Internship: Week One (Continued)

In which I actually go to work.

I refuse to actually read the previous post, because I'm sure I was word-vomiting like a fifteen year-old girl with a Xanga. Maybe I'll get back into the swing of writing and create something approaching prose.

At any rate, I said I would continue the saga of week one. I left out that on Sunday we walked to all three entrances of National Instruments, attempting to scout out the best way in on our first day. At all three, we found eight foot tall gates with ID scanners. As none of us had IDs yet, this presented something of a problem. Fast-forward to Monday morning, and all the gates are wide open; one less thing to worry about. National Instruments hired 220 interns this summer, and 88 of them started that day, so there were quite a few of us. We got ID badge photos taken and were shepherded off to breakfast with our mentors/managers. My mentor's name is Mark, and he seems like a pretty swell guy. He (and a lot of NI) seems pretty young, probably under thirty. He told me (finally) what group I would be working with--PXI. Essentially, PXI is a modular instrument system consisting of a PC motherboard (controller) and a series of instrument modules communicating to the controller over PCI (now PCIe), just like expansion cards in a desktop computer.

After meeting Mark, I was put back into the general population of interns for orientation. As you can imagine, this was a bunch of PowerPoint presentations and forms and a tour--nothing exciting. After being oriented, we were reunited with our mentors for lunch. Mark, a two other guys from the group, and I went out to a burrito place across the highway called Freebirds. It's a chain that apparently started in California. Imagine Qdoba or Chipotle, but with bigger burritos and they serve beer. The pork burrito I had was pretty good, but oddly cylindrical.

After lunch, it was time for something new and exciting: LabVIEW training. (This is not actually exciting.) I've been programming in LabVIEW for almost three years now, and I probably had more experience going into training than anyone else in the room except for the instructor. Needless to say, day one of training was wasted on me. They let us out of training around 4:30 so we could go back and set up our computers and whatnot. I went back up to my cubicle to find that my computer would be an actual PXI chassis, which is kind of cool. It's got more horsepower than any desktop they could have scrounged up for me (~Core i7 at 1.7Ghz). I started setting things up, then finally got out at around six, making for a ten hour day.

When I got home, we went on another shopping expedition so that one of my roommates (I never mentioned this in the last post, but he didn't arrive until late Sunday night) could get some food. I spent the evening reading more of Odyssey Two before going to bed in preparation of another day.

Tuesday was pretty uneventful. More LabVIEW training (I did actually learn a thing or two), and setting up things on my computer. Wednesday was a bit more exciting. Once every quarter(?), NI buses all their employees down to a big auditorium for a Company Meeting. There just happened to be one on Wednesday, so LabVIEW training ended after lunch and we went down to the Company Meeting. Essentially, it was a bunch of keynote address-type things and speeches by assorted higher-ups in the company. Some of it was pretty interesting, some of it less so. Afterward, I went back and finished setting up my computer and whatnot, then clocked out for the day.

Garrett will be pleased to hear that I've started watching Doctor Who. I never had anything against it, I just never really had the time. Now that I've got scads of time, I'm working my way through the second season. I've seen bits and pieces of seasons 1-3, but I've missed quite a few episodes. I think there are actually a few episodes of season 1 that I've missed too. I should go back and check.

On Thursday, I LabVIEW training until lunch. I now know how to do a lot of things in LabVIEW that I didn't before, including event-based programming and multi-process/multi-thread control. I don't know that any of this will ever be useful, but now I know it. After lunch, I spent a few hours going through assorted slideshows on assorted policies and practices, then went to the deck party. The deck party was in honor of the previous day's company meeting. Lots of free fried things, beer, wine, soda, and music out on the patio between buildings B and C. It would have been a lot of fun if I had friends around here, but even so, free food is free food.

At this point, I guess I should touch on the friends bit. I'm not really trying to make friends here. I know that's cold and antisocial and unhealthy and whatnot. It's not that I'm actively avoiding people; I'm just not putting forth the energy to be social. Having friends is great and all, but I'm here for twelve weeks, and I'm here to do a job. It's a lot less stressful (for me) if I don't have to think about the social aspect. I'm sure most of the human race would disagree, but for the most part, life is easier on my own. There are times when I wish I had people to hang out with, but I that doesn't mean I'm about to get chummy with a bunch of people I don't know just because I happen to live or work with them. If I meet some interesting people, I won't avoid them (much), but in the mean time, I'm fine by myself, thank you very much.

Somewhere between Tuesday and Thursday, I finished Odyssey Two. It's a good book, and I'll leave it at that. I've heard the other two in the series are not as good as the first two, which is a shame. I'm deciding what else to read this summer. I may invest in a Kindle account and read on my laptop (that's how I read 2001 and 2010, although I read them in PDF form). I figure if I go with a Kindle account, I can either buy a Kindle some day or just use my phone/laptop/future tablet and the Kindle app.

In other news, I discovered on Thursday that my laptop really cannot handle Fallout 3. The lag is just terrible. This is sad, but not entirely unexpected. I'm going to build a new desktop at the end of the summer so I have something to game with. In keeping with my tradition of naming my computers after fictional intelligent machines and AIs, I'm thinking her name will be Athena. If anyone wants a new desktop, I'd love to make her a twin (Boomer).

On Friday I finally learned exactly what it is I'm doing this summer. Without going into too much detail, I'm essentially designing a breakout board for a PCIe controller chip that's being used as a load-tester for PCIe/PXIe. I'll be doing the schematics and layout for this load tester, which will spam packets across the bus to the controller to test how it can handle full loading, even at PCIe 3, which isn't out yet. I cut out early because I'd already worked 42 hours this week.

I'm once again tired of typing, so I'll stop here, but as promised, I got through the week. Don't expect a blow-by-blow of my life in future posts. I imagine that would get very boring very fast. I just figured I've had enough people ask about my week that there was some interest. I'm going to go eat now (yes, at quarter after nine).

Internship: Week One

It's Been a While Hasn't It?

I always said I'd update this when I felt like it, and I guess I just haven't really had a chance...in the last four months. I'm sure my dedicated readers are devastated. In any case, I'm not going to do a semester in review right now. I'm going to do a week in review.

For the uninitiated, I'm spending my summer in Austin, TX as an intern at National Instruments, purveyors of such fine products as LabVIEW and the cRIO (and many many other things). Long story short, they sell hardware and software that allows people to make electrical measurements and generate electrical signals to control things like robots and factories and supercolliders. I'm going to be spending my summer designing a circuit board to stress test PCIe (and PXIe) controllers by saturating them with traffic and seeing what they do.

I flew into Austin on Saturday, via Houston. That little adventure started with me finding out that my bag was too heavy to go on the plane. Some quick unpacking and it was able to go on the plane, but for a $100 surcharge. Now, I wouldn't have a problem with that, except that if the contents of that bag were in two bags, they would have been free. Clearly, the $100 isn't being used to cover fuel costs. Maybe there's some really strong guy who will only carry bags if you pay him lots of money. In any case, I got my bag checked. The flight itself was was pretty uneventful. There's something amazing about a world where flying across the country is positively unexciting. Also, airlines have gotten even stingier in the last five years: despite taking a three hour flight straddling lunch time, there was no food (there never is anymore), unless I wanted to pay six dollars for chips and salsa. Needless to say, I declined.

Arrived in Austin around 3:15 PM local time (Texas really is living in the past, but only by an hour). Retrieved my bag, which was the first off the plane. That's never happened to me before, so maybe that's what $100 buys you. I then grabbed a cab to the corporate housing they've put us up in. That too was an adventure. I had the cab drop me off where I thought I was going, but apparently there are two side-by-side complexes of apartments. After wandering through the first one and not finding my building, I realized that I must be in the second one. I walked here, got my key from the lockbox and came in to meet my roommates, or at least the two who were already there.

I'm not going to go into detail about my roommates aside from to say they're all nice guys and friendly--I just don't like having roommates. The setup here is a two bedroom apartment shared between four guys. Each bedroom is set up more or less like a hotel room with two twin beds, a TV, a dresser, and for some reason no desk. The closet is bigger than any I have seen before, which doesn't make a lot of sense. Same for the bathroom. Altogether, there are more closets than I would know what to do with, even if I had all of my worldly possessions with me. Given that I have but one (albeit heavy) suitcase, the closets have gone unappreciated. The real shame is that the bedroom itself could be a bit bigger. Maybe then there would be room for a desk or two.

The apartment is fully furnished, right down to the linens on the beds and the dishes in the kitchen. That's nice, but for what we're paying, the kitchen could have had a better assortment of cooking implements. After spending a year in a fully stocked kitchen, this is definitely a step down. </rant>

Fortunately, one of my roommates has a car, so we were able to drive over to a store and buy some groceries, which pretty much brings Saturday to a close. Sunday afternoon, we all walked down to the mall across the highway (about two miles). It's an outdoor mall (Clevelanders can compare to Legacy Village), but with a bunch of apartments and offices above the stores. Essentially, they plopped a town down on the side of the highway. The mall itself is a waste of space in my opinion--a bunch of overpriced stores that I would never shop in. There was a Borders, but it's closed. I did enjoy having an afternoon that I literally had nowhere I needed to be and nothing I needed to do. Between work and projects and homework, I haven't actually had nothing to do in longer than I care to remember. I felt like I should be going somewhere, and then I remembered I had nowhere to go. It was kind of nice. I ditched my roommates (again, nothing personal, I'm just a loner) and wandered around the mall. I spent an hour or two on the phone. I had lame, overpriced chicken parmigiana. When I got back, I started reading 2010: Odyssey Two. I'm going to need more books.

I'm now tired of typing, and all I wrote was a weekend in review. I guess I'll write more tomorrow. Or in four months.