Memos From the Cube

So, busy couple of weeks – but that was expected, of course.

Two Fridays ago I was invited by my workmates to the fortnightly beer meetup after work, where all the Atmel Apps team (and partners?) gather to sample the local bar atmosphere and brain addling chemicals. That particular one happened to be somewhere in Trondheim I’d been to once before many months ago; the Trondheim Mikrobryggeri (Microbrewery). I was there on my last visit to Trondheim to see off the Atmel Sensor team, after their brief stay here in late December 2010 – a experience I thoroughly enjoyed, minus the jaw-dropping prices. This time I ended up splitting the somewhat cheaper jugs of beer with my girlfriend and Thomas, a rather nice German student who’s currently working in the local Apps department on his own University internship. I wish I had the forsight to bring my camera along, but alas, it was not to be. Not to worry; the next one is this Friday at a local pub called Den Gode Nabo (“The Good Neighbor”) which, coincidentally, happens to be located just down the street from my new apartment.

Speaking of the new apartment, Anika and I moved in last Thursday and out of our rather comfy hotel. We managed to fight the absolute hordes of people and brave the “Ikea Experience” last Saturday to secure ourselves a bed, which is now sitting in what is now our new bedroom (and, given that the frame is wider than the door, where it will stay until we move out and find a hacksaw). The construction of this bed was an experience itself, taking two nights, and resulting in sore hands, much tears and – worryingly enough – a pair of rather structural looking bolts being left over. Still, it hasn’t collapsed just yet, but if I don’t post here for a couple of days inform Atmel that an ambulance and/or crane may be required.

I’ve put up a couple of quick shots of the apartment and/or view from the windows on my new grand central Trondheim headquarters page, where I’ll automatically collate any blog entries, videos and pictures I make and take just like I did last time I was here. Given the length of my stay here I’ll probably break it out into smaller pages eventually, but for now that’s the easiest place to stalk me.

As for work, I’m actually enjoying it quite a bit. I’m now through all the mandatory inductions and trainings (with the gigantic Employee Information booklet to prove it) and I’m now performing general AVR, XMEGA and AVR32 support work as a new trainee. This means I’m now answering questions sent to the “avr at Atmel dot com” address everyone uses, which is actually reasonably interesting and gives a view of the broad spectrum of users of Atmel’s products. As on Monday, I’ll be moved up to the “Hotline” priority support line given to large customers, which is both terrifying and gratifying at the same time, since it’s apparently one of the fastest moves up from general support in the Apps Norway department. Seems I did have some useful skills after all. On that note, a general plea: don’t forget to include at least some of the basic information with your request! I’ve had a few support questions that consist of just four lines of code and a “it doesn’t work” explanation, without mentioning anything else. If you want help, don’t forget to at least include the chip model you are using!

In my spare time I’m now transferring all my old tutorials from AVRFreaks.net BBCode forum posts, over to nicely typeset LaTeX PDFs. This will mean easy access to the latest versions of past and (potentially) future tutorials, in a nicely formatted document. It also means proper revision management, which should be useful down the line for tracking changes. With the new system, we go from this travesty of a presentation, to this sexily formatted document. Keeping up to date is just a case of a wget or svn update.