Short 3M Video

   I forgot to share this earlier. We were shown this on my first day at work. Gives a glimpse of a few things 3M is responsible for. I can't make the clip any larger. So here is the YouTube link to have the option to view it full screen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XCJkBpPvDQ

I don't have a title for this post. 

   I haven't had any huge events happen recently to post about, but I guess I can just make a post about a few small things. I don't even have a single picture. 

   3M had "bike to work" day last week. As I was pulling into the parking lot, more than 100 cyclists were riding in at the same time. It was pretty cool to see... but I am not cut out for that. 

   My bootcamp classes at Snap are going well. There are three "regular" people that go to every class: me, and a mother and daughter. The mom and daughter remind me a lot of my mom and I at Snap in Milford. The mom is loud and the daughter is quiet and gets embarrassed when her mom draws a bunch of attention to herself. I guess I am used to Mom acting like that, so I don't really get embarrassed. But this daughter in my class is, like, 14 years old... so she get embarrassed easily. 

   I had a hair appointment. I was nervous about finding a new hair stylist in Minneapolis, but I really like the girl I found. I'll have to back to her again soon because it doesn't take long for my hair to grow into a mullet. 

   3M had a fire drill last week. I don't think I've had a fire drill since middle school. Or elementary school? I felt like a kid. We got to go play outside for a half hour. After that, I had an "intern" lunch. I work in building 235, and it has its own cafeteria in it (which is where I eat lunch every day). So one of the other interns in the building invited all of the other interns to eat lunch together. About eleven of us showed up. It was interesting hearing about some of the other majors/internships. One girl is a fashion major, and her project this summer is designing coveralls. I wouldn't have thought 3M had interns for that. 

   I had a lot of fun at home this weekend. Rocco is still ugly. I look forward to coming back for the 4th.  I warned you that I had nothing interesting to talk about, so I am sorry that that is it for the post. Maybe something exciting will happen this week. 

Twin Cities Tour

   This weekend I went on a tour of Minneapolis and St. Paul. It was a chartered bus tour, so we stayed on the bus most of the time. We got off twice to look at different waterfalls. I was mostly interested in the tour so I could find more restaurants, parks, and shopping places. And I did. I saw a really cool walking path along the river right away. It goes along the University of Minnesota campus, which is where I live. So I'll have to check that out. 
   Our tour guide, Mary, is from Iowa and she was funny. She pointed out the art museum on the U of M campus designed by Frank Gehry. He is a famous architect that I learned about in school. I tried to take a picture and laughed at my attempt. I sort of pride myself in being able to take a decent photo with my nice camera, so I laughed when this is the picture I got of the art center: 

   I was on the wrong side of the bus. So here is a better picture of the building...  I stole it from the internet: 

   Speaking of our nice tour guide, Mary, I'd also like to mention the bus driver. He was a grumpy old man, but was so funny. He was complaining about everything the whole time. Mary would talk about the golf courses, and he'd have to take the microphone and complain that us kids have it too easy with golf carts, and that back in his day they had to walk to each hole. He complained about all the bicyclist riding too slow in the road. Mary would compliment the really tall, old cotton trees (or whatever the trees are called the produce white fuzz balls), but then the bus driver had to yell about how much he hated the cotton flying around everywhere and those trees should be cut down.  I can't remember everything he was complaining about, but the way he complained was funny, and it wasn't in a way that made him actually sound angry, he was just old and crazy. 
   We looked at the old General Mills building and then across the river at the old Pillsbury building and learned about their competitiveness. The Pillsbury building in this picture is being turned into condos. I bet those are going to be really sweet with the brick work and stuff. 

Here are a couple other shots from this first stop. The brick bridge is an old train trestle turned into a pedestrian path. 

The bridge in the back of the photo was the first bridge built across the Mississippi (that fact doesn't seem right, so I might be wrong.. but it was built in the 1800's). And the bridge in the foreground is that pedestrian path again. 

    I took too many boring pictures of things without being in any of them.... but it was also awkward and lame to ask random people to take a picture of me all by myself.... especially when they didn't understand how to work my camera. So here is one that actually has me in focus.



   We rode along Lowry Hill and Summit Avenue which had big old houses. 

   We visited the chain of lakes. I had researched Lake Calhoun and figured out that I need to go there. The running path around it is 5K and there is also a restaurant called the Tin Fish on the water. I was pretty excited that I had already figured all this out before Mary said any of it. She confirmed that the Tin Fish has great food. I can rent kayaks, sailboats (not that I'd know how the hell to sail), paddle boards, and other stuff. I look forward to going there with someone. 

   We drove by a lot of dog parks. Mary said that many dog parks are split in half with a fence or something. One half is for big dogs and one half is for small dogs. But I think Tag, the chickenshit,  would be better off in the little dog pen and Sammi and Rocco could probably handle the big dog pen better. Mom, I saw a lady riding a bike with the child cart (well, it was made for dogs) connected to the back. I feel like princess Sammi might like that mode of transportation on these hot days when you take the dogs to Kenue Park. But maybe she'd prefer the stroller. 

   We drove down the Nicollet Mall. I look forward to going back there to look at the shops and restaurants. Mary made a point to tell us all that we MUST visit Isles Bun and Coffee. Tootie, don't read the rest of this. Mary says the cinnamon rolls are the best ever because they serve them with a whole bucket of frosting to scoop each bite into. 

   The rest of my weekend went well. I hung out with some friends from work last night and today I ran errands and caught up on laundry. It was beautiful outside, so it's too bad I didn't go to Lake Calhoun today (but I did go to Snap!). Maybe next weekend. 

Happy Father's Day again, Dad.

Grand Old Days:

   My roommates moved in this weekend. I have three. But I've still only met two of them. Laura and Vinati (rhymes with infinity). Laura is from Wisconsin and Vinati goes to school at MIT. Laura has a car and her and Vinati work in the same building at 3M. So they drive to work together. My third roommate, Taylor, is the one I haven't met yet. She has been in town since last Wednesday. She flew up from Texas with her Mom and stayed in a hotel with her. She shipped her car up from Texas. Taylor moved in on Saturday... and I think she has been living in the apartment since then.. but I really have not seen her. Our bedrooms each have their own bathroom, so maybe she has a mini fridge in her room and just doesn't plan on leaving it unless she has to go to work. I don't know why she doesn't socialize with us. I don't even know what she looks like. I can't believe I haven't run into her in the hallway yet.
   I've spent time alone with my other two roommates. Laura is 21 so we went out on Saturday night together. She is fun. Vinati is not 21 yet, so I spent Sunday with her. We went to Grand Old Days in St. Paul. Grand Old Days is a day-long festival on Grand Avenue. It is huge. Tents line the street for over a mile. There is fair food and other random vendors, beer gardens, concerts, and a certified hot dog eating contest. Vinati and I walked into the hot dog eating contest by accident and happened to catch the end of it. The winner of it gets to go to the championship round on Coney Island on the 4th of July. The winner was a short, very skinny woman. She ate 31 hot dogs in ten minutes. We also saw a booth that was a club of people who love Irish Wolfhounds. I've been set on getting this kind of dog for a long time. So I was very excited to sit and pet them for a bit. I got to introduce Vinati to cheese curds/cheese balls. She had never heard of them because it isn't something on the menus of restaurants on the East Coast. She loved 'em. It was a fun day.

The red arrow is pointing to the woman who won the hot dog eating contest.

Can you see how far down the road this goes? You can't even see the end of it.

   After work yesterday, I took a back road home. I happened to drive by a Snap Fitness less than a mile from my apartment. I had my new tennis shoes delivered to my apartment, too, so I was excited to go to Snap with my new kicks. The Snap was very nice. They have a group fitness room with a nifty touchscreen TV that has a schedule of when classes are. It directed me to get online to sign up for classes ahead of time. I took a look at my options and am signed up to do one class tomorrow night. It is a high intensity.. interval... training.. class? I don't know if those are the four words, but I do know the acronym is H.I.I.T. So I'll go to that class tomorrow and if I like it I might sign up for more classes. I'm glad that it is nearby, and it is much nicer than the gym inside my apartment.

   The school flag war at work was put to an end today. This was the last shot I got of my cubicle before the fire marshal people made us take them down. Oh well.

   I saw this billboard... It is so rare seeing advertisements for food that isn't fast food. Cool.

My first week at 3M

My first week at 3M

   Dad and Jon helped me move up to Minneapolis on Memorial Day. We found my apartment easily without getting lost. It has four bedrooms and four bathrooms with a living room and kitchen. A very nice building. The kitchen cabinets look familiar.

   On my first day of work, I needed a little help finding where the lobby was in the right building. 3M’s campus is huge. They have something like 39 buildings. It’s almost as big as Iowa State’s campus. The first girl I met when I checked in is named Maggie. It turns out that she is my neighbor. My first day was all orientation stuff. I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement saying that I won’t talk about all the secret stuff going on at 3M. It reminds me of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. Lots of secret stuff and only people with a golden ticket, or in my case, a badge, are allowed inside to see it. Basically, I can’t talk about a lot of the projects I’ll be working on.

   We took a tour of “the quad,” which is the four buildings that a lot of the business people work as well as the executives. Most of the other buildings outside of the quad are labs (I work in a lab). I saw some pretty cool things in the quad. 3M has an employee mall which includes shops, beauty salons, eye care centers, and more. One of the stores sells 3M products for cheap. I can get a pack of Scotch Tape rolls for, like, 25 cents. They also have a fitness center. It is huge with things like group fitness/yoga classes and spin classes. My apartment has a gym in it so I will probably use that one instead. At the end of the day we were given our laptops and sent home. Yvonne, my supervisor, told me where to meet her the next day.

    On my second day of work, Wednesday, I arrived at building 235. It is a mechanical and electrical engineer lab as well as an industrial design lab. So it has all the cool machines I got to use at Iowa State (laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC machines, etc.). I was waiting in the lobby where Yvonne told me to meet, but she was running late so a man named Peter greeted me instead. He  works in Human Factors. Peter showed me around the building and introduced me to some people. He then started to show me some project he is working on. He asked if I was interested in joining him at a meeting later that day to talk about a project. I went to the meeting and that is where I was assigned my first project. Because of the NDA that I signed, I can’t go into detail about it. My workstation is right next to Adam Carlson, another Industrial Designer at Iowa State. He is double-majoring in in IndD and Mechanical Engineering. But I know him pretty well, so I am glad I sit next to him. He has been a huge help showing me around (like where to eat lunch). He hung up the Iowa State flag. And I think that has started a war, a couple other flags have started to pop up around the office now. I get my own phone and phone number and email address. That’s all pretty neat. Here is a view of my cubical. Mom and Tootie, I just had to bring my container of Spark to work. I need one of those after lunch to keep me awake the rest of the day!

     My third day went smoothly. Peter invited me to a couple more meetings. At those meetings I was assigned two more projects. So I am working on three total projects right now. I can talk about one of them a little bit. Cavilon is an alcohol-based rub manufactured by 3M. It is flammable before it is completely dried on the skin. It was not intended to be used in the operating room, but has started to trickle in there. Long story short, I need to come up with some label designs to better warn O.R. doctors that this is a flammable product.

    Another meeting I went to with Peter was an ethnographic research class. 3M brought in teachers that don’t work at 3M to teach some of their employees how to properly conduct ethnographic research. I took a research class and learned about ethnography. It is basically the type of research you do to observe people in their natural environments and understand how they use products. The class was interesting and it was a relief that I knew a lot of what was being taught. I could contribute and actually sound like I knew what I was talking about, haha. I ate lunch with a man named Tom that day. He is one of the lead industrial designers. I like him a lot. He is funny and laid back. He talked about his crazy roommates in college.

    I finally felt settled in and comfortable by the end of the week. I was sent some emails that asked me to complete some online employee training. I got a kick out of the ergonomics training. Most of the training was based on how to adjust my chair to make it comfortable. I also got to play with Rhino 3D. This is a computer software that 3M uses and I know it is on my supply list to get for The Landing School this fall. 3M has a book about how to use Rhino, so I opened it up and this was the first page I landed on. Kind of a cool coincidence. I hope to be able to design a yacht like that with Rhino by this time next year at the Landing School.  On my free time I hope to be able to use the book and get familiar with the software throughout the summer. 

    That's all for now. I'll post again later to talk about how my first weekend went. It was fun.