Internship Report, 10/14/95

Several things worthy of reporting have occured at work and in the program during the last two weeks.

Our Multimedia Department has a new shunin (head), Ario-san, who just came in from another, completely unrelated department. Work is scarce right now, and he wanted to learn Visual Basic, a programming language, so he called for an informal meeting in which several of us gathered for half a day to discuss and learn the language with him. Since I have never programmed in Visual Basic, I was invited to attend too.

Afterwards we took a new project and divided it into parts for each of us to work on in the new language. I picked up on things quickly and was the first to finish my part. I spent my extra time helping the others with their parts and teaching them tricks I learned while I was completing my part.

The rest of the two weeks was devoted to research. Our World Wibe Web demonstrations were in need of some multimedia helper applications that were not available anywhere, so I used this as an excuse to learn more about interfacing Visual Basic programs with a Multimedia Control Interface (MCI driver) as I built the needed software. I completed two of them, one to play movies and the other to play sound. Both were well received and are currently in use.

Last week I saw in the newspaper an article about a company which, having reviewed my kaisha annai (described in earlier reports), has decided to sign on with our company to promote their services on the World Wide Web. (I wrote about the time we met with representatives of this company in previous reports.) It felt good to see a product I made be directly mentioned in the business section of a newspaper and be told that it was the main selling point that convinced the company to join us in business.

Yesterday we had a meeting with Dr. Farnsworth and all the interns. We worked out details concerning the intern program and discussed its successes and failures.