Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Days 2 through 45
Due to a combination of business and laziness, I haven't updated for a while. Here's a summary of what I should have been writing about:
We made it safely to Austin, and had no trouble moving in. I like my apartment, but it doesn't seem to be the best quality. I think the management here isn't bad, but may be a bit stingy when it comes to spending money on the place.
My stuff arrived quite shortly after I did (I believe it may have been the next morning, in fact), and seems to be all in tact.
I spent the next week with my parents running around town purchasing things to furnish my apartment, getting a phone, getting internet access, getting a Texas driver's license, etc. Probably one whole day was wasted trying to find brake pads for my bike. It seems the only places in the entire city that sell brake pads are bike shops, and they charge a fortune for them. Most other stores will sell you just about anything you can possibly think of for you your bike except brake pads. In the end, we decided to have my parents ship me some from Madison, since that would be far cheaper. Thankfully I didn't kill myself riding my bike while I was waiting for them to arrive.
My start date was supposed to be Jun. 27, but they decided that I needed to attend a 2-day orientation in San Jose, CA on that day, so I actually had to fly out of town on Jun. 26. I had an evening flight (5:30 or so, IIRC), and had scheduled for a shuttle to come pick me up at 3:30 to take me to the airport. Around 2:45 they called and said they had someone in the area at that time and asked if I could take that one. I said sure, and ended up at the airport around 3:00. Went through checkin fairly quickly, only to discover that my flight had been delayed. The plane had had problems that morning, causing delays for repair, and that had snowballed through it's entire schedule. The result was that it didn't arrive until after 7 (meaning I spent more than 4 hours waiting for it in the airport). While waiting I got a taco salad for dinner, and managed to get tomato stains on my pants before even taking my first bite. Which is annoying, because they were the only pants I had left without a stain, which is why I was wearing them to this training. I ended up getting to the hotel (The Dolce Hayes Mansion, if you're curious) around midnight.
Orientation started bright and early at 7:30 the next morning. It was mostly just company history, company values, and things like that. In the evening a bunch of us (from the orientation) went to a Thai restaurant downtown for dinner. A guy who worked at the hotel told us about it, since his son runs it. We told the waitress that that's why we came, and so she brought us fried bananas and ice cream (free of charge) after our dinner. The food there was good, but at the moment I don't remember the name of the place.
After the second round of orientation, in which they mainly covered the advantages of working for my company (ie. pay, benefits, professional development, etc.), one of the guys who had a rental car took me and a couple of others to the airport. Most of the other new hires weren't able to get flights back to their locations that evening, so they spent another night in the hotel. Our flight back to Austin was also delayed by several hours, so I didn't get back to my apartment until after 2 AM. Thankfully I was able to get a ride back with one of the other coworkers from Austin whom I met at the training. He lives in the apartment complex next to mine.
For my first 6 months here I will be working in the company's Design Center Bring-up Lab. My first few weeks here I was just testing chips as they came in, which was so mindlessly boring that I was about to go crazy. Thankfully I've been moved to a job that requires a little thought and has more variety. I'm taking this job over from someone I didn't get the chance to meet but who evidently didn't leave under the best of circumstances. Furthermore, the guy I'm working under left for 2 weeks of vacation before he had a chance to really train me, and I've been assigned to do his part on a fairly high priority study. I'm glad that I'm getting the responsibility and visibility, but a little more training beforehand would have been really nice. Also, one of the guys I worked with 2 summers ago is going to be relying on me to do a study for him as soon as I finish this one, and he's told me he's relieved that I'll be the one working on it. I think his opinion of me has been blown out of proportion through selective memory. Ah well. Hopefully I'll be able to do a good job.
In other news, I've been battling with invading ants ever since my parents left, and have been spending my free time watching anime and to a lesser extent trying to finish up Kingdom Hearts. It's been taking a while to finish, not because it's hard (the hardest part is fighting with the camera ), but because there are lots of things to do and I'm the sort of person who has enter every room, collect every treasure, get every spell, and in general "finish" everything I possibly can before I actually try to advance the plot. It will be at least 8 hours of gameplay before I'll move on to the next area, because there's a clock here that opens a different door every hour of game time and I've only gotten the treasure from 4 of the 12 doors (I'm told only 12 of the doors open, one for each hour on the clock) so far. Once I finish that I'll probably try to finish Tales of Phantasia (I just got the ability to fly anywhere in the world, so I'm going around trying to find all the secrets and grab all the treasures I can before I go where I'm supposed to go to advance the story), Final Fantasy VII (I'm going around doing side quests and building up my Materia), .hack (there are some rare items in the first game I haven't gotten yet, so I haven't progressed onto the second one yet, which will start where the first one left off), or Dark Cloud (I spent hours building up my sword before advancing to the second area, only to discover that the guys there kill me with long range attacks), all of which I've started but haven't finished yet. Once I've finished those I've got probably 20-30 other PS1 and PS2 RPGs to work on. And when I get sick of video games I can always keep reading my manga.
Since my life here will probably be fairly uneventful (and many of the most interesting things will probably be confidential anyway), chances are I'll be covering random thoughts a lot more in this blog in the future. I've got some that I'm developing, but usually don't think to write about them when I'm at a computer.
We made it safely to Austin, and had no trouble moving in. I like my apartment, but it doesn't seem to be the best quality. I think the management here isn't bad, but may be a bit stingy when it comes to spending money on the place.
My stuff arrived quite shortly after I did (I believe it may have been the next morning, in fact), and seems to be all in tact.
I spent the next week with my parents running around town purchasing things to furnish my apartment, getting a phone, getting internet access, getting a Texas driver's license, etc. Probably one whole day was wasted trying to find brake pads for my bike. It seems the only places in the entire city that sell brake pads are bike shops, and they charge a fortune for them. Most other stores will sell you just about anything you can possibly think of for you your bike except brake pads. In the end, we decided to have my parents ship me some from Madison, since that would be far cheaper. Thankfully I didn't kill myself riding my bike while I was waiting for them to arrive.
My start date was supposed to be Jun. 27, but they decided that I needed to attend a 2-day orientation in San Jose, CA on that day, so I actually had to fly out of town on Jun. 26. I had an evening flight (5:30 or so, IIRC), and had scheduled for a shuttle to come pick me up at 3:30 to take me to the airport. Around 2:45 they called and said they had someone in the area at that time and asked if I could take that one. I said sure, and ended up at the airport around 3:00. Went through checkin fairly quickly, only to discover that my flight had been delayed. The plane had had problems that morning, causing delays for repair, and that had snowballed through it's entire schedule. The result was that it didn't arrive until after 7 (meaning I spent more than 4 hours waiting for it in the airport). While waiting I got a taco salad for dinner, and managed to get tomato stains on my pants before even taking my first bite. Which is annoying, because they were the only pants I had left without a stain, which is why I was wearing them to this training. I ended up getting to the hotel (The Dolce Hayes Mansion, if you're curious) around midnight.
Orientation started bright and early at 7:30 the next morning. It was mostly just company history, company values, and things like that. In the evening a bunch of us (from the orientation) went to a Thai restaurant downtown for dinner. A guy who worked at the hotel told us about it, since his son runs it. We told the waitress that that's why we came, and so she brought us fried bananas and ice cream (free of charge) after our dinner. The food there was good, but at the moment I don't remember the name of the place.
After the second round of orientation, in which they mainly covered the advantages of working for my company (ie. pay, benefits, professional development, etc.), one of the guys who had a rental car took me and a couple of others to the airport. Most of the other new hires weren't able to get flights back to their locations that evening, so they spent another night in the hotel. Our flight back to Austin was also delayed by several hours, so I didn't get back to my apartment until after 2 AM. Thankfully I was able to get a ride back with one of the other coworkers from Austin whom I met at the training. He lives in the apartment complex next to mine.
For my first 6 months here I will be working in the company's Design Center Bring-up Lab. My first few weeks here I was just testing chips as they came in, which was so mindlessly boring that I was about to go crazy. Thankfully I've been moved to a job that requires a little thought and has more variety. I'm taking this job over from someone I didn't get the chance to meet but who evidently didn't leave under the best of circumstances. Furthermore, the guy I'm working under left for 2 weeks of vacation before he had a chance to really train me, and I've been assigned to do his part on a fairly high priority study. I'm glad that I'm getting the responsibility and visibility, but a little more training beforehand would have been really nice. Also, one of the guys I worked with 2 summers ago is going to be relying on me to do a study for him as soon as I finish this one, and he's told me he's relieved that I'll be the one working on it. I think his opinion of me has been blown out of proportion through selective memory. Ah well. Hopefully I'll be able to do a good job.
In other news, I've been battling with invading ants ever since my parents left, and have been spending my free time watching anime and to a lesser extent trying to finish up Kingdom Hearts. It's been taking a while to finish, not because it's hard (the hardest part is fighting with the camera ), but because there are lots of things to do and I'm the sort of person who has enter every room, collect every treasure, get every spell, and in general "finish" everything I possibly can before I actually try to advance the plot. It will be at least 8 hours of gameplay before I'll move on to the next area, because there's a clock here that opens a different door every hour of game time and I've only gotten the treasure from 4 of the 12 doors (I'm told only 12 of the doors open, one for each hour on the clock) so far. Once I finish that I'll probably try to finish Tales of Phantasia (I just got the ability to fly anywhere in the world, so I'm going around trying to find all the secrets and grab all the treasures I can before I go where I'm supposed to go to advance the story), Final Fantasy VII (I'm going around doing side quests and building up my Materia), .hack (there are some rare items in the first game I haven't gotten yet, so I haven't progressed onto the second one yet, which will start where the first one left off), or Dark Cloud (I spent hours building up my sword before advancing to the second area, only to discover that the guys there kill me with long range attacks), all of which I've started but haven't finished yet. Once I've finished those I've got probably 20-30 other PS1 and PS2 RPGs to work on. And when I get sick of video games I can always keep reading my manga.
Since my life here will probably be fairly uneventful (and many of the most interesting things will probably be confidential anyway), chances are I'll be covering random thoughts a lot more in this blog in the future. I've got some that I'm developing, but usually don't think to write about them when I'm at a computer.
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