Today's workplace is not one my father would recognize.
We got email today from our global security director. Briefly, it said that, yes, our site in Mumbai had reopened; no, no one from our company was injured in last week's terrorist attacks; yes, one employee did need to be “evacuated” from the Taj Hotel. We were also advised not to plan trips to India unless absolutely necessary and that we had engaged the services of International SOS Assistance (ISOS) to help “mitigate” the risks of international travel: “If you travel on business, you are encouraged to sign-up with ISOS to receive timely security updates during your travel.”
WTF? What a long, strange trip it's been (props to the Grateful Dead).
Quite apart from the fact that my father's workplace did not have email and other gee-whiz technologies, I cannot imagine that he or any of his peers could conceive ever receiving a corporate communique of that nature. Indeed, I could scarcely comprehend it myself before September 11, 2001 cast its long, baleful shadow over everything. The really sad, pathetic part of this story is that I read that email with nary a hint of surprise or shock.
Terrorism is or has become just another business risk, something to be managed and mitigated. That is, it is business as usual.
Posted by Kurt Wall at 20:51 2008-12-01 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Perl is Like a Camel (Work)
I've been refreshing my Perl skillz ahead of an intermediate level Perl course I'm taking at work in December. Perl is ugly code, but darned effective. On the topic of Perl's aesthetic deficiencies, I ran across this quote in the Llama book:
Camels are kind of ugly, too. but they work hard, even in tough conditions. Camels get the job done despite all difficulties even when they look bad and smell worse and sometimes spit at you. Perl is a little like that (Learning Perl, 4th Edition, p. 5).I couldn't say it any better.
Posted by Kurt Wall at 20:00 2008-11-22 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Layoffs (Work)
I've been down this road before with other companies. I'm not panicking yet, if only because I made it through round 1. If we show a profit after this quarter, round 2 might not occur. It's the first layoff in NVIDIA's history (13 years), so I'm not prepared to pronounce doom and gloom, yet. That won't keep me from freshening up my resumè, however.
Posted by Kurt Wall at 08:12 2008-09-20 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Fearless Leader (Work)
I work for NVIDIA. Our
Fearless Leader CEO is Jensen Huang. A while back,
NVIDIA was featured as Forbes
Magazine's Most Excellent Company in the Galaxy, or some
such. That issue's cover included a photograph of Jensen wielding
a plastic ray gun of some sort against an alien. Shortly thereafter,
a few life-sized posters of Jensen based on that cover photo appeared
in various NVIDIA buildings.
The folks in my building couldn't leave well enough alone. Bless their twisted, witty hearts. I'm glad Jensen doesn't take himself too seriously.
Posted by Kurt Wall at 23:33 2008-06-12 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Back to Work (Work)
Actually, I've been back to work since March 31st. It's been a hectic two weeks.
In addition to the standard fare, such as filing bugs against test regressions and dealing with incoming customer bugs, Lonni and I have had to deal with some vexing issues in the test harness. In the first place, we've had at least two PSUs go south, which introduce hard-to-diagnose test failures. Then there are the outright system failures, which require fairly quick replacement if we are to avoid downtime for the test harness.
There was also some display driver breakage that required chicken blood, toad piss, registry hackage, and wholesale file deletion to "fix." Rather, to workaround. Even the engineers couldn't sort it out, so the final workaround was disabling 3-D acceleration on the desktop.
Perhaps most frustrating was dealing with, um, less-than-clueful "QA" members from other groups and the complete morons from marketing and sales. I'm not the brightest bulb in the light fixture, but some of these folks make me look brilliant.
The highlight of this week was the apparent midnight requisition of
some storage shelves for Lonni to use. It was funny to see Ian, Lonni,
and me tag-teaming an ungainly, heavy set of metal shelves from one
building to the next. But at least Lonni has additional storage for
all of the assorted hardware and peripherals that has, until yesterday,
been sitting along the windows next to his row in the cubicle farm.
Posted by Kurt Wall
at 08:36 2008-04-12
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Recruiters
(Work)
When it rains, it pours. I go through periods where recruiters are coming out of the woodwork to contact me. Today's events suggest just such a spell might be starting.
First, someone named Joy from Eclectic Consulting (or Eclectic Recruiting, I wasn't paying enough attention) called me at my desk to see if I was interested in a storage support position. No, I'm not. Do I know anyone who might be interested? No, I don't.
To her credit, unlike a certain class of slime-ball headhunters, she fully identified herself, stated for whom she was working, and explained she realized she was calling me at work. I still wasn't interested, but I respected her candor. What I didn't like about the situation was that she was called me at work and that the call was unsolicited. I sent a note to my manager about it.
When I got home, I had email from a recruiting firm with whom I had previously worked. Was I interested in yet another position in storage system support. I haven't responded yet, but I will. The answer is a firm, emphatic, "No." I learned a lot at Panasas. In the present context, the relevant insight is that storage is interesting, but technical support, even two levels removed from immediate customer contact, isn't for me. It doesn't play to my strengths and I haven't the personality for it.
So, The Night of the Living Dead Recruiter is upon me once again. Like a kidney stone, this, too, shall pass.
Posted by Kurt Wall at 16:47 2008-02-25 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Kickin' My Butt (Work)
Last week kicked my butt. Lonni was out of the office, traipsing around the southern California desert on a well-deserved vacation, so I was holding up the test harness at work.
In short, the test harness fell on me. I came in Monday morning to a mostly red test matrix. So much had failed I hardly knew where to start. I regressed some of the easier failures, but by the time I'd finished that and after several interrupts, the next nightly run had started. Tuesday morning was worse than Monday. By Wednesday, I started practicing, "Would you like fries with your order?" Meanwhile, I had installed on OS update on the wrong machine, which caused almost complete test failure for a pending beta release. So, after installing the OS update in the right place, I ran the tests manually, they passed, and the beta went out the door. About 12 hours later than it should have. Sigh.
By Wednesday, I'd identified a couple of significant breakages, just in time for the source tree to get locked against updates. Fewer things broke overnight, so Thursday's test results weren't quite so depressing, but with the source tree locked, no fixes were getting in. By Friday, I was pretty much toast. I'd worked until 7:00 p.m. three nights then came home and worked from 9:00-ish until after midnight. I'd love to say that I had a lot of work to do, and that would be true, but it was really more about not being good enough yet at my job to work as efficiently as I'd like, so I had to trade efficiency for long hours.
Butt-kicking aside, the week wasn't a total loss. The test matrix was mostly green by Friday. More importantly, I was able to identify what I didn't know, didn't understand, and wasn't sure how to do, so I at least had a set of questions to ask Tuesday morning. The other thing I realized is that I need to spend more time learning how to do my job, which compelled me to cancel my plans to attend a training class—for the time being, I think my time is better spent becoming at least half as effective as Lonni rather than enhancing my Perl chops.
I'm glad the week is over and glad that Lonni will be back in the office Tuesday. He might beat me with The Bone™, but at least I have learned something. Oh, and I now totally grok why he needed help.
Posted by Kurt Wall at 12:31 2008-02-17 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Banks and New Accounts (Work)
Ugh!
I got my first paycheck yesterday from my new job. It was real, honest-to-goodness paycheck, not a directly deposited electronic marvel. You remember paper paychecks? I do. I also remember what a PITA they can be. Case in point…
I took my freshly issued paycheck to my bank, where I opened checking and savings accounts last week so I would have the ability to conduct my financial affairs, endorsed the check, scribbled an amount on the Cash Back, Pretty Please line, and approached the teller. No love on the cash-back-pretty-please operation because my account is new and a they place a seven-day hold on checks deposited into new accounts. Aargh!
I explain that this won't do because I have bills to pay (rent, house payment, car insurance, a credit card bill to this bank, "child" support, and so forth). Teller fetches a manager. Mr. Manager says my options are to cash the check at the issuing bank and deposit cash or they can process the deposit, make a photocopy of the check, and contact the issuing bank Monday to verify funds, and then release the hold.
I considered cashing the check but wasn't sure where I'd find a branch of the issuing bank (Wells Fargo) and if the one I found would still be open this late in the day (it was approaching 6:00 p.m.). So, I opted to process the deposit and let Mr. Manager verify the funds. It was frustrating, to say the least, but I handled it well (which means I didn't curse or raise my voice or impugn anyone's parentage).
I've been writing "Mr. Manager" so I should be clear I'm not ridiculing him—he was working within the boundaries of his responsibilities. He gave me his card and emphasized that I call him before noon on Monday. He can count on that.
Meanwhile, I wrote bills this morning and mailed them. I still had cash in the account, so I used my ATM card and life was good. My ex-wife will not enjoy having to wait until Tuesday to get her "child" support check, but I didn't have a lot of options. Everything else should be copacetic.
It was still nice to get paid. I could have done without the bureaucratic hassle.
Posted by Kurt Wall at 17:54 2007-12-01 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Fan? Check! Network? Nope! (Work)
...the replacement chipset fan works, the machine booted, but it doesn't want to talk to other machines on the network. :-\
One of my tasks today was to replace a non-functioning motherboard chipset fan. I waited until the end of the day, shut down the box, removed the mobo, and replaced the fan. The fan works fine. After the machine booted, there was no video—turned out I'd missed reconnecting one of the power cables for the PCI Express-based graphics adapter. Fixed that. Started the box. No network. I've got link activity, but the box is not reachable over the network, obstinately refuses to respond to ping, and declines to mount NFS exports during boot. Scrud. I gave up at 7:00 p.m., had dinner, and came home.
I detest leaving loose ends like that, especially when the box is used by other people, but I'd been at work since 7:45 and had had enough for one day.
More generally, I spent a good portion of the day trying to get my head back into the work habit. I'm surprised at how quickly I got out "work mode." It's even a little distressing because I'm accustomed to hitting the door and getting down to work; yesterday was a lost cause due to orientation, so I had high hopes for productivity today. No joy. Instead of a surge of task-oriented work, I seemed to move forward in fits and starts. I hope Lonni isn't ready to hurl me to the curb.
Seriously, I should be able to get down to some serious business tomorrow. And today wasn't a total loss; I did establish that I could build debug and release versions of the CUDA libs and apps and I'm also getting my computing environment squared away. But, this is not the blazing, accomplishment-laden start for which I was hoping. Grmph!
Posted by Kurt Wall at 22:15 2007-11-13 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Day 1 (Work)
Today was my first day on my new job at NVIDIA. Not a bad first day, as first days go.
Orientation ran from 8:30 a.m. (well, 8:45 a.m.) to approximately 2:45, followed by a very short tour of the campus and about 45 minutes spent waiting to run 18 people through the badging process. Lonni walked me to my desk at 3:30, introduced me to the rest of the team (no, I don't remember anyone's name, save for Lonnie's and my own), showed me to my cubicle, and cut me loose. I spent the balance of the afternoon, until about 6:30 p.m., setting up my computers, installing Linux on one of them, going over my email, and prioritizing tomorrow's work.
Real work begins tomorrow. I greatly appreciate Lonni helping me get the job by recommending me to our boss. The task now is to demonstrate to him and to our manager that they made a good decision offering me the job. Oh, my job title is "GPGPU QA Engineer," which is another way of calling me a "tester."
Today was also my first official commute in Silicon Valley's rush hour.
Fortunately, I'm only 20 minutes away from NVIDIA even with heavy traffic
on the 101, so the commute is vastly better than what I dealt with in
Pittsburgh, which involved 45 minutes to an hour crawling up Route 51. Going
in this morning wasn't bad; traffic was backed up merging from 87 North onto
the 101 North, but it picked up the pace pretty quickly after that and the
San Tomas Expressway was a breeze. Coming home, again, the slowest going
was getting from San Tomas onto the 101 South. After that, the ride was
smooth and uneventful. I could get used to such easy commutes…p>
Posted by Kurt Wall
at 21:20 2007-11-12
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