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.