Georgi’s Blog

School is over, got a job.

Officially, today is my first day at my new job. I started work in UBS A.G. - Investment Bank in the IT Equities department. We spent most of the day, today, listening to various presentations and speeches. I am saying officially, because I started last Monday as I had to go trough a pre-week financial and accounting training. I now live in Stamford, CT and my new place is not bad, it only lacks an AC, but not for long.
Because I work in a bank now, I will have to be careful what I write here and I have to put some disclaimers here and there that all you read here is my personal opinion and does not reflect that of my employer… the general stuff. However that will happen some other day because it is late now and I have to get up at 7am tomorrow.

iDiet RC 1

We released RC1 of iDiet yesterday. Of course we have more planned functions that will not make it to 1.0, but at least we want to see if we are on the right track and if things work so far. The program is fully functional. Supports user setup, diet setup and custom meals ( from the DB ). If you like to try it, please go to this address.

Thanks in advance

After holiday

The last two days were pretty lazy. I enjoyed them a lot. Monday night we had on the table the following meals: Monastery Old black beans soup ( Ivan Zvezdev’s recipe ), baklava ( the recipe that Dary knows ), stuffed cabbage and grape leaves ( from Best Yet ), oranges, mandarins, homemade bread, almonds and potato salad. We ate pretty good and we opened the presents :). Dary and I gave ourselves a nice present and we each gave the other one present :). More about the big present in another post. Tuesday, we spent mainly enjoying our presents :). Today is Wednesday and I feel sleepy, lazy and I don’t wanna go to work! A couple of days are too little…

Day 42

Today was a very … unproductive day. Not that I didn’t want to work, but maybe because it’s the end of the internship and I’m done with my projects so there isn’t much time to do another one…

After work I came home and I talked with Dary over Skype. She showed me some very nice pictures from her cousin’s wedding, but not all of the pictures are ready yet. After that I left my clothes in the laundry machine and I went out for diner. On my way back home I moved the clothes from the washing machine to the dryer. While waiting for the clothes I looked at the deals at Fat Wallet and I liked one :). Well I liked several but I was able to let only $9 go.

I then took my clothes back and now I need to iron some for tomorrow and to go to bed.

Day 41

Today I didn’t have much work. Every once in a while someone would send me a comment about the work, but nothing complicated to do. Dan asked me to add another element to the tool. Also, today started a new guy, so I had to show him the code and lead him through it so that he can edit it if needed in future.

We had diner at the Deli and after that I came home and watched this week’s episode of Photoshop User TV. Then I was in the bed for a while, because I wasn’t feeling very well.

Day 38

Today I had to go to Manhattan and I had to take the train in the early afternoon. Before that I went trough my presentation and I send it to Liz. After lunch we worked on our Java project for a while. I had to leave earlier for Manhattan, because I wanted to make a stop on my way…

After the talk I got on the 18:40 train to Long Island and I went home. Vassil and I went to Friendly’s to have dinner. We were both pretty tired but still we decided to try and watch the first Lord of the Rings. However that didn’t work out for us. We went to bed about 1/3 way though the movie.

Day 36

Today, even my manager asked me about the progress of my presentation. I guess it is time for me to do it. That will be my priority tomorrow. Other then that I worked the entire day on improovements and bug fixing and bug workarounds ( for IE). Because the they want the form to be quite clever, I had to write quite alot of Java Script and Ajax. That’s ok, but I hope it will not turn into some rusty web app with all these “enhancements”. Today I worked till 7pm and after I came home I ate a chicke souvlaki and watched this week’s photoshop user tv. Then I started writing in my blog to catch up since last Wednesday… I shouldn’t leave behind this, because it is hard to catch up later.

Day 35

Today we got emails to remind us that next week we have to do a presentation on what we have worked on and learned in the firm. I, of course, have not started mine, but I have to submit it by Friday, so I’ll have to do it in the next couple of days. We had a nice talk with my manager about future project that I can give my opinion on before I go back to school:). Tomorrow I’ll do some Java…

After work I spent the entire afternoon doing some more tricks on my phone. I found some interesting things that so far were available only on Windows machines… I also try to do tests so that I can show concrete data.

Day 34

The new week is the same like the old one. It is still the 7th week at this job and it’s out of interesting things to write about. We ate breakfast, we worked, we ate lunch, we workd and we left.

After work was more interesting. Vassil and I went to look for bright bulbs for the dashboard of the car and later I was playing around with my new phone. I started to gather some information on various tricks and soon I’ll be putting together what I’ve been able to find.

Day 33

Today my manager had a day off and I was asked to do some of his job, which I didn’t even know how to. In the end I decided to stay on the safe side and not experiment with the apps of the traders. Later we went to lunch with to other interns and a guy that had graduated from the training program one year ago to talk about our future plans. I was organized by the bank.

Vassil had come to Long Island yesterday, so I decided to leave earlier. My train was at 15:52 and at around 15:20 Petko asked me to put together a web gui for one of his tools he had written. I was doing that til around 15:43 and I was at the train station at 15:51 and I go on the train on time. At Penn Station was crazy. I arrived there 10 minutes before the train and I almost missed it because of the long lines at the ticket vending machines… I came home around 18:30. Dary had prepared her clothes and she had to only put them in a suit case, which later turned to two :). My new phone was also here, but I’ll talk about that some other time.