Alright first things first. New site design. Not great, but not as shabby as before, eh? Decided to make my blog the center of the site. There will soon be a photoblog here. All sorts of pictures will go up once I can figure out how to circumvent some weird filesize upload limitations.
The most exciting news of all is a move to a new apartment! Katie and I will be moving over to downtown Mountain View. Found a nice spacious (read: HUGE) apartment, especially compared to our current setup. It’s literally TWICE the square footage, plus it has a nice big balcony. We started the lease a few days ago and will gradually shift over in the course of a month while Katie finishes up school. We still have so much furniture to put together (go IKEA) so it will be sometime before the place is fully presentable and we’ll be inviting guests over =)
The other big piece of news is that I’m switching projects from working on Space-Based Radar (SBR) to the Airborne Laser Program (ABL). The website is a little out of date, but it’s still got some basic info. I’ll be working in the Real Time Systems group, which is responsible for the OS that controls the laser… yes, the “laser”…
Anyway, I’m pretty psych’d for the work, mostly because it’s all operating systems stuff, which was what I loved most in doing CS @ Stanford. It’s really challenging, cutting edge work (read: 100 microsecond control loops) that they’re doing with a real megawatt laser. The change in project requires a new location, so I packed up all my stuff today in preparation of the move. I also need to apply for a higher level of security clearance, which should be nice to have. It will open the door to other interesting projects down the road. Some of you will be contacted as a result, and odds are if I asked to put you down for my DoD Secret clearance, they will definitely contact you this time around.
Kudos to my hiring manager for getting my situated with this phatty job.
Hmm, what else is new… quick tidbits… 5+ hours of shopping at IKEA, my SCSI hard drive dying for the second time in 2 months requiring another RMA, serious contemplation about buying a new computer only to hold off yet AGAIN but this time only until late March/early April for the AMD Socket 939 systems, skipping the orkut party (sorry ryan!), hooray for tax refunds, shopping around for wireless routers and such.
I’ll post a long rant about the state of hardware sometime in the next day or two. My odyssey into refreshing myself on computer hardware the past few weeks has shown me just how out of touch I have become in the past 4+ years, plus how fragmented the market is (aka: Too many fucking Socket types).
Life is pretty good right now. My back is healing up but I think I’m going to go back for another injection soon to help me get through this moving-in period as we setup our new apartment. Can’t complain about much besides the usual wish-i-had-more-money-than-i-can-dream-of-so-i-can-drive-a-superfast-supernice-car stuff. More coming… more often and sooner than you think!
(PS: If you want to design the logo for my site that should be at the top of this page, do it and tell me. I’ll put it up. Seriously.)