First Quarter Summer Update

2010.06.13 in personal and qualcomm

Work

If I'm counting correctly, I just finished the first quarter of my summer internship! Both Qualcomm and San Diego have treated me quite well so far — my team (the QChat client team) is awesome, the weather's been beautiful, and there's lots to do.

I won't talk about what actually goes on at work, since it seems like nearly nothing we do is public at the moment (likely intentionally), but about work itself instead.

Right now, I get up at 7:15, shower, eat, etc., and leave my apartment at 8:10 or so. I get to walk about two miles along — among others — the very busy Genesee Ave. to building AA; I get there right around 9:00, depending a lot on how quickly crosswalks turn in my favor — sometimes they turn instantly, sometimes it takes well over a minute.

We have a daily status meeting at 10:30, where the 12-or-so of us meet and go through a list of in-progress work, talking about what work has been done. Pretty standard stuff.

I'm — someday — going to get a laptop; at the moment, I run back and forth between my office and the lab quite frequently (there are computers to use in the lab, but my development environment is on a VM, and RDP seems much faster from my thin client, for some reason — also, the display in my office is much, much bigger). In theory, the laptop is coming on Monday... we'll see! Then I'll get to cease this laggy RDPing and hang out in the lab with everyone permanently... poor them!

I usually leave at 17:00 or 17:30, or 18:15 one day. Luckily, there's a bus on the way home, so I get to skip a good part of the walk in that direction. I tend to call Carol for the part of the walk before I get on the bus, and call home after I get off; a nice daily routine.

Not-work

There's usually not a great deal of not-work during the week, as it's usually almost 19:00 by the time I get home; just time enough to read the news, make and eat dinner, watch an episode of something (I'm currently making my way through Mad Men), and go to sleep (usually by 22:00 or 22:30 or so).

The weekends are a different story. I don't really seem to associate with the other interns — I don't work with them (in fact, I work five miles away from most of them), and I'm not forced into non-work-related interactions with them like I was during freshman year (when I met all of my friends at school), so I really just don't see them. That's OK with me, there's enough to do here anyway!

I've got an org-mode file (somewhat unfaithfully (where'd my newlines go!?) rendered to HTML here) filled with trip ideas from a reddit thread. I've been going through them slowly, and everything I've done so far has been excellent! There are lots of pictures, as always, on Flickr.

Next weekend I'm going to refrain from exploring San Diego, because I'm going home! I'm leaving early in the morning on Friday, and coming back late on Sunday. It's going to be a whirlwind trip across the country so that I can be home for Amy's high-school graduation! Should be fun, though... I'll write more about it as the time comes. I'm quite tempted to just sling my camera over my shoulder and take nothing else on the trip — I've got clothes at home, and won't have time to need a computer other than my phone. We'll see. I also get to figure out how to get to the airport at 5AM... that'll be a trick!

Other Stuff

I'm quite excited because Nate, Carol, and I are going to see Belle and Sebastian in NYC (outdoors, at Brooklyn's Williamsburg Waterfront) in September! It's far too far away, though... should be fun :-)