Can You Smell It?

Well, I can smell college basketball in the air.  Art has been telling me for weeks that a tough task has been approaching.  So I was ready.  The tough task arrived on Thursday.  He apologized, as he has done a couple times before handing off tough tasks to me.

As college basketball approaches Art needs to know when many New England colleges play their games so we can easily keep track of them.  The task that was handed off to me to make a master list of all these schedules.  According to Art, this job took the previous intern a week and a half to finish.  I didn't cower in fear, I just got to work. 

Throughout the day I got in a considerable groove, I had more than half of the schedules done... so I asked Art if I was doing it correctly.  I was not only doing it correctly, he was thoroughly impressed by the pace I set over the first half.  Needless to say, I went back to work after checking in with him.

As the day began to come to a close, I finished the master schedule and sent it his way.  That's right readers, I finished what has been known as a weeks worth of work in about 6 hours.  And it was done correctly.  It was an accomplishment I was very proud of.  I take great pride in the work I do, and I know Art and the rest of the staff notices it.

Busy Couple of Days

As my whirlwind internship continues, I have had quite the busy past couple days.

On Friday, the Prague trip was starting to wind down for my colleagues who went overseas.  As part of the trip they took a ton of pictures of their experience to post it on our site.  I got the distinct pleasure of getting to caption all 66 photos.  It was a whole lot of fun to see the little details of the trip.  For anyone who has not done captions for photography it can get  relatively difficult throughout the process.  Why is that you might ask.
1.  You try not to repeat a caption.  When there a lot of pictures of the team warming up, there are only about three ways to describe stretching.
2.  During practice the players don't have names or numbers on their jerseys.  Identifying players can be next to impossible if it is a zoomed out shot.

Then after I was captioning all the pictures, Art asked me to transcribe two interviews.  One of Tyler Seguin the other of GM Peter Chiarelli.  The two interviews totaled about 10 minutes.  The two took me about a half hour to transcribe.  This task is very difficult depending on how quickly the person talks and how well they enunciate each word.   The Seguin interview proved to be a somewhat difficult task.   Between filler words (like, ummmm, like) and the speed he was talking I had to continue rewinding the footage to make sure I quoted Seguin correctly.  The Chiarelli interview was longer but considerably easier.  He enunciated every single word, and spoke reasonably slowly, which made my job easier.  There are two very big differences between the two people. Seguin is a hockey player, it is not particularly his job to be speaking to the public.  He is getting payed to help put the puck in the net.  Chiarelli makes the big bucks for speaking for players and the organization.  So, I understand.

I had Monday off.  Thank you Christopher Columbus.

Ok, back to work.  I actually got to do something with Photoshop today.  Jason Levine found out that I have an extensive background in Adobe Photoshop.  So, I got to create the little logos that will be featured in Joe Haggerty's Power Rankings.  I just had to do some basic Photoshop work, but it was something new and fun that I knew I could do.

The Randy Gene Experience

When you work in this business, big news is the most fun experience throughout the day.  The newsroom get really loud and rowdy as discussions of the event echo throughout the newsroom.  Wednesday morning was very different.  A monumental trade went down sending Patriots wide receiver Randy Moss to the Minnesota Vikings.  At around 9 a.m. I arrived in the newsroom to find out about the news of Moss,  but there were no discussions, there was no ranting about why the Patriots made a terrible move. Why was today any different than other days?  The majority of the people who are normally in the newsroom at 9 went on the trip to Prague to follow the Boston Bruins.  This made my morning very interesting.  It was up to me and (a video intern) Tim to hold down the fort and get the video and news out to the public.  We did just that.  I posted the story immediately after finding out the news, and he gathered pictures in preparation for the mid-day update that would be coming his way when more people came in.

Later in the day I was navigating my way through the Patriots web site after the deal became verified by the team.  I then found my way looking in the Pro Shop site and discovering that the price of an authentic Randy Moss jersey has plummeted from $250 to $75 dollars.  I got a laugh out of it so I shared it to Art and Rich.  Art replied, "Write it up, then put it in the Patriots folder."  I was kinda confused, I didn't realize that was actually news.  I wrote it up anyway, and after a lot of editing by Art it turned out to be this.  Art taught me that when writing something like that to just punch at it.  What I had before he considered it as "too wordy" and now I understand.  I have to get myself out of the habit of writing around the topic.  Word counts in high school and college are really hurting me right now.  I am really learning a lot, and having a lot of fun at the same time.

Then today, I got to help out the CSNNE community again concerning the Randy Moss situation.  Tom E. Curran had a lot of work to do today in preparation for his show Quick Slant tonight.  After the trade, the show took a complete 180 degrees in another direction.  This gave me a chance to help out, so I told him I could.  Tonights "Stats are for Losers" segment will be the fruits of my labor.  I went through the Randy Moss stat archive to try and find how many games he led the team in receiving yards and what their record was.  When Randy Moss led the team in receiving over his 3+ years in New England the team was 17-3.  In the remaining games that he did not lead the team they were 25-11.  So, hopefully this stat that I acquired helps people make their decision whether the Moss deal was a positive or not.  I can't wait to tune into the show and see the stats that I got!

Once again, it makes me feel so good that Art and the rest of the staff has so much confidence in me that they don't feel the need to babysit me throughout the day.  I feel like my hard work has finally payed off.

Feeling at Home

Well, it has been a good month, five weeks, 25 days, however you want me to put it.  A whole lot has happened here at Comcast Sports Net.  I have learned some valuable lessons already and can't wait to see what is in store for me over the coming months.

Anyway, the meaning of this post is to go over how comfortable I am here.  I feel like I know exactly what I am doing at the time, and I can't wait to do more things as my time here moves along.  I not only feel comfortable, but I think that the rest of the web team feels confident in me as well.  The writing team seems to have no issues asking me about my opinion, help, and also for knowledge that I might have on a certain topic.  The other day, Art was doing some research about next years Red Sox team.  He came to me to do some research about the salaries that the team has on the books for next season.  It was actually interesting to me.  I found out some new things about the financial system of MLB, something I never really understood or cared about in the past.

Keeping on the same theme, Bill showed has shown on a couple occasions that he trusts me to do good work.  The tasks he has given to me have been mostly from a business standpoint.  The first one was to help organize receipts from a writers road trip.  I can't remember if I mentioned it or not, so I figured I would mention it again.

The second task Bill gave me was a much more important one.  As many people may know (if you don't, go to my shameless promotional link) the Bruins have headed to Prague to open up their season.  This is a monumental trip for CSN as we push to get more coverage for all sports in an attempt to become the go-to web site for all things New England sports.  Bill wants to see what kind of ratings our site is getting throughout the trip.  That is where I come in to the equation.  I have been placed in the middle of this trip, don't worry I'm not going to Prague.  I am responsible for keeping an eye on the web traffic throughout the trip, basically seeing if it was worth it.  I have learned so much about the business aspect of CSN/the internet, and is very fascinating.

As more tasks get placed on my shoulders I feel trusted and so at home here.  I guess I am doing something right.

UPDATE:  Just stumbled across a bunch of messed up videos.  I helped save the Celtics Dancer special.