Day: October 4, 2012

Well, I never going to try that again. Christian had to work on his research project today on the Centennial Campus at NCSU. My plan was to work in the Hill Library on the main campus at NCSU and wait for him. That did not work out because, even though NCSU is on fall break, so there was no place to park. So, I decided I would run over to the Cameron Village Library. The things I learned there include the following:

• It is quite and attractive library
• You can drink coffee in the stacks (unlike the Holly Springs Library)
• The wireless is free, but not so good
• The coffee is expensive, but bad
• The environment really is not so bad if you do not need internet access
• It is not so easy to talk to the people at work in a library setting

I am going to need to avoid libraries as a regular places to work.  Early in my career, I thought work from home would be an awesome thing.  The first time I had an opportunity to work from home, I realized I am not really a work from home kind of guy.  I like to be in the same building with at least some of the people with whom I am working.  There are some limited things I can do better when I am completely isolated, but they are out-weighed by the benefits of working at work.  I think it is a personality thing.

The upshot, then, is that I will try to work from home when I cannot go to the office and I will only go to the library when I have a compelling reason like when I need some isolation for a week or so of coding.

Meanwhile, back at the NCSU career fair, Siemens gave out very impressive paper speakers and the NSA (a government agency spending OUR money) gave away very impressive red water bottles.  What does the company that really made business computing happen hand out?  Cloth shopping bags.  How weak is that.  They are trying to win the hearts of engineers with cloth shopping bags.  That would absolutely give me pause if I were looking for a job as a geek. 

Do I want to go to work with the company that either made speakers cheap enough (or was willing to spend the boat load of money) to hand them out to every engineer at a major university career fair or the company that had their HR department buy cheesy 15¢ cloth shopping bags from China?  It is a pretty sad commentary.

Day 410 of 1000

Lorena, Kelly, and I listened to the debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney last night.  Christian was too busy hacking together a new build for his Nook with a more recent Linux kernel.  I scanned a couple of the doodles from Kelly’s sketch book that she did during the debate.  She is still asleep (almost 9 AM) because it is the first day of something called Fall Break for Kelly, Christian, and Lorena.  I do not ever remember having a fall break when I was in college.  Maybe that is because I went mostly to schools with quarters while NCSU and Wake Tech both use a semester system.

I think Lorena and Kelly will hang out here most of the day, but Christian and I are going to be pretty busy.  Christian is going to run down to work with Dr. Kudenov at the Optical Sensing Lab at NCSU this afternoon.  Of course, I work, but I have a dentist appointment in the early afternoon after which I will run to the Hill Library at NCSU to do some programming for work while I wait for Christian to finish up.  I envy him the undergraduate work he is doing.  It is real science and engineering and all about discovery with a purpose.  The jury is still out, but it surely seems like he found a great project that will both teach him some tools and give him some great tools to help him in grad school.