Kwik-E Mart and Jay Leno

Faris-Penn Describes the Bus Route to Work

July 23, 2007

Sheila Faris-Penn, director of web communications for University Advancement, is spending seven weeks as an application developer intern at Warner Bros. Worldwide Television Marketing’s New Media Division, thanks to a Staff Development Award she received this spring.

Inside Online asked Faris-Penn to provide a weekly blog about the experience. This is her fifth submission.

Week 5

Burbank’s Media District

From the Burbank train station I catch a bus that takes me the final part of my daily journey to Building 151 outside Gate 4 of Warner Bros. Though not as direct as the two trains, the bus is a little more interesting. It is called the “Metrolink/Media District” line, and it meanders around the part of Burbank where the fun stuff (by that I mean the TV-and movie-related stuff) is housed. I’ll give you the rundown.

The first thing we pass is the Nickelodeon Building. It’s a white building with green-slime built on the top and lots of characters, such as Sponge Bob and the Fairly Odd Parents overhead. After that are various houses, a park and a psychic, then there’s a 7-Eleven that’s gotten a new look: they turned it into the Kwik-E Mart from the “Simpsons.” You can get Krusty-Os and Squishies there, and many of the characters are on the building. There’s a line to get in.

We pass a comic book store and the first (of many) copy centers, then we pass Disney Studios. This includes the Michael Eisner Building, which is “held up” by the Seven (very large) Dwarves. After that we pass an enormous hole, which will someday house underground parking for “The Point” (not sure what that will be). The NBC Lot is next, followed by Compac Video and lots of antennas/satellite dishes for video uplinking.

The “Tonight Show with Jay Leno” has its own building. If there is someone popular guesting on today’s Tonight Show, the line to be in the live audience starts early in the morning.

Next is the Pinnacle Building, which houses the WB radio stations (I didn’t know the WB had radio stations…). On this building there’s a HUGE promotional “poster” for a Smashing Pumpkins concert. We also pass this interesting (architecturally speaking) restaurant called “Dimples” where they advertise Karaoke. “Virgins are Free.” (I’m assuming people who haven’t recorded themselves singing there before. Otherwise how would they know?)

When we drive around to the other side of the Pinnacle Building, you can see the logos for Electra Rhino, Warner’s Music Group, one whose logo I don’t recognize and Atlantic Records. It has an even larger “poster” on this side, this time for the Traveling Wilberries. (I put “poster” in quotes, because I’m not sure what else to call it. It’s much too large for a poster, though, roughly four stories for the first one and 10 stories for the second. But I digress.)

A little farther and we pass Warner Bros. Records, Inc. and then the parking lot for the Warner Bros. VIP Tour, an entrance to the WB Lot, and a large WB building on the other side. We drive along the wall of the lot, pass some houses and apartments on the other side, and then we’re at my building and I get off.

In the afternoon when I get on the bus to start my journey home, we finish out the circle of this side of the Media District (there’s another bus that hits more ABC/Disney buildings on the other side). We drive by the SAG/AFTRA Credit Union and stop at the Disney Channel Building. This is apparently the only “non-lot Disney logo” building on the west coast … I’m not sure what that means but it sounds cool. There are lots of satellite dishes here, too. There’s also the “Burbank Center” for Disney operations, where Disney does a lot of its uplink.

Here we start seeing the back side of several buildings that we saw in the morning. The Disney Lot (the Eisner building) and the NBC buildings are among them. On the NBC building is another “poster”; this did have “America’s Got Talent” for a while but is now sporting one for “Bionic Woman.” There are lots of entertainment-related or media-support stuff on the route that I haven’t mentioned, like the Writers Guild, lots of video duplication, captioning houses and various “production” places and a hospital, too. We drive past Nickelodeon again, and then we’re at the train station!

The DAMM Front End

Although there was still a lot to do, my instructor said that the part of the DAMM Project that deals with data – the Content Management System (CMS) or “back end” – was “good enough.” It was time to work on the part that the majority of users (or “clients”) would be seeing. This is the part of the project where the digital assets can be looked up (and people don’t have to worry about how they got into the database in the first place – or even that a database exists). So I packed up my notes for the part that I’d been working on and changed emphasis. These pages were totally different, so there was lots of new stuff to learn.

Things Left to Do

I felt a little guilty about all the stuff that was still left to do on the CMS system. I had gotten the bulk of it done, but there were a lot of little things needed to be done and I wasn’t going to have time to do any of them. And there were things on the client side that were more important. So I started a “Fix File” to keep track of them. Every time I saw something little that needed changing, I printed the page, wrote what needed to be done, and put the page into the file. The file kept getting bigger and bigger…

Unintended QA

You know how sometimes you want to get something out of the garage, but you can’t get to it, so you end up unintentionally cleaning the garage? The Quality Assurance process can be like that sometimes.

I did try to get away from the CMS back-end pages. I really did. I even got a couple of front-end pages almost done. But I kept finding things on the front-end that depended on the back-end stuff. So I’d spend some time fixing it, then I’d go back and work some more. I’d find another issue, fix it, and move on (inch by inch).

Then we found something REALLY big that we hadn’t done. I had it on my to do list, but didn’t realize that until this was done we couldn't move forward. So we had to stop and fix it. This meant that I went back to the CMS entirely for a while. I know I mentioned that I really wanted to finish the CMS, but somehow this wasn’t what I meant. Sigh.

Week 6 Previews

Back on the DAMM Back End
Harry Potter Family Screening
Looping, Hash Tables, Dictionaries and Stored Procedures
The People on the Bus