Poken setup

So, when I was uploading pictures to my computer, I switched over to my Windows partition because F-spot was frustrating me by not being Picasa, which is frustrating me by not being installed yet.

So I plugged in my Poken in Windows and the folder had three files: start_poken, help, and autorun. I opened the start_poken.html and it took me to the login/create account page. Logged into my existing account. Got taken to the "dashboard" which showed the people I had pokened! (Pick your favorite pokenesque verb. I prefer the self-referential "do what pokens do.")

Uploaded my headshot (same one as on this blog- it's recent, looks like me, etc). Stared at the card. it looks very... bland. But it has my info. Close damn enough for tonight.

I'll probably do this all over again tomorrow in ubuntu. For now... fun times!

GHC: Tuesday! (job fair)

Pics here: http://picasaweb.google.com/wordymusic/GHC10Tues#

31 pics, creative commons. email me at wordymusic@gmail.com if you want something taken down or want something that you think was taken to be uploaded.

It's going to be even more crowded tomorrow. Today was just the job fair; tomorrow all the industry professionals will be here, and it will be epic. I remember this from last time.

My hotel room wifi is pretty atrocious: it's ranging from 40ms ping to 120 ms ping, and from .78Mb down to .25Mb down- which is to say, not as good as the internet that I was getting on the plane ride here. So I'm sad about that, but it's not like I have time to watch videos, so I guess it's okay. Also I think that bandwidth was much higher this afternoon because not so many people were on it... which tells you a lot about the network configuration, actually.

All three of my roommates are asleep right now, so I'll try to be brief. (And disjointed, because I took notes sporadically throughout the day.)

This evening around 8:30, I went to the Hard Rock Cafe with Mariya (roommate) and two people from her university, and we chatted and chatted... turns out that they're all three PhD students! (I just finished my undergrad degree.) So that was interesting. I drank some margarita that the bartender came up with- pomegranate and melon, I think? It was tasty but very mild.

This morning at 12:30pm (dude, it was totally morning), I reported to my Hopper shift! I signed in, picked up a red vest, met my fellow Hopper Juliana, and hung around the poster table until three pm, talking everyone's ears off. Juliana is awesome- goes to UW (giant university in Seattle- an order of magnitude more undergrads than IIT) as an aerospace engineering major (actually, a pseudonym of that) and her mom works for Microsoft and has been trying to get her to come for years...

I considered begging an introduction to her mother, but I'm not sure that I want to use .NET all that badly. .NET is a lovely lovely program, but it has a high learning curve, which I am currently on the wrong end on. And frankly, Ruby is more fun. Hell, Java, C, and C# are more fun. I wouldn't know about FORTRAN, never having used it.

Sorry Juliana, if I embarrassed you. Watch me do it to other people now too!

While I was being a Hopper, I met this lovely older lady who's one of the official photographers for GHC10! I showed her my Rebel xT and she told me that she was a Nikon lady... actually that her favorite cameras were this German line of hardware that's 3x more expensive than anything whatsoever... and she told us an excellent story about when she spoke to her granddaughter's highschool photography class and told the teacher that he(?) was full of shit for teaching darkroom techniques but not Photoshop. I love it when industry professionals tell off teachers.

There was a man who works at the Hyatt who, after he walked up to us (at the poster table) and conversed with us re: a pile of boxes to be taken away, the first thing that came out of my mouth after he was out of earshot was "He... has a very purposeful stride." It was very brisk. There are actors somewhere in Hollywood who wish that they could do that.

Moving on. Some nice lady came up to me, said "Are you Linda?" and proceeded to tell me that she was "geekettebits" and I said "Oh yeah, I friended you this morning." Man, I <3 geekettebits ="=">

"My attention span is about three clicks long." That's in my notes. Not sure where it came from.

As I was sitting at the table, Zara and Rachel came by wearing a massive amount of Google swag, and chatted for a bit about work at Google and all that. Apparently the guy in the wraparound black and white Google t-shirt is the marketing guy, is named Damien, and ran the meeting at which they discussed what kinds of swag to have...

I met Yang, who is a Hopper and is presenting two posters! As far as i could understand, one of them is on paralell computing with biotech (to, or with? I don't know) and the other is on how to do a server migration while also using parallel computing (is that a solved problem, or still under debate, or...?) ...Anyway, I plan to go check out the posters and take pics and generally be very impressed. I'm theoretically doing a poster next year... depends on co-authors and research outcomes.

By about 5:30pm, I had talked myself hoarse. So I got some mints and a bottle of water and kept talking. I was the girl in the purple shirt who talked your ear off. Yep, that was me. Follow me on twitter (wordymusic) so I can do it there too.

My roommate Mariya worked a summer at some cloud computing company called Scaleright or Rightsize or something- lots of details, very cool-sounding. Man, there are so many places that it would be cool to work at!

I was planning to do a detailed blog with pictures about the swag bag, but it's past midnight and I'm going to be up before 7am tomorrow, so instead I'm planning to do an end-of-conference swag post about everything that I pick up all week.

By the way, the object persistence framework Hibernate is rocking my reading list right now. It's so cool! I'm going to set up a mini implementation. ...But not tonight. For the love of little green Poken, not tonight.

I went and got my Poken! Had to pay $15 for it, since I'm not actually a student any more (barely!) and I chose the little green one with three eyes... so cute! I used it several times today, so it's totally worth what I paid. I haven't set up the online account yet, but I'll probably do that tonight. I hear that it might be a little complex...?

Next to the Poken table, there was a table with hardware on it. Which I looked at and went "ooooh!" because I used to assemble stuff like that, so I asked the guy sitting there what it did. It turns out that his name is Spencer, and he had two smartphones, some hard-wired switches, some radios, and two step-down power devices so radio 1 wouldn't short out radio 2 at such close range... and his company Rayetheon is making a system so that mobile phones are usable in war zones (unmodified cell phones are very locatable and therefore dangerous/useless in the field). We talked for a while and he gave me pieces of paper and we discussed Fort Worth and the programs there... I'm not sure that the commute would agree with me, but they're doing some rocking things over there. I like travel, but not between coffee and meetings. More like between where I am and somewhere interesting.

Ended up having dinner (meh, box dinner wraps) with TeeTee from IIT and some people that I just met... fun times!

I stopped by the opensource table but it was full up, so I headed out. I'll totally be back, though.

I should look at some of the grad school tables, since it's possible that I'll be gradschooling relatively soon.

On Friday from 3-4pm I'll be at a lecture by someone from ThoughtWorks - it looks interesting! Also increases my chances of being employed, sent to India for training, and being generally incredibly happy. (I've never been to India! Dangling a free international trip in front of me motivates me impressively.)

I ended up talking to some excellent people from the Xetron division of Northrop Grumman, which is the company that all of my engineer friends slaver to work at... and it sounds like it's pretty excellent over there, so I'll definitely talk to their website and forms and all that and see if anything comes of it. (Because how cool would it be if I could help some of my friends get jobs? Like, just by telling them that they should bloody apply, because I work there. That would be rocking.)

I talked to... some company whose logo looks like Picasa's, and whose acronym sounds like the "jitsu" part of ju-jitsu... anyway, not seriously considering working there, mostly because they sound like they're kinda stiff in general- but I was talking to one of their HR people about their fiberoptic cable network analysis hardware and I would really really like to talk to one of their technical people about how that all works because I'm a brat with an oversized curiosity. I'll poke their website and see what there is to be seen...

And I talked to other companies but frankly it's getting towards 1am and you don't care anyway, so au revoir.

I was so good at the job fair that I only have one resume left. Gotta stop by the Kinkos upstairs tomorrow- not that I really need so many more, but they're nice to have.

And the codeathon is Thurs afternoon! Come. I will be there, writing bugs. (Code is by definition a series of bugs, right?) http://eden.sahanafoundation.org/wiki/GHC2010

I have the feeling that my post-conference followup will take weeks.

Dammit, one of my roommates is snoring. I won't tell you which one.