A new Job

There have been a lot of things going on, and I haven't been updating this blog often enough. However, there is some good news: I finally got a job. Starting tomorrow, I'm an employee of West-Chester based Ionx. They're a very young little company (started in April) and doing some cool sensor-related stuff for rail cars. My job title is "Software Engineer", and I'm probably going to be doing some low-level programming/debugging/configuring work on the new sensor doodads they're developing.

The job seemed to be a pretty good fit for my background and skillset. There's going to be some C and assembly-level debugging and code work (which I consider to be my forte), but there is also going to be some higher-level scripting work for various controllers and sensors. Again, I don't know all the details (and even when I do, I likely won't be at liberty to talk about them here), so Monday will be a big learning experience.

Of course, this is going to cut into my time to work on Parrot, and I was hoping I would be a lot further along in that project before I got a "real job". But progress has been slow (and grueling), so I haven't hit the milestones I was hoping for. This is not the end, however, I do intend to continue my work on Parrot during the evenings, and I intend to be an active contributor there long after the summer has ended.

Dana and I went out shopping this weekend, and I bought a whole smattering of "business casual" clothes in anticipation. I don't even know really what "business casual" is, but at least now I have plenty of options to choose from. It's my experience that most engineers don't seem to conform to a strict dress code, but things are also very different at different companies. The people at the MathWorks were generally better-dressed (from what little I saw) then those at Agilent, for instance. Of course, who knows what I saw or how accurate a depiction that is.

I'll probably post again tomorrow after my first day is over.