The theme of this past month seems to have been 'internships, and little else.' After we got back from San Francisco, I filed all the requisite forms to get work authorization for the summer. Since then I've done four phone interviews with various researchers in my field, and a week or so ago I spent the (entire) day doing on-site interviews with Microsoft in Redmond. It's been sort of intense, but the news so far is good: I have one official offer and possibly more on the way. It is somewhat of an embarrassment of riches.

After my first phone interview with Microsoft, they (flatteringly) invited me over to Redmond a few days later. This was a little hectic, given that I didn't get my itinerary until a day in advance. One of my flights -- the very first one -- promptly got canceled, but United was kind enough to drive us from Charlottesville to Dulles instead. By the time I made it from Dulles to Seattle to Redmond, I was not in a great state. Fortunately, my 7 straight hours of interviews didn't start until the next morning...

I spent most of my free time in Redmond with Jake Whiton (Colgate '06), who now works for Microsoft as a contractor. We had dinner after my interviews (while I was still desperately getting my brain to recover), and on Saturday he showed me around the area. I liked Seattle, although possibly not as much as San Francisco (lack of a Golden Gate Bridge, perhaps). Either way, after slightly over 48 hours in Seattle, Jake drove me back to the airport (thanks!) and I was on my way back to Charlottesville. Overall, Microsoft did a great job planning the trip -- I had quick connections, the hotel was within walking distance from my interviews, and the traveling was mostly smooth sailing.

In the meantime, I've had plenty of work to do. I found a rather obscure memory management bug in my research code. It basically prevented a lot of memory to be freed until rather late in the program, causing it to use a shitton of RAM (and potentially running out). With the fix it runs about 180 times faster (literally), so I suppose that will settle any reviewer concerns about performance...

MORE WORK TIME NOW WOOT.