This past week I traveled to Toulouse, France, on business to receive training and discuss plans for a near-term integrated display system project. It’s essentially a display with a PC attached to it; think rugged iMac. It’s a sure bet that the system will run a flavor of Linux and utilize an embedded monitoring module for thermal management. I will be responsible for integrating the operating system, drivers, and our in-house applications, which may require modification for the project.
Our French hosts were very courteous and easy to work with. All business was conducted in English and I had no problems communicating my thoughts. Even so, it was satisfying to note my high school French coming back little by little. Every day we were treated to lunch in the Thales cafeteria several blocks removed from the BarcoView Texen site. Dinner was typically at a local restaurant of our choosing. I tried a number of interesting dishes including fondue savoyarde, magret du canard, and cassoulet, one of the local specialities.
Toulouse itself was mostly untouched by the Industrial Revolution so it managed to retain a great small town charm despite its recent growth into an industrial center and the fourth-largest metropolitan area in France. I had ample opportunity to roam the city on Saturday so I took my camera along and tried to capture some picturesque views of Toulouse. You can browse the results using the gallery link below.
The title says it all. Almost immediately after I completed my first major project at Barco, I got shifted to another project and it has been draining both my time and energy ever since–perhaps my health as well as I’m currently ill. A significant portion of our engineering resources have been allocated to meet some tight deadlines issued from our customer. My seemingly endless task has been to test our system designs against a specification and pursue any and all issues that we can identify. I can only say that it has been an increasingly frustrating experience and I can only hope that it ends on a positive note.
I have largely left my website in neglect. I have not touched the code in weeks and anyone can see that content updates are increasingly infrequent. I can only apologize and restate that I do make it my goal to increase the quality and frequency of content I place on this website.
We celebrated Cinco de Mayo in proper fashion as Frontera catered a lunch buffet for all of BarcoView. The buffet proceeded much like a Mexican-American rendition of the salad bar, with numerous ingredients available to roll your own concoctions. I constructed a couple of soft tacos and went about enjoying some excellent free cuisine. There was plenty of food for seconds, even though the vast majority of BarcoView turned out for the event.
I’ve been working at Barco for less than two months and this is the third food-related event we’ve had. We were served free ice cream a couple weeks ago and we’re due for free Subway in another couple of weeks. It’s a pleasant surprise coming from my internship, where we rarely enjoyed such company-sponsored events. If nothing else, it’s an opportunity to meet some people you otherwise wouldn’t encounter in your day to day routine.
It’s been a busy couple weeks. I had forgotten just how much time work takes out of your day. I got to enjoy my first three day weekend under Barco’s 9-80 program, which allows you to take every other Friday off in exchange for working an extra hour every Monday through Thursday. It definitely comes as a welcome break after working a couple 12+ hours in a row. We’ve been pushing to get one of our consoles out the door and I’ve been working extra hours to help with that effort. My primary responsibility is the system’s software configuration, but I try to help in other areas when I can.
I’m settled into my new apartment now, but there are still things to do and the living room isn’t completely cleared of boxes yet. In the near future I’m going to be looking for a new wireless provider as well as looking for a few small furniture pieces and upgrading my computer (it’s that time again). For reference, my new address is 607 Ivy Chase Lane, Norcross, GA 30092.
Mom informs me that I’ve been running overages on my mobile phone so it seems like a good time to shop around for a new plan and/or provider. My mobile phone is really my only phone so I tend to use it whenever I need it rather than wait for the off-peak hours. T-Mobile provides my current service, but I’m leaning toward switching to Verizon. They lead the way for cell-phone service providers in PC Magazine’s most recent Reader Satisfaction Survey. T-Mobile didn’t do too bad either, but I’m inclined to try something different at this point.
I’m looking to scrap my current tower and replace it with a small form factor (SFF) box in the near future. After living with a huge tower for a couple of years and moving it constantly, I feel that a huge case no longer meets my needs. SFFs have evolved to the point where I feel like I could make one my primary machine without compromising much. I’m looking to use Shuttle’s SN25P, which should hold an Athlon 64 CPU, 3 hard drives, 1 optical drive, 2 memory sticks, and a double-wide PCI-Express graphics card in a box that measures 320mm (12.6in) x 210mm (8.27in) x 220mm (8.66in) (L x W x H). For reference, my Lian-Li PC75 full tower measures 23.125in x 8.25in x 22.625in (L x W x H). I’m quite looking forward to putting one together.
I started working this Tuesday after accepting an offer for full-time employment with BarcoView in Duluth. It took a few days to get everything settled with my employment, but by the end of the week I had a spacious cubicle, access badge, and workstation at my disposal as I seek to come up to speed with our business. My boss and several other engineers have been working to quickly provide me with a broad view of Barco’s business and our role in the systems integration group. The biggest suprise so far has definitely been the amount of paperwork associated with the engineering process; it’s a definite change from how IT operates. It looks like my first task will be to aid a Design Verification Test (DVT) process.
There are plenty of places to eat in the immediate vicinity of work and I have already eaten at Frontera, Moe’s, Jersey Mike’s, and Wendy’s. It’s taking between 35 and 40 minutes to get to work from Smyrna, so I’m definitely looking forward to moving into our new apartment and cutting my commute time down. Titus and I eventually decided on an apartment in Norcross and we will be moving into the new apartment next weekend. Most of our utility providers will stay the same, so I just need to see about having them transferred. My parents should also be coming up to help us with the move.
I’ve spent my off hours absorbed in World of Warcraft and working on reworking my blog to better fit the object-oriented programming paradigm. I flirted briefly with a full migration to PHP5, as well, but I eventually decided that the new classes and objects didn’t really gain me as much as I had hoped. I’ll likely wait until my hosting provider decides to offer PHP5 before switching.
