I won’t rule them out when I’m starting off.
Vance didn’t get to see his friends again today, so he had to put up with his cousin instead. We pushed closer to the end of Tales of Symphonia. The road to Yggdrasill is littered with teary farewells and cheesy reunions. I can’t say I was terribly impressed.
Cribbage matches resumed as Aunt Kathy and I teamed against Mom and Granddad. We won each game until Grammy subbed for Granddad; we promptly lost afterward. I’m still unsure how much luck plays a factor in Cribbage. I feel like there is a strategy to the play, but one can only do so much with a crummy hand.
I put in a motion for Baskin-Robbins after Cribbage. I had my favorite Daiquiri Ice; Mom and Aunt Kathy had Margarita Ices. Aunt Kathy wasn’t enthused with her Margarita Ice, but then she didn’t like my Daiquiri Ice, either. There’s no accounting for taste.
Vance showed me Tales of Symphonia, a cel-shaded RPG for the GameCube featuring anime cutscenes. The real-time battle system reminds me of another RPG I liked quite a bit: Star Ocean: The Second Story. Tales is the first cel-shaded game I’ve experienced first-hand. The effect is interesting, but not revelatory. Tales also sports multi-player support, but Players 2–4 are limited to control within battle. The camera only follows Player 1 so control can be difficult.
Achieving a concensus for dinner proved to be more difficult than I expected. We settled on LaBamba, but Granddad opted to stay home. Vance and I rode separately so we could go our own way after dinner. I quickly started to feel like a fifth wheel after we ran into Vance’s friends at the mall; Vance did say they were mallrats, after all. Vance eventually did eventually find his GameCube 1019 memory card.
The PlayStation 2 game console I had purchased arrived. It’s lightly used with all cables and documentation in the original box. The seller included Kingdom Hearts and Medal of Honor: Frontline for good measure. The plan is to hook up the PS2 through my monitor and somehow route the audio through my PC speakers. I’m uncertain exactly how to do the audio, though.
This morning we received another ticket to re-image a workstation down in one of the break rooms. It was one of our many PCs that have become afflicted with spyware in recent months. I’ve noticed that the workstations that are touched by the most hands—particularly security guard hands—tend to be most prone to collecting junk. I fielded some spyware questions while I was waiting for the “Home Run” image to load. Questions like these are exactly why I’ve been working on a basic system security primer to distribute with our next “IT Tips & Tricks.”
While waiting, I also learned perhaps more than I ever cared to know about hunting and fishing from a security guard on break. I was not previously aware of the “wanton waste” laws that apparently require hunters to retrieve and, presumably, use any game they kill. I had basically thought of hunting as killing for sport and little more. I do find it at least slightly reassuring that hunters have to actually use the game they kill.
Janet, our resident nuclear instructor and intern coordinator, gathered all the Farley interns together for an afternoon class. We discussed how the systems we worked with could affect the reliability of the plant (i.e. causing trips). Not surprisingly, IT systems were least probable to impact critical plant operations. IT’s criticality lies much more with plant communications (LAN, phones, pagers, plant data monitoring, etc.). After class, I inquired about how the plant is operated around planned maintenance procedures. Sometimes a unit must be taken offline and sometimes a unit is ramped down rather than taken offline for subsystem maintenance. I learned that some systems can be safely removed from service below specific power levels (e.g. Pump X could be removed from service at 60% power). Other systems cannot be removed from service without taking the unit offline. The goal in nuclear is for 100% output all the time—other forms of generation typically adjust output for load—so reliability is taken very seriously.
