decidedlyodd

Today was what I’d call my first real day at my new job.

The morning was filled with more presentations. Unfortunately, I had a much harder time dealing with them today compared to yesterday. I don’t know if that’s because they were less interesting, less relevant or if I was just getting tired of sitting through talks. All told, it was probably a combination of the three. One presentation on legal issues was particularly painful. One question from the audience concerned the length of copyright. I mean seriously, why does anybody in the room need to know that? Like I said, I think my patience for long-winded presentations was wearing thin.

I got out at noon and walked over to meet my team and direct supervisor. I decided to walk across the campus because the day was so nice outside. It was crisp and sunny. On the way there, I noticed that you can see the cascades with their snow-capped peaks framed by the evergreens from the campus. Absolutely breathtaking. Upon arrival, we started getting one of my computers (I have two, how fancy) set up and then headed to lunch at the cafeteria. After lunch, we went back up stairs and resumed the install. I then met my peer mentor, who is a guy in my group who’s been with the company for about 5 years. He introduced me around to the other developers before we went to the weekly group meeting where I had to do the whole “I’m new, this is where I’m from, this is what I’m going to be doing here” spiel which was relatively painless. Apparently, I’ll only have two regular weekly meetings: this one and one with my supervisor. That should give me a lot of flexibility wrt schedule.

After the meeting, my mentor and my boss’s boss introduced me to several other people I’ll be periodically working with who perform different roles on the same project (testing and program management). Then I really just spent the rest of the day trying to get my workstations set up, doing some reading on how things work in my team, dealt with this weird email/Exchange problem I was having and filled out the online paperwork to get my benefits started. It was kind of a long day with me not leaving until about 7:30pm (I got there at 9am). Still, the bus ride home was pretty quick due to the limited traffic.

After stopping quickly at home to drop things off, I drove out to Ikea in Renton. I didn’t end up buying anything, although I was generally impressed by what they had in stock. I found a futon that seemed pretty decent that would fit in my car (assembly required–this is Ikea we’re talking about). They had some nice beds too, although I think I’d buy a matress elsewhere (horrible memories of Ikea matresses in Germany make my back hurt).

Tomorrow, I have to move out of the furnished unit and into my apartment. I was up there this evening and everything appears to be finished now. Unfortunately, I have no furniture at this point. More unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll really have time tomorrow to look for some. Most people on the team work late on Wednesday nights, so I probably will be too tomorrow. I guess there’s always the weekends to brave the crowds. While unpacking my car, I realized I have my sleeping bag and pad. Not ideal, but I can take one or two nights of that I think. Then I can move onto the futon until I get a real bed. The work schedule looks like I should be able to work things around furniture delivery.

The other big thing I still need to do is get broadband installed in my apartment. I’m leaning towards getting the Speakeasy phone-less DSL. It’s more expensive than with Qwest (local phone monopoly) or Comcast (local cable monopoly), but less restrictive. I probably call tomorrow and see what the wait time for installation looks like. They’d need to send out a technician to test the line and what not though, so who knows how quickly I might be up and running. Because of that, my internet access may be somewhat more limited for a while. That of course will probably mean less frequent blogging.