Shattering Glass Arm

It's been a while, but my internship is going good. I can't remember if I wrote about it at all before, but I'm going to write about it here. I'm doing an internship with the church in their ICS (Information and Communications Systems) department. It's been a great experience so far. I'm learning a great deal about the industry and about programming in general.

My first project has to deal with downloadable conference talk mp3s. Somebody has brought it to the attention of the Audio Visual department that their ID3 tags for their mp3 files are inconsistent and sometimes just flat-out wrong. I have to write a program that will process all the mp3 files and write their ID3 tag information to a .csv report file. .csv is like an excel spreadsheet, basically. I got that part done a while ago and was able to run the program on all the files today. It worked like a charm and processed over 9,000 files in less than 3 minutes. I was pretty excited about that. The next part will be to build a tool that can be used to edit massive amounts of mp3 files at once. It's going to be tricky, but I think it will be fun.

I talked on the phone with mandy for a long time today. It was good to have a real conversation with her. We haven't had one for a while. That's really all I'm going to say about that though. Porcupine Tree is my new favorite band for this week.

On a gospel note, it's been an amazing experience to work so close to the temple and to work for the church. In a way, I kind of feel like I'm a missionary again, and it's not just because I have to wear a tie to work every day. It's great knowing that what I'm doing is helping the Lord's kingdom. Even if it seems like a small, rather insignificant aspect. I mean, correctly tagged MP3 files aren't going to be the diffrence in someone's salvation or not, but it does affect the kingdom in it's own way. It's pretty humbling, really. I'm so glad that I'm experiencing this wonderful oppurtunity.

Actually, I really wanted to work at USAA instead of the church. USAA is a great company and their services are also very admirable and I'm sure I'd feel almost just as accomplished there as I do here. But to be honest, ever since I've started this internship, I haven't thought of USAA once. Mandy mentioned it tonight, and it dawned on me that I'd never even thought about it since I started working here. Well, I'm off to read and get to bed. Big day tomorrow. I get to start writing the ID3 tag editing part of the application.