Well, I for one am exhausted!
It is 28 degrees outside. I have just finished my third week at the new job. After not working seriously for years, I am finally settling in to sitting in front of a computer for 7.5 hours a day (no 8 hour work days here) with other people on computers all around me. The job is becoming more managable, or at least I am understanding the product and my role in it a bit better. Knowledge, it turns out, is a great stress reliever. I have been going through the tutorial for our product, getting through about one page per two hours, and finally get the general idea. Duh. You connect to a target (the chip) through an interface (Trace or ICE), load an image onto the target that contains the RTOS (Realtime Operating System) that you wish to run on the chip, and then run through the code looking for errors. When the original chunk of code is compiled, the level of the optimization controls the amount of original code left in the end build. So if I am debugging a highly optimized build, then the errors might not point me to the exact spot in the software with the problem, but if I use a low amount of optimization, then I can usually find the area in the code that I want to test. So that explains why Microsoft Word is such a large size, becausse if they were to optimize the compiled build into a smaller sized executable, then there would be more difficulty in the developers finding the sources of bugs.
Whew.
Ok, so if learning everything in that preceeding paragraph weren’t enough to completely rock my world, I am also househunting. With no car. In the cold. This means that every morning before work I have been taking the bus somewhere to look at houses, and every lunch time I do the same. Generally, the busses that run every ten minnutes don’t arrive for at least thirty minutes when I am in a hurry. And since it has been 32 degrees each day, I have been loading up on cashmere before going out the door. Aftger looking at many homes that were absolute pits, I finally found one right across the street from work that is gorgeous! But now the owner, whom I met and got on well with, is saying that he may want to sell the house instead. Ugh! Tht would mean at least another week of this dreadful househunting.
Other than the growing pains of adapting to a new country, job, etc., I have been getting out and having a little fun. Bern and I went to a fundraiser for Prince’s Trust, Prince Charles’ organization which helps people start businesses and helps teenagers or young adults with unsavory pasts get a new start in the arts. The party was in the Master’s Lodge at Magdelene College (part of Cambridge University). The Master (I can’t remember his name) said that no one normally gets to enter the house. It was beautiful. And the attendees of this benefit were some of the ‘Gown’ set (each town here seems to have it’s own ‘town’ and ‘gown’ set) and it appears they all wore black or dark red blazers. I was in a pink sweater set. Stood out like a sore thumb.
