Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Third day at Cray

The daily blog probably won't continue much longer, but I'm mostly doing this for myself, so in a few weeks/months/years I can look back and remember how terribly terrified I felt on my first day. (hyperbole).

Day 3 started slightly after 8 a.m., meeting Wendy to watch her boot a Cray, ask questions, and, mysteriously, start to feel like I might actually be beginning to understand some of this terminology.

Or maybe that was just gastrointestinal distress. Hard to distinguish sometimes.

Jason brought over a ridiculously thick user manual for me to dive into (light bedtime reading... or rather, reading that might cause bedtime), and we arranged that I'd meet him tomorrow at 6 a.m., when I'd actually sit in the driver's seat to install an update and boot a Cray. Eeek!

I did joke, however, after Wendy's repeated reminders that she wasn't expecting me to remember all these details, that I was ready to take the written test. I mean, not really, but I'm sorta catching on. Sort of. I feel pretty confident I could draw you a picture of how the Cray's nodes are connected, and which nodes do what.

The rest of the day, I:

- finally got my Windows account password reset so I could log into my email
- got my underground parking permit figured out... mostly
- debugged my Perl code from yesterday
- had lunch with Ben
- talked with Carl for a while about 1984, Cray, church and God, and who knows what else
- got a personal webspace set up so I can play around with a site Carl maintains
- met with Blaine (boss) and he assigned me a web project!!!! to mockup an interface for some other managers

Then I mowed the lawn and finished an audio book (A Monster Calls). I hate mowing the lawn, but having something productive to do made it more tolerable.

Now I think it's time for dinner and Netflix.

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