First week and Thanksgiving

Back again,

Well here we are on Black Friday, that soul sucking shopping day from the blackest pits of hell, and I am enjoying the four-day weekend even though it's pretty boring and cold here. So on the day that stores have been open since the wee hours, I will spend some time in my comfortable, yet exceedingly bare abode and give an update on the first week of work and Thanksgiving with the boss. At the end, I have a service announcement for all the Starcraft players out there.

Work on Monday started really slow, they never set up my computer equipment and never got the request even though it was processed on the previous Thursday after I had registered with Boeing. So for most of Monday, I was spending time going over procedures and reading power point presentations about the corporate structure. While there is something more fast paced and maybe exciting about doing research for a professor or private industry, the job security and myriad of career paths afforded by the largest corporation in the country is not only impressive but maybe a smidgen over compensating. The other thing I spent most of Monday doing was meeting the other members of the software requirements team. Well I wouldn't say I met them so much as they met me. By this of course I mean that there are about 20-25 of them and only one of me, and for those who know me you know that I am horrible with remembering names especially when they are clumped together so and the people are busy doing their own work. I did discover that there are many baseball fans in the group so I will have plenty of opportunities to mesh and talk sports. Sadly one of them is a Mets fan and well I feel sorry for him. On the other side, my boss is a such a big fan his goal is to visit every Major and Minor league baseball stadium in the country. He even has a map of this in his basement proving he has gone to about half of them.

Tuesday was spent doing much of the same, going to meetings to see procedures getting set up with the Boeing website, though it's very complicated and most of it was inactive until today for things like direct deposit and health benefits... so I dunno what's gonna happen there. The other thing I spent time doing was visiting the V-22 manufacturing plant and visiting the testing labs. The plant is pretty spiffy, but for those who went through the Aeronautical Engineering school at UC Davis, you will remember the trip you took to the Pratt-Whitney manufacturing plant down by the SF airport. The production lines and general layout of that production plant is almost identical to the V-22 plant. The big difference is that the V-22 airframe and most of the software is loaded here in Pennsylvania and then it is shipped to Amirrilo to add the rotors and nacelles. Unfortunately this means that there are rarely any V-22 sitings here where most of the software is maintained. Kinda sucks since I will probably never get to see the helicopter fully complete but I can with the other planes made here so that's kinda cool. The other thing I learned on Tuesday was that even though I have four degrees, realistically I will never use any of that knowledge except when error/sanity checking the code results I will eventually be writing. This kinda sucks, because I went to school to actually build/design aircraft and instead am writing the software code to support it, however being able to see the internal workings of the aircraft and test it is pretty cool. Since I am allowed to apply for a PhD program in a year, I may get a degree in Aeronautical or Controls or maybe software engineering and eventually teach or move back to the West Coast and be an aircraft designer. The other option of course is to get into Phantom Works and work on special projects. Note for any outside company readers, this isn't divulging anything, as everyone remembers Skunk Works, in fact Kelly Johnson is one of my heroes of aircraft design because the SR-71 is my favorite aircraft of all time.  On a wrap up, still no computer or phone nor access to the time keeping system to log my hours and set up the company benefits.

When Wednesday came around, most of the employees either left early or were just on vacation since the next day was Thanksgiving. Basically today was a day spent doing online training of absolutely stupid and ridiculous tests. Since they gave us ethics, protection, and general knowledge talks in orientation AND because 90% of this information is based on common sense, these tests are beyond redundant. Although, I suppose due to the volume of computer losses and private information surrounding such a company, it makes sense to have people reminded of these things. After spending a few hours with these trainings and having lunch with some friends from orientation my day was spent in the lab again just going over basic procedures. I think the idea from my bosses was to spend time just learning HOW they do things before I'm given tasks to do alone. In fact, while in the lab I was told by those people who will probably be in charge of me directly that they took a month or more to finally be able to go to the lab and test things by themselves. It also took many of them an extremely long time to understand remote terminal connections, which I figured out in about 20 seconds (special thanks goes out to Zachary Graham on that one for drilling such things into me!). So I guess I am not a total noob in life. On an ending note, my computer was found across the room due to a maintenance error and was finally installed, though with the wrong software, about 5 minutes before I left for the day.

This brings me to Thanksgiving. On Monday my boss invited me to his house for Thanksgiving after realizing I have lived in this state for about 15 days now and don't know a soul outside of work. So when I woke up early on Thursday and looked outside it was snowing, lightly but it was. I was like: well shit this is gonna be a long day. Fortunately, by the time I left for the 50 minute drive the snow stopped and it was just raining. Rain I can deal with, especially since it wasn't too cold outside. At the house, which is really nice although quite far from work, there were tons of appetizers before dinner. All of the food was quite tasty, though I didn't go crazy with it, because well it's my boss's house with much of his family present. I did learn a lot about what Pennsylvania is like in terms of weather and I got to talk about what CA is like for those who have never been. I can tell that they are infinitely more jealous of me than I am of them in terms of living locations. So after copious amounts of food, I headed for home needed gas along the way. The drive kinda sucked because it was on dark, narrow roads and raining so I was kinda nervous, but survived. I don't know about this state, everything is so dark unlike CA when you have street lights every 200 feet or so by law. Anyway, after that I just came home, went to bed, and am just going to stay in and do housework all weekend. This included of course trying to set up the Boeing stuff that I finally have access to. Otherwise I have nothing else major to report. I will update next week once I get some real work in.


As an announcement for all those Starcraft players, while you could spend your time watching the matched from Dreamhack on Day[9]'s website, I am trying to set up a new version of my Starcraft 1 weekend tournament. For those who don't know, I used to have 6-10 people doing lan matches in a mini tournament that had live casting via an observer in another room. I would like to do that again with Starcraft II with as many people as I can. I already have a bracket system and rules in place, though they are modular, but I would like to actually cast the last best of 3 matchup and post it to youtube as well as the SLAMCLAN site assuming that can be set up.

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT IF INTERESTED SO I CAN START THIS NEXT WEEK!