Dear reader,

Well the past few days have been filled with what the British have called ‘decluttering’. My mum finally realized that she should get rid of the old things… So I finally managed to get her to allow me to throw away some of the old childrens’ books that she once bought for me, but which I never read. So now I finally have some room for new stuff!!!! Yeay for more room.

Well today was my first day of internship. I was quite nervous, so I did not get much sleep last night… So I went there while I was quite tired. He gave me a tour around the shop (explaining to me where what book sections were located etc.) and then started to teach me how the systems which they use to keep track of their stock and to manage the website worked.
At first I got off at a very slow start. Because I was so tired it just took me a while to get the gist of things. I had to adapt the short articles that newspapers wrote on books to html and add the ‘order’ buttons, which had to be placed underneath each article. So yeah, that took me a while. The next job I was given was to adapt a lot of older html codes on the site (which sometimes just existed of a picture and a hyper link) by hand to the newer system. And there were a LOT of codes that needed changing. They have quite a large archive really. I really did get the hang of that and was going strong when he asked me to do a different job. He was afraid that I was getting bored hahhaa. Well it wasn’t the most ingenious job ever, but the jobs that are less fun also need to be done ;). Subsequently he asked me to adapt the introduction of the book “Voorwaarts en vergeten” (which would mean something like “move forward and forget” in English) by Liesbeth van de Grift, which will be published next month, which had been sent to us in a PDF file to html, so it could be published on the site as a news item. So I adapted the entire text, added the title and author to the database, searched for the blurb text on the website, since we would be using that as the introduction. Also I wrote about two lines on when the book will be published. Subsequently I sent the media department of the publisher an e-mail to ask for a portrait picture of the writer, so as it publish that along with the text on our website. It was the first e-mail which I actually wrote as an intern… Yeay! I got a really fast reply and even published the picture on the website myself. (Though all the previous steps were done with lots of help of my supervisor… couldn’t have managed it without him ahhaha).
After this he asked me to take a look at a review that one of the writers wrote since it was full of mistakes… And it was. Though at this time it was a quarter to five and I was absolutely exhausted. It felt like forever before I had finished the article. Sometimes I had to reread a sentence three times, before it finally made sense hahaha…. Or it did not, just because the sentence was grammatically incorrect. There really were a lot of mistakes in that review. Next time I will try my best to spot all the mistakes.

As for now… I am so so sooooo completely exhausted. I can’t wait to get back to bed… Yet I still have to make a form for the student organization, because we will be selling books to the first year students and we have to let them know how much it will be.

Well that’s it for today. This is a completely exhausted Blacky, signing off.