An Ominous Beginning...

[appetite] Spoiler: The following section is about vomit. If you suspect your delicate sensibilities will be offended by such a topic, I suggest you skip past the segment enclosed in asterisks. If you suspect others in the room may be offended by such a topic, please feel free to read alloud and enunciate.

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Today was my first day of work at Maxim Integrated Products, and might I say here and now that vomiting all over your business clothes in the car ride to work is an *extremely* foreboding omen of things to come. Thanks to my damnable weak stomach and distinct allergic reaction to sunlight (yet another warning sign that I may be slowly making the descent into gothdom), I spent the first half of the hour-and-a-half car ride popping Tylenol to try and push back the headache and mouthful of bile, and he second half reeking and feeling like I'd engaged in quite possibly the most disgusting act I've ever had the displeasure of experiencing. Thank god I had a suitcase full of clothes riding along in the trunk - oh I'll never forget pulling over by the side of High Street, finishing the job that I started in the car, and then promptly falling into it after my damnable shoe got caught between the gutter and the bottom of the car (I swear, nothing this bad ever even happens to my character at Legends... and I've got the least dignified plot in game). Needless to say... this morning was quite possibly one of the worst mornings I've ever been through. The only thing that consoled me was the fact that I managed to completely miss the new expensive white shirt my father had bought for me so I could make a good first impression on the job. Of course, it meant that I couldn't wear my brass rat, or most of my other jewelry for that matter, as it, along with the road map, the car seat, and my pants were violently and thoroughly soiled and in need of a vigorous cleansing.
I'm telling you, nothing says "Good morning Mr. Koo, I've just come from last night's 8-hour bender in celebration of my new job" like the lingering smell of something not quite right...
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I should have known better than to have eaten anything after waking up and feeling something had gone awry with my digestive tract, or psychologically, or whatever it may have been that caused my little episode of vehicular transport discomfort.

Despite the day getting off to a fairly horrible start, I arrived at Maxim whole and intact - and after a particularly intensive trip to the washroom to get rid of every last trace of "eau de bender" that might have lingered, I met my supervisor and jumped right into a fairly neat project that he'd had lying around for me to finish up. I'll not bore you with the details, but I learned that European televisions are neat, in that they only utilize one composite wire instead of 3 separate ones, and that sometimes companies design interim products in very amusing ways - today I got to edit a spec sheet for "a new chip" which was actually the old chip repackaged with 4 fewer pins.
My supervisor and a few of his colleagues treated me to lunch today at a local Thai place, and I discovered, much to my delight, that one of the guys I'll be working with this summer is this neat old British guy who shares my interests in siege weaponry, medieval castles, dungeons, and the like. He's also into image processing, which makes him doubly cool. After lunch, they wandered over to the local yuppie coffee joint and treated me to coffee. This is apparently a very chill place to work :)
The rest of the afternoon I spent reading up on the latest project that my supervisor has been working on - a chip for a machine something akin to an MRI, in that it uses photon emissions to reconstruct an image of the tissue in a patient's body in which a radioactive marker has been placed. I got introduced to the program Visio, and will be using it to draw up circuit diagrams for this particular chip.
My own cubicle (it feels very Office Space), a PC in transit, and two cool projects in one day - this makes me very happy. It's consolation for the fact that my bodice got Enron'd and will have to be put on hold until next weekend... and that the British exchange rate is up once again. And furthermore, I've escaped from El Cerrito, at least for the week - it's been a productive beginning and hopefully there'll be more good news to come.

Further bulletins as events warrant.