My Solar experience so far...

Solar Turbines hired me on as a permanent employee on June 13, 2006. I was a little surprised but mostly happy that my pay would stay the same, in fact--maybe increase a little. I'll be eligible for bonuses at this point so that's great.

I'm still basically doing the same thing. Putting manuals together and releasing them to customers. At this point, I've attained a better grasp of Perl programming and Javascript. I've already designed a few solutions that have saved my coworkers time.

It's going well, I can't complain.

thir day...

We took a tour of the turbine plant and became familiar with Solar Turbine's products. What an amazing operation! They use turbines and compressors to power everything from small mines to massive offshore oil rigs all over the world.

My job, as of now, will be to compile, trouble-shoot and assemble the manuals that are sent out with Solar's products. They are looking to automate their assembly operation so that's apparently where my experience comes in. But I have been looking into how they use SGML, PDFs, HTML and Solaris UNIX to create complex documents to ship to customers world-wide.

But I can't really get into the automation phase of this project until I get familiar with the production aspect. Already I've seen a need for some JavaScripted tools that we could link to the PERL compilation to generate a tree-like file structure to display images.

First day at Solar Turbines, San Diego, Ca.

My day started a little late, I miscalculated my time because I thought I had to go to Kearny Mesa. When I realized that I had to go downtown for training, I realized that I was going to be a little late. I called in and informed them of my situation. I finally arrived at Solar Turbines about five minutes late--no problem. I was greeted, told where to park, issued a badge and off I went for training. Training was long and boring but I did learn how involved Solar Turbines was to San Diego's history. The use the original building that Lindbergh used to build the Spirit of St. Louis as an office building now but commerate the spot with a plaque above the entrance, very interesting. After training, I reported to my new job location in Kearny Mesa and was greeted cheerfully by my new boss and work-mates. nice place. They actually had everything set up for me upon arrival. Everything except for passwords and they were ver appologetic about that. But everything else is set up and my neighbors came around to introduce themselves. Honestly, I don't think I'm used to this type of courtiousness upon initial arrival. Very different from my last job with a government contractor. At that job, my desk was next to a space near a storage shelf of dusty, obsolete, electronic components. The culture was competetive at best but I made it work.