I figure that I can’t post much of the project-specific IBM stuff due to all that privacy stuff, but a lot of stuff happened today. Lots of stuff… unfortunately the internet connection in the room here is pretty slow. Hopefully it’ll get fixed in the next couple of days.
So basically, last night I was up till 4am (yes, i’m an idiot) installing Fedora Core 3 on my new hard drive and trying to get my wireless adapter to work. Piece of advice if you’re trying to get a fairly new wireless card to work with your linux distro: use ndiswrapper. In any case, finally I got it set up, but it was late and I was too tired to try and get vnc working right. I was lucky enough earlier in the day to successfully forward the Remote Desktop port (3389) on the newly-built computer, behind my router, so I could work on it from Austin.
Inevitably, my stubbornness caught up to me. I woke up at 7am, stumbled out of bed, stared at my toothbrush for about 10 minutes until I started drooling, and then took a shower. Seriously, I’m not used to staying up late and waking up early anymore. Not a good thing, especially while you’re in the shower and you realize that in approximately 6 hours, you have to be about 1,200 miles away from your bathtub. We drove to Charlotte-Douglas, I waved goodbye to my parents, I picked up Angels and Demons and some camera batteries from a concourse shop, and boarded the plane.
Angels and Demons is a fantastic book. Of course, from what I hear it’s not as good as The Da Vinci Code, but the way Brown writes his books truly creates a movie in your head much more spectacular than anything you’ve seen on the big screen. The suspense is thrilling, enough to keep me at bay while a kid next to me was banging away “Row Your Boat” on some ridiculously annoying electronic piano thing.
I finished the first part of my trip in a very wet and muggy Atlanta, took a picture, got an iced mocha, and then boarded the next plane. This was one a lot bigger and a lot comfier. Two and a half hours feels like an eternity when you’re drugged on iced mocha and airline caffeine. I got up to page 200 in Angels and Demons and then passed out for a few. I woke up when the stewardess offered me Sun Chips. Wow… never got that before on an airplane.
I arrived in a cloudy, but pleasant Austin around 1:45 PM. I was dead; my eyes refused to open. I made my way to the baggage claim and waited. A lady stepped next to me and tapped me — “Excuse me, do you go to UNC?”. Apparently she had a daughter who was graduating next year in UNC, and she had come back from there. Small world. We had a nice conversation, and eventually she was gone. I picked up my gigantic bag and headed over to the Supershuttle ticket counter.
Supershuttle is the shit. Only $15! And the driver was friendly too. I was one of three people in the van. In a great demonstration of my “good” luck, as soon as I stepped out of the van in front of the hotel, it started pouring. The rain was incredible, and as soon as I stepped in, soaking wet, the rain stopped. Meh. I checked in, got a massive goodie bag, and headed over to my room.
The room was awesome. It was everything I expected, with an iron and ironing board. So I took a hot shower, unpacked a little, and then headed over to our welcome dinner at 5pm. Unfortunately I wasn’t there earlier for the Scavenger Hunt across Austin, so I remained quiet while they joked about stuff that happened earlier. Eventually I started getting to know them and by 7pm, I was having a pretty good time. I met some cool people, and a few pretty nerdy ones, heh.
A few alumni were there… one girl I talked to worked on a super confidential Extreme Blue project that involved developing and optimizing applications for the “Cell” processor. You might know this as the Playstation 3 chip. Pretty cool… a lot of the projects some kids were doing were really interesting… I was jealous. Unfortunately I didn’t meet anyone on my team, but I suppose i’ll do that tomorrow. For now though, I’ve unpacked and after spending a few hours here, i’ve realized that there is a certain calmness that comes with living alone — nothing can beat chilling on the couch or watching TV, or reading a good book until it gets late… which is exactly what I’m about to do.
More pictures…
