So I started my internship with Flowserve Corporation this week. I'm positioned as an IT intern in their Dallas/Irving based Headquarters. My first impression of the facility was a good one: the main floor is beautiful--cherry wood, open to the floor above, marble, brushed metal, and a waterfall by the stairs.

The people here are really similar to the recruiters I met during the interview process. They're all really helpful, cool people. It's interesting to see how much politics and the bureaucracy of the Corporate World affects every move I make. People are always in meetings, on conference calls, or waiting for something.

I found myself waiting to start my project on the first day. I needed to get my security/name-badge and equipment for working on my project and I ended up making a good contact within the IT group and got myself setup with a laptop (IBM T43) and wireless notebook mouse (Microsoft) in no time flat....

It's been fun so far, but not extremely challenging. I'll hopefully be switching over to a new project which will involve learning a new technology that I haven't had a chance to get my hands on yet: Oracle Databases. I've worked with ADO.net in ASP.net using VB.net -- what a mouthful -- in the past, but it was all accessing SQL databases on a Microsoft SQL Server.

As you might imagine, the access/connection/tranmssion to a Oracle database is just slightly (read: VERY)different. They have a lot in common, but everything in Microsoft's Development Suite (Visual Studio) is geared toward microsoft products. There is basic functionality called OLE that will allow you to connect to any database that follows a standard data structure, but it isn't very optimized.

Although this will work, I'll probably get the Oracle Data Provider which will optimize the connection and provide the level of scalability I would want for a company of this size.

Well, I'm done boring everyone with all the technical stuff. I'll try to post a few updates over the summer to let everyone know how everything is going.