Monday, June 23, 2008

Status Report: 5 Weeks

Well I realized that I've been here for five weeks. Seems like it's been a lot longer, but I finally have some impressions of Austin and of my project.

The first part is the project: I have to say I'm really enjoying it so far. I'm not actually doing exactly what I thought I'd be doing, but that's not a big deal. You see Fortress doesn't actually have a type-checker, and well they kind of need one a lot. So while I sort of thought I was going to be working on, like, type-based optimizations of software transactional memory, I'm really going to be implementing the typechecker and type inference. Now things were started before we got here, so there's a chance we'll get to see it finished before I leave. And, as I've said before, the project is totally open-source, so you can see the code I write here (not that I'd recommend it) and follow my progress here.

Austin is good too, but it's not like being in Pittsburgh. Here's what I mean: You see, in Pittsburgh I know lots of people. Here I don't know many people. Most of the people at work, while very cool and very nice, have families and aren't necessarily interested in hanging out. When I've had people come to visit, I get a better feel for the cool stuff that is going on in Austin: great restaurants, bars and stuff to do outdoors, but a lot of those things are hard to take advantage of by yourself.

So far I've spent of lot of time sitting in my apartment, going to the gym and watching Lost episodes. (My aunt got me Netflix for the 3 months I am here, and I decided to go back to season 1 and see if I can understand this crazy show.)

Anyway, I'm going out tonight for a bit to meet some friends, so that should be rad. Oh, and I'll be back in Pittsburgh for next weekend just to say "hello." Holla at your boy.

3 comments:

  1. Hey, I think Katherine Lohmann may or may not still be in Austin. I don't have her phone number or anything anymore, but you could always try facebook.

    --Rand

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  2. Good call. She's not (back in NOLA), but we did talk a lot about Austin and she gave me a list of cool stuff to do.
    Thanks

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  3. I hear you; San Francisco has a ton of cool things to do but between my thesis and having my gf and most of my friends on the other side of the country I haven't done nearly as good a job taking advantage of them as I should have.

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