The Tedder P. Schoenhopfer Policy Exchange

I bought some Mystic River potato chips, and here’s a thing about a Crum, and supposedly he was Native American — but what kind of Native American name is George Crum?

From the package: “The potato chip was invented in 1853 by George Crum, a Native American. Responding to a customer’s complaint that the French fries were ‘too thick,’ Crum sliced a batch of potatoes, fried them to a crisp in lard, sprinkled them with salt, and sent them back to a delighted Cornelius Vanderbilt. An original American food had quietly been discovered at a time when shipbuilding was an active industry in maritime America. Nearly 200 years later, the original New England Potato Chips is back. Mystic Chips® made their maiden voyage at Mystic Seaport, America’s leading maritime museum, where a 19th-century village of historic buildings and tall ships recreates the era when George Crum salted his first potato chip.”

The above quote is from this website, devoted to junk food.

I thought it would be neat if everyone said what their favorite album was (I know you might have a couple, you can list them–don’t need the ONE favorite).

Right now my favorite album is probably “Remedy Lane” by Pain of Salvation, even though all their stuff is really good, I just found out about them recently. The leader is the lead singer, composer, and guitar player–he’s really talented, writes really powerful lyrics and melodies, has amazing vocal range, and can really wail on the guitar.

Other favorites: Jeff Buckley (best singer ever I think) - “Grace”, Pat Metheny - anything by him, all his albums are equally amazing and different.

Marshall went on a raft trip today (Friday). So how was it?

Susan’s job in the public defender’s office is very interesting. She helps defend criminals and sometimes it’s kind of yucky. But someone has to do it. This is posted in the hopes that she’ll write about it.

I was just wondering what everyone thought about it. Stick with how it is, follow Bush’s plan of privatization, or something new?

So I have internet, and life is still boring, but not quite as much. Last night I went out to see Batman on IMAX with a group of interns and it was AMAZING. This is by far the best IMAX I’ve ever seen–in terms of video and sound quality, not to mention the movie was unbelievably good.

There were about two other interns in the group of 11 who where somewhat cool. Everyone else was really nerdy and weird. Nerdy by itself can be ok, but some of these guys were weird. Meaning I didn’t event want to be around them, much less seen with them, much less hear them. But oh well. We went to a pizza place afterwards, where I got to hit on the cute waitress because she’s the only female contact I’ve had here in three weeks. Then I came back to my new internet where I did nothing productive, followed by sleep.

So basically, things are getting a little bit better. It’s nice having internet because the evening boredom is somewhat lessened. It’s 3PM on Saturday right now, and I think when my roommate gets back from buying some food (he opted to go by himself), I/we will head into the city and get some stuff we “need”–paperclips, floss, Q-tips, and socks.

The city itself is really nice. Everything is really hilly in Seattle (meaning lots of hills). You can go in a building on ground floor, up three levels, and exit the other side on ground floor again. I live right on “Beacon Hill,” which is pretty much right on a mountain. I’m literally a one minute walk from the Amazon headquarters, where I catch the shuttle to downtown every morning to where I work. Work has been good–I’ve actually already made a small difference at Amazon–I made a little monitoring console for monitoring a ton of servers Amazon has. But that part’s boring. Most of the day is spent staring at a computer screen, and by the time I get out I’m sort of in a spaced-out daze that takes a good run to shake me out of.

The weather here still kind of sucks–it’s been raining a lot, and it’s hit 70 maybe once so far (minus the two 90 degree days when Mom and Susan were out here). So I’m still not in shorts and it’s the middle of June.

Well enough complaining from me, things might pick up. I’m used to instantly making a lot of friends in situations like this, so it’s a little weird and I don’t really know what to do with myself, so I’ve basically just been working out/running and eating healthily to pass the time. I’m debating whether to come home for July 4th weekend (in which case I’ll probably drive up to Connecticut for a party a bunch of friends are having on the actual 4th), but my first priority is visiting Travis is San Diego, so if he’s free I’ll be visiting him there (I haven’t been to California anyway).

Alright, feel free to ask me more questions.

Hey Everyone -

So yesterday we had our orientation at 9am. We met the college intern recruiters (who were all cute girls around our age) who gave all the interns (about 140 guys and 3 girls) an “orientation”–basically getting around amazon.com, legal issues, paperwork, company objectives, how to eat pizza, etc. Then our respective managers came in and found their specific interns, showed them to the rest of the department teams and saw them to their offices.

My manager was sick though, so instead another guy from the team came to get me. His name is Jaipal, and he’s pretty cool–he’s my “mentor” that sort of helps me out throughout the summer. I didn’t really do anything at all yesterday because we wanted to wait for my manager to get in, so I kind of just screwed around on the computer for a while, looked around at the amazon.com site for employees (which is pretty big and extensive with a lot of stuff), etc. Went home around 4:30.

Today my manager was in, so we sat down and talked for a little bit. He wanted to know what my strengths were because the department I’m in deals with a huge range of the backend of Amazon.com. I’m in the “item management” department, which is responsible for storing ALL of the data on all of the items, receiving client requests, and sending it out, etc. So the main issue here is scalability–Amazon’s DB is growing too large now that soon it might become a big problem. All of the projects in our department are “tier 1″ which means business-critical, so the stuff we do is pretty important (if we mess up the company loses a lot of money).

So for now I’m just reading a bunch of documentation and trying to familiarize myself with the system. All of the interns were super dorky, and I’m kind of bored in general, but once work kicks in I’m sure things will speed up. We still don’t have internet at home, so I’ve just been sitting around and reading. But any way, I should get back to reading all this.

I accidently deleted the posts about the twins. Here is an update that was in a letter from the proud father.

Just a quick note because we are off to the nursery. They found a gram positive infection in Abraham. The doctor thinks it is not bad. They are testing to find the exact bacteria that is causing it so they can zap it with exactly the right anti-bacterial medicine. The good thing is that they have both been on anti bacterial medicine since they came out. Now all they have to do is match it exactly to Abraham’s bugs. Abraham is also under lights for a borderline bill count. So far Julia has none of this. They will keep them in the NICU for a week like this. We were hopeful that they would be coming home sooner, but we are used to this since Sammy took that terrible turn south after only four hours and he turned out very healthy. In my mind I was expecting this.

But they are still not on oxeye or anything else. Just an IV. They said they are both gaining weight and this is amazing because they usually lose weight for the first two or three days. They have my appetite