Will I lose my dignity? Will you still care?

So I’ve moved hosts, but this post isn’t about the website, it’s about the real world.

I’ve notified everyone who should be already, so I can finally post about it on the blog.  I’ve accepted a job offer with Genesi USA and so I will be moving from Tulsa, Oklahoma to beautiful San Antonio, Texas.

I’m going to be a Senior Software Engineer there.  I really can’t begin to describe just how incredible the offer is to me.  I guess it can best be summed up as, I’m going to get to work on what I’d normally do anyway, but with the added bonus of getting paid to do it.  Plus, the toys, oh the toys.  Getting to “play” with the smartbook, nettop, and eventually tablet, and what ever else down the line… kid in a candy store

Well, today was my last day in San Antonio for a bit. Matt and I worked hard on getting the merge kernel working on the smarttop, although we’re currently still getting errors, we’ve got more debugging info being printed, which helps out quite a bit to figure out what is going on.

R&B brought me a Freescale shirt which is really nice. I like wearing polo shirts, they are just as comfortable as tshirts, and look just a little bit better, even when wearing jeans. Apparently the meeting with Freescale when really well with them showing off the 3G Smartbook.

Mauricio and Denise gave me a ride to the airport. Said goodbye to them as well as Matt who accompanied us to the airport. I gave him the groceries from my room so they weren’t wasted. Wish I had brought a bigger bag with me though, everything was very tightly packed in my bag.

While waiting to get a drink, one of the San Antonio police in the airport asked me questions about my Efika MX smartbook since I was holding it. I let him play with it for a little bit and he really liked it. That was very cool. Seeing people’s reactions to the machine always makes me smile. He commented that he liked how light it was. I’m happy with the battery life myself. While I turned it off before most flights, I unplugged from an outlet at 4:30pm. I would turn it on and use it during the flight, then just close the lid while I was walking through the airports. At around 8:30pm, I started compiling xorg-server and all of its dependencies. I figured okay, this will really stress the system and cause it to draw a lot of power. I didn’t even get a low battery notification (the led on the power button starts blinking orange) until around 1:15am and I finally plugged it in at 1:20am. Mostly because I wanted to be sure that the xorg+friends compile didn’t get cut off. Love it.

So, I am home, and it is somewhat nice, but it was cold when I got home. It is currently around 35F out (somewhere around 2c) and I’m really missing San Antonio. I want it to be warmer.

One thing that I really notice now that I’m home… my computers are freaking loud. I mean okay sure they are “powerful” desktops with “modern graphics cards” but eesh. I miss the quiet Genesi office. Nice having 10 machines going and hearing the carbonation in soda as the only noise.

I really want to post some other news, but it won’t be until at least Monday or Tuesday before I do. Some of my posts over the past week have been hinting at things, and some of my blog posts feel incomplete because I’m not just throwing it all out there.

I do want to say a HUGE thank you to everyone on the Genesi team for making me feel welcome as well as inviting me down to San Antonio. I had a really great time, and look forward to seeing them again in the future!

So I didn’t write a post about yesterday, I ended up getting tired while writing it up, and just leaving it. This morning instead of continuing it, I modified it, but didn’t post. It is still sitting in my drafts. This one will have to suffice.

Yesterday, got a bit of kernel work done, unfortunately, the merge kernel testing didn’t go so well. We should have framebuffer but for some reason it is lowering the resolution and then failing to reinit. We did some juggling around of servers, and some re-racking. Sun rails are really nice.

Had dinner at a place that I can’t recall the exact name of, but it was something like Cafe de Artistes. Really amazing food. I had a fillet mignon which was absolutely delicious. And I also had their stuffed quail. I’d never had quail before, and since the dinner was being paid for, I wasn’t entirely sure about ordering it. When someone takes me out to eat, I prefer to stick to something I know I like, that way I don’t order something and since I may not like it (not that it isn’t good, just that it isn’t good to me!) I’m always a little apprehensive about ordering it. I’m glad it was ordered though, as it was also very delicious. Compliments to the chef.

Today… well, I slept in a bit, which was nice, although I had actually wanted to get an early start. Then again, I do tend to stay up later and work, the quiet is really nice. Speaking of which, this is something I meant to mention earlier, but forgot to. So, it is currently 3am. I’m in a decently sized room right now. There are 5 Efika MX smartbooks running. There are 2 EfikaMX smarttops running. The only thing I can hear, is Matt’s Sony laptop, and my can of Mountain Dew Throwback. I love it. I’m so used to machines being loud (our servers in Oklahoma sound like jet engines!), that this peace and quiet is nice. Another one of my favorite things to do, is to grab the ClearSpot 3G access point, and take it outside onto the picnic table, and just work from there. Since I get 7 hours of battery life from the 3 cell battery.

Speaking of which, although I don’t have the power to resolve a bug as fixed, I did fix one today. The EDID information from the LCD screens is reporting incorrect numbers, and so we have to work around it. One of the numbers was off, so I changed it. Fix will be committed in the morning. I also got to test the Efika MX 3G smartbook. Even better than carrying around a ClearSpot 3G access point, is just popping your SIM card in to the SIM card slot (it is on the back of the machine, behind the battery, so it can’t fall out!) and then telling NetworkManager the correct information to use, and there has been a lot of work done on the scripts to recognize a majority of service provider’s networks.

I was left to my own devices today (see what I did there? ) and since they brought us sandwiches earlier in the day, I didn’t actually go anywhere for dinner. I just had the sandwich (roast beef with white cheddar.) And I had some bananas.

Things for the future:

I need to organize a Debian Sprint, here at UIW, hopefully we can get some developers from all over the world to come, as I enjoy hearing about the different cultures.

More kernel testing and hacking.

Answering some questions for an article about the Efika MX smartbook.

I also need to log in to the IMX Community website ( www.imxcommunity.org Come join the community!) and see what people are up to on there. There are always really awesome projects that people are doing that don’t seem to get enough exposure.

Help make sure things are ready for the meeting with Freescale on Friday.

Also, check this out, Android running on the Efika MX smarttop!

Woke up early, which was kind of refreshing, this post is going up around 2:30am though, so I’ll be giving Konstantinos the key to the Technology Center since I may oversleep, hopefully that doesn’t happen though.

Let’s see, what all went on today, there were a couple different conference calls, one with Michael, in Sweden(? I’m not sure where he was, but it was somewhere in Europe) this one had video, he has been working hard on getting u-boot into the shape that it needs to be to upstream all the EfikaMX bits. I haven’t had a chance to look at it, not that I know much about boot loaders.

One with Sandy, at Freescale (no video in this one, unfortunately), in Taiwan, so it was nice to meet her as well, although she had a cold, so hopefully she feels better. Definitely look forward to working with her, if I decide to do something.

Miscellaneous hacking occurred, as always, and great conversations as well. Started getting the machines ready to build a buildd cluster for Konstantinos, need to finish getting that set up tomorrow.

Had an amazing dinner at (I think it was called) Thrumunz. Their power was out however, which oddly, only added to the atmosphere. Even though I had steak yesterday, I had another one today, with a baked potato, and a slice of their Key Lime Pie for desert. Very delicious.

I also met someone else today, I unfortunately can’t remember the spelling of his name, Mauricio (maybe?) but he is the president of Genesi Americas. While we didn’t get to talk for a long time, we will be getting together again in the morning. And it is definitely nice to meet more people on the team!

And in unrelated news to the hackathon, the Detroit Lions won their game. Even more incredible was the fact that they scored 23 points in the 4th quarter. Of course, I was happy.

I have 2 patches for Neko from Saleem Abdulrasool, while they (probably) don’t fix anything, they do cause some oops to… not. I need to mail those off after I finish this blog post. I’m trying to think of anything else that I’m missing…

Ohhhh, actually yes, the teaser post from earlier…

smarttablet

Okay, it is 3am now, didn’t hit my target goal of 2:30. Off to mail the patches, and then to bed!