CMS offers a few different work schedules, an 8, 9 and 10 hour day. The 9 hour work schedule is the 9 hours Monday- Thursday and then an 8 hour day every other Friday, with the other alternating Friday being a day off. The 10 hour work day allows you to work only four days a week. I am working the 9 hour work day (well... that is what I am scheduled for..) so last Friday was my extra day off. So what better way to use a three day weekend than to go to New York City. I haven't been there since 8th grade when I got to go there for spring break. Not only that, but Amaris's dad lives in New Jersey so we stayed with him over the weekend. She doesn't get to see him very often, and I had never seen him.

The city was huge, as was to be expected. We were going to go to the Statue of Liberty, but the line was seriously a quarter mile long to get on the ferry, and we still wouldn't have been able to go into the statue... just stand next to it. So we took a picture and moved on. We saw Central Park, Times Square, Broadway Avenue, the Natural History Muesum, and the Empire State Building. I can't believe how much walking we did, but it was a nice day trip. Driving back to Baltimore after NYC almost made it seem like a tame little town. Crazy.

In other news, it looks like everyone hates their summer jobs. Ben and Lucas aren't wild about what they are doing. Even Ramey who was so excited about getting his job says that he wishes he went to Egypt. I am sitting here with no work to do... I have not had anything since last Thursday. Now, it isn't terrilby bad because all of the work that they are giving me is a tad tedious, so I am instead surfing the web all day for $13 and change an hour. And I have done valuable things with that time. Besides keeping up with Slashdot, Engadget, Digg and Google's goings on, I have studied for the Cisco Certified Network Assistant certification and found a new bank account. Good stuff.

Speaking of a new bank account, I was wasting my time one day looking at my bank statement, and I realized that I was getting paid 0.1% interest on my checking account, and .05% interest on my savings account (which means that I have been getting less than $1 in interest lately). So I decided it was time to move on. I found a online bank based in Massachsetts called Salem Five [http://www.salemfive.com/] that pays 5% interest on checking and savings accounts, and they have CDs where you can pull your money any time after an initial set of time (so non of those small windows where you can access your money). So I increased my savings interest rate by 10,000% and my checking interest rate by 50,000%. Plus they don't have as many rediculously high fees like US Bank. That was a no brainer.

I finally decided to put some pictures of my adventures up here for everyone to see, but then I realized that I haven't been taking pictures. So then I decided to talk to my friendly neighborhood Luey (who reminds me of my mom) and I sifted through the billion pictures that she took for the best few. I have pictures of most of the counselors up along with some other pictures of what we have been doing. There is everything from the "No Hands Day" at dinner where we eat the whole meal without our hands, to the wedding that the kids put on for us (I don't know how I am going to tell Amaris that I am hitched now). There is even some pictures of us in testimonial paint, which is where we talk about how we came to God and use paint on our face to illustrate it (the kids love it). Oh, and I have my own mini series that we do before the bible studies called "Packman and Friends" where we do little skits to bring the kids into bible study time. So check out the pictures, and if I can get a hold of any other goods ones I will put them up too.

By the way, be praying for me because not only is it "No Hands Day" again, but it is the pinnacle of the week when we paint all of the camper's faces and get to really have a heart to heart with them as they (hopefully) open up to us. Last week rocked because one of my campers who was really quiet really opened up to me and we had a pretty cool talk. I really like that kid.

Anyway, my break is over so over and out!

I don't want to work for the government. Not only is it depressing and boring to work here, but I don't even get to play with the technology that I want. The entire government is outsourced. Maybe I will join the Navy or something cool like that... get to see the world and all that. I figure it would be cool to have a job like that before I get all settled down and boring and stuff.

Oh... speaking of not being boring, I am going to New York this weekend. And I meet Amaris's dad (wait... isn't that a step in the direction of being settled down?).

The government is unbelievable. I should be prepared for all of this since I worked for the Navy last summer and all, but I still am not. After going to dozens of meetings (most of which don't actually produce any work... just plans for more meetings), talking to lots of people and just seeing what goes on at CMS, I have figured out what we do: nothing. Right now we have four concurrent audits going on, all of which take up government resources on both ends (auditor and auditee). Basically, CMS uses 1/5 of the federal budget so lots of people want to see where the money is going, but I guess they are not doing a good job. I will tell you what we do:

1. Deal with audits. Four concurrent is a bit out of the ordinary, but there are always lots of audits of CMS. One of the audits that they are doing is checking whether select laptops are encrypted, which sounds great, but that requires all of these people to stop whatever nonwork that they are pretending to do, bring their computer downstairs and get it back a few hours later.Yeah... I don't know how they are going to check their email and CNN either.

2. Set policies for the real workers: contractors. The government setup policies that force most work to be contracted to private industry to get the best price. What they did not do was to get rid of the people who used to be doing that job. So now we have all of these contractors doing the actual work, and the government workers sitting around "managing" them. So they instead just set hundred page long policies, have meetings on them and rework them over and over again.

3. Talk.I cannot believe how much people just sit around and BS with each other. It is great for "team building", but people do it for hours. There is one guy in the cube behind me who seriously will get into conversations about anything with anyone. One second he will be talking about how much he hates the project he is on, and the next he is talking about how much he hates the 5/6 year old soccer league that he coaches.

I was always against government programs like Medicare, social security and welfare before because they make people lazy, but I did not even account for the massive amount of beurocracy that they create, and the amount of laziness on the inside they create. Amazing... and I committed to working for them. Sigh.

Hmmm... I figured that I would be updating this a little more often than once a week...

Anyway, week 2 is in the books and I still don't really have a long term project to work on. I have been in a bunch of meetings and conference calls, yet no project. Technically, I think that I am working on three projects but they are all waiting on someone else. Maybe this is a good representation of the government. But I was told that I would get some work this afternoon working on some more policy stuff. But isn't there something wrong with putting someone with little experience in security on security policy stuff?

But I think that this is going to be a great experience for me, simply because it is showing me what I *don't* wan't to do. Bascially, CMS exists to manage contractors who do all of the real work. So when I asked whether they had their own datacenter and they said yes... they did answer the question as honestly as they could. It is just that my interpretation of running a datacenter is much different from the government's idea of running... anything. From what I have seen, CMS does nothing except create a huge amount of federal buerocracy for Lockheed Martin (the contractor) to deal with and through. And that is your government at work.

The lady's house that we are staying at is a very nice house, but them lady does not take care of it. 95% of the lights are burned out and the garden would look great without all of the weeds. So I am finding that conditions like this motivate me to clean up. I guess I am a neat
freak down deep.

But when I am not working or showing my neat freak side, I have been seeing the sights. Friday I saw an Orials baseball game. It was fun, but I still don't understand what would be interesting about actually watching the game regularly. I have even been following baseball a bit because the radio stations talk about it a lot since this town has a team. So yeah... I don't get it Christine: baseball is still boring.

On Saturday, I went to a Baltimore tradition called Honfest. It was... interesting (honfest.net). I guess it is Baltimore celebrating the fact that they can't move on from the 50's. A lot of people do the beehive hairdos and wear those takcy glasses. But they had good food so I had a crabcake and a thing of fried dough. So many things that are huge over on the east coast are hardly offered at all in Idaho. That is why I am loving the east coast... atleast for a summer.

Yesterday we made a daytrip up to Gettysburg which was great. I was a little rusty on my civil war history, and I don't think I ever really studied Gettysburg atleast. It is amazing how many people died so quickly... especially since they hardly had accurite weapons and could, at best, shoot 3 times a minute. I guess warfare has really changed in the last 150 years.

So I guess this summer is going to be me taking the good with the bad. I am having a lot of fun over here, and this job is great... but it is not what I would want to do. Niether was last summer with the government either though. Maybe this scholarship wasn't as hot as I originally though.

Just kidding... yeah... it still rocks.

I figure that it is about time to update this again. It is a slow day at work, so there is no better time than the present.

Last week was my first week, and as is usually the case with internships, the person who had my assignment was out for most of the week, so I got to look around, get tours of the area, and work on some busy work (same thing happened last summer... just comes with the territory).

I did get to take a tour of the datacenter, which happens to be about 25,000 sq ft. In the center, there is a big command center with a whole bunch of big screens, lots of people all around, and CNN showing in the corner. On the right side are all of the racks of servers. Apparently, they like to switch between computer manufacturers so they have Dell, HP, Compaq (yeah, when was the last time Compaq made servers?), IBM and Sun. They have decided that Sun is the best option for them for some reason and so they are slowing moving their whole datacenter to Sun. Sun has its merits, but it is also expensive... oh wait... this is the government.

They even said that they are still running a mainframe… they need it because some of their critical applications are written in FORTRAN from the 60’s, and they will only run on something that is as old and decrepit as they are. I was told that they planned on switching them over eventually, but it is one of those “eventuallys” that is going to be shelved until the system dies and they have to scramble to get something together.

On the otherside in a room that is about as big as the command center and the server room combined is the backup room. It is a room of thousands (maybe millions) of backup tapes, and "tape silos". Eleven big grain silo sized cylinders that are about 12 feet tall that house more tapes and have a mechanisms inside to easily retrieve any tape you want.

They have other rooms like the "war room" and the "situation room", which are basically just conference rooms that are for those really bad times when the servers that serve millions of people across the US go down (but since it is the government, I guess they have to have sensationalist names incase they have to fight "the war on terror" or "the war on global warming" or "the war on ________").

One thing that I was told over and over again was that I had to try the crab around here. In my first week, I was told that about half a dozen times. So Amaris and I tried it, and I have to say that I was impressed. They bring out this platter of whole crabs and dump them on your table, and then you go at it ripping these things to shreads to get every morsel of crab meat out. I felt like I was doing dissections for science class. But the experience was fun, and very tasty. Amaris is way better at the dissecting than I am, but I guess it is good practice for her future as a surgon (as long as she doesn't start eating the meat off of her patients).

Friday we saw Pirates of the Carebean 3. I am really starting to see a pattern on these trilogies: they have the same great production values and acting that the first two did, but they lack the story that made them so popular. Spiderman 3 was the same, and I am going to guess that Shrek 3 is the same (also see Matrix 3, and ending of Lord of the Rings 3).

Saturday we went down to the Inner Harbor in Baltimore to actually get into the major city that we were living right outside of. I was pretty surprised just how much it looked like the harbor in San Diego, but I guess that shouldn't be too much of a surprise... all they have to work with is water meeting land. Do that, and hundreds of restaurants will come.

And a great site compliments of Digg... it needs no introduction: Badonkadonk Land Cruiser Tank (and make sure to read the reviews).