« February 2006 | Main | August 2006 »
July 27, 2006
Graduation
I was just looking at some other people's graduation photos... makes me wish I could have been there. I think everyone forgot that I graduated too. Oh well guess that'll happen when a bunch of major events happen all at once.
Parents are visiting this weekend. Should have some fun going tubing, visiting San Antonio, and just relaxing around here.
Posted by Plocmstart at 11:38 PM | Comments (0)
July 18, 2006
Welcome back!
I haven't written in this thing for a long time, but I figure I might as well start again. I'm now writing from Austin where I moved back in April, and am now working for National Instruments as of the end of April.
Right now I'm working on quite a few different projects, which I guess is somewhat unusual for someone new. Usually I think a new person is a project to work on from start to finish, and that sort of happened then a few weeks later that all changed.
Well I guess I should start at the beginning. At first when I started usually people get training in the first week. Since I guess I started on a day that wasn't very popular with new people all the training for that week and the next had been cancelled. So I had to wait 2 weeks to actually get trained, which meant I spent about 2 weeks sitting at my desk just reading stuff and looking at confusing Labview VI's trying to understand what a IO Node is exactly.
Then training actually happened. I trained with all AE's (application engineers, or the people that handle customer's questions via phone, bulletin boards, email, etc). That was OK though since they were a good bunch of people. Most of them were interns and are probably heading back to school in a month or so.
So I learned a lot about Labview and how to get around in the program, but still not so much about stuff that my department does (I'm in the cRIO hardware development area - but I also do some software to blur the lines a bit more).
After training I got my first real project that was just being kicked off. I got to spend quite a bit of time getting familiar with a processor that would be used on the module I'd be designing the digital portion of. So I read over and practically memorized portions of the datasheet while spending some time writing some test code to see how well some of the peripherals operated. I then started compiling all my tests into a set of code that would actually work properly in a prototype module. I was able to get a evaluation module of the ADC, connect it up as well as connect the CPU to the cRIO backplane and write some simple VI's to communicate with the CPU and acquire back raw analog data from the ADC through the CPU.
Then I found out that the project had been put on hold since the analog hardware wasn't quite up to par yet. So I developed quite a bit of stuff for this CPU and now it's just sitting there on hold. Oh well maybe I'll get to use it again later.
Other than that I've been working on various aspects of quite a few different modules. Digital design on another one (that's quite simple in most respects, so not much effort involved) and working on revising a few other modules to solve some minor issues. So I've been spending quite a bit of time jumping around to hardware and software and getting back into VHDL and now just starting to figure out what a IO Node really is.
Work has been fun though. Every Friday at the end of the day the group gets together for a "meeting" where we just sit around and talk about whatever or watch the latest random stuff on the Internet, or even sometimes play Xbox360 or watch movies like Office Space. At the end of last week one of the managers decided to take some extra Coke bottles from a meeting earlier that week, get some Mentos, and experiment out in the parking lot making Coke fountains. So it's pretty much a variety of different work with other random things intersparsed, sort of like grad school I guess.
Other than work, we've spent a lot of time doing different things around Austin, San Antonio, and Houston. We've been to San Antonio 3 times now (Sea World twice, the riverwalk, Alamo, Ripley's believe it or not haunted museum, Guiness book of world records museum). We went to Houston to visit Matt and Lauren once so far. Around here we've been up to Lake Travis and a smaller lake that's near our apartment. We bought bikes, but then I got a cold and since then it's been around 100 every day so we haven't gone out riding yet.
Liz is looking to start a new business doing some advertising here. I just bought a new printer for her and helped her design a logo (which she liked). Right now she's working part-time at Cato, a clothing store that she likes.
Still working on the robot board a bit, well a brand new version of it actually. It's a much-improved version that may actually go somewhere (or at least I hope so).
Well that's a quick overview of the last 4 or so months I guess. I'll leave with one more though though that I made me want to get back and post things here. I received an ad from my insurance company trying to sell me what I guess would be identity insurance. For $25/year I can protect myself against identity theft. I think it's sad that I have to spend more of my money so that someone steals something that I don't even have control over or can necessarily check on every day for free (oh yes you have to pay to see your credit score and all that data too so you can't even check for free except once per year). So why do I have to spend my money to guard something I can't even see? And then if someone does steal it, it costs even more to get it back. I guess that sort of is like a real object, but the thought of insuring something virtual like an identity seems so different, or maybe that's just the way the 21st century is.
Posted by Plocmstart at 8:20 PM | Comments (0)