8:40pm. Actual temperature in the low 90s. Dense, thick humidity. Cloud to cloud lightning is near constant, providing a stroboscopic illumination for my journalling, here on my third story balcony in Hampton, VA. Radio claimed that the “heat index” hit 109 today.
Spent my day training programmers. Revving them up, really. Whipping them into a frenzy of cluster-using, computing rage. It worked. I think that it worked really well. People seemed to enjoy the session, and I had more audience members after the lunch break than before. If things are going badly, then people tend to bail at lunch.
Spent my evening hanging out with a submarine officer who did his job interview with Rickover himself. Dude had some good stories. We griped about Bush, traded dirty jokes, and talked computing and power generation infrastructure. At the end of the day, he’s also the one who determines whether the people who decided to hire me get performance based bonuses. Good times.
His Rickover story: Apparently, he went to his interview and got there early. Like, 6am early. Got placed in a room with 50+ other potential nuclear submarine people (nucs). One guy in his group apparently went in and was asked “why do you want to drive one of my submarines?” The answer “to serve my country, sir.” Rickover looked at him and said: “Great. Pick up the flag by my desk, go over, and wave it out my window. I’ll tell you when to stop.” He then proceeded to interview other candidates while the dude was waving the flag. It’s not clear what was said after that, but said candidate did not get the job. The guy I was hanging out with, did.
The cluster seems to work. We’ll find out more tomorrow. The mission for tomorrow is twofold: Train the system administrators, and ask really hard questions of the stakeholders who will decide how to use the system. I think that the latter will be more fun. Questions like “When both of you have a deadline to meet, who gets precedence on the machine. Questions that local folks would have trouble asking … but since I’m leaving tomorrow … it’s all good.
I can feel the thunderstorm starting to move through, the pressure dropping, the cool air displacing the hot. Soon, the wall of water.
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