Julien McArdle

Okay, so maybe I won’t be too precise about what I do where, but nothing says I can’t talk about what I do on my way there.

I’m in Buenos Aires at the moment. Interesting city. Wonderful, wonderful food. I stopped by Santiago, Chile, earlier today. It’s interesting – it’s right by the Andes, yet you can’t see them because of the smog.

So the new job is going well, so far (I’m a field geophysicist.) In a week or so, I’m getting shipped off out of the country. I’ll be gone for a long while. This ambiguity brings me to a realization I made: secrecy is everything in this business.

This is a cut throat industry. These few talented companies are competing for some serious business. And what these corporations do to get the edge over each other is incredible. The R&D alone is unbelievable. They’re single handedly pushing the barriers of human technology. It’s like AMD vs. Intel: IP means a lot. It’s really cool stuff. Unfortunately again, I can’t talk about it here (I imagine Intel employees are in the same boat.)

To that same extent, I won’t be posting pictures of what I do or where I go. It sucks, but if I do it right you won’t ever get the feeling that I’m withholding information from you. This is the only time that I’ll broach the subject anyways.

Well, I did it. I got the job as a geophysicist. I’m cautiously optimistic at this point, as I’m not entirely sure what I got myself into. Nevertheless, it will be a part of my life I look back to with a smile I’m sure. I suppose its a bit of a godsend, as I was really unsure what to do past the September mark. There was a point where I was seriously considering returning to school to pursue an education in computer science.

I’m glad that things have turned the way they have. In other news, I’m moving out of my place. The situation demanded it as such. Living with two roommates has been a wonderful experience, but I certainly do look forward to moving into a bachelor’s (or 1 bedroom.)

So what’s in store for me? Apart from the new job, and the whole moving business, I have my university field camp to accomplish. It’s a weeklong affair that once done will allow me to get my degree.

Rice Tea has been going on as usual. I’ve sent out a few interview requests to individuals with law enforcement backgrounds for some help, but I’ve had no responses. Eh well. I’ve also updated the site for the book- it now automatically groups the updates into small expandable batches to cut down on the page’s consumption of vertical space.

I’ve also been working on a 3D filesystem explorer over the last little while. It’s a project that I’ve been working on bit by bit, as part of a challenge that was set at the last 2600 get-together I attended. It displays files/directories as entities within a solar system. Directories are planets, files are asteroids, and the current directory is the star. Clicking on a planet (directory) transforms it into a star, and a new solar system is formed around the directory. Clicking on a star goes up one directory level, turning it back into a planet that’s part of a greater solar system.

I’m doing the file system explorer in Ruby. What a wonderful, simple, fast, language that is. It’s high level, but it runs extremely well on my 300MHz PII. I come from a background where all I did was recursive code (in C, PHP, etc.), and this was a great introduction to object-oriented programming. With zero experience, you can get up and running on that thing within seconds if you have some programming experience.