Second day at Cray

To say my second day went perfectly would be an overstatement. To say today was as stressful as yesterday, fortunately would also be an overstatement.

Today, in fact, was much better than yesterday. For starters, I got to sleep in, and not show up at the office until 9 a.m. And while there were cars on the road (as opposed to middle of the night non-traffic I encountered yesterday morning), I once again missed rush hour.

The highlights of today were:

- my Linux login credentials actually worked today! But no one’s bothered to tell me my Windows/email un/pw, so I still can’t check email. Nor could I set up my voicemail (no one’s told me what that ID is supposed to be, either). There’s great irony in all this, because I had more than a few moments of annoyance at MA when teachers had issues similar to what I’m experiencing right now. Neither Cray nor MA has great, or any, documentation for newcomers. I’m pondering what I can do to fix this.

- talking with Carl briefly, then reading some wiki pages about Cray’s scheduler application and it’s proprietary language for interacting with 3rd party batch systems. (or something like that - if that didn’t make any sense to you, it’s okay, because it doesn’t make very much sense to me [yet], either)

- lunch with my friend Ben, and his Cray friends.

- meeting Wendy, and talking with her for almost an hour. Wendy is a sysadmin, one of the folks I’ll be working with, and possibly taking some of their responsibilities on myself to free up their time. She’s been at Cray for 10+ years, and is a very very smart woman. On top of that, though, she was also very personable, and, like Carl, makes me feel at ease.

- reading chapter 1 of “Learning Perl”, about a programming language I need to learn for the sysadmin side of things. (so I’m told)

- Ben stopped by my desk, we went and sat overlooking the park outside, and talked about Cray, my experiences so far, his experiences, advice, wisdom, and so on.


After work, my parents hosted me for dinner. A three-fold occasion:

1) Grandpa’s birthday would have been yesterday.
2) Today, 27 years ago, is when Mom and Dad found out I was on the way.
3) To celebrate my first two days at Cray.

I wish I could have spent more time with them, maybe watched another Smothers Brothers or Carol Burnette episode like we did for Easter.

Instead, I left their house and went to Minnehaha to set up a new server at South Campus, and patch a bug in a web app. Which made for a very long work day.

On the plus side, I’m now done with the large extras casting project from this weekend (100 people Sunday, 40 Monday, 20 for tonight), and the client, as far as I know, is happy. Huge relief to have that off my plate. And by that I mean, I’m looking forward to the next time, I learned so many lessons on what to do better/more efficiently, but with starting the new job this week, having less on my plate is a much needed gift.