Teaching

East encompassed kindergarten through senior high school. The elementary, East Elementary School, had the right half of the building while the high schools, junior and senior collectively referred to as East High School, had the left. I started there with kindergarten and attended for twelve years but at the end of my eleventh grade it was clear that something had to change. My grades were dismal and only with summer school was I advanced to the twelfth.

There is a country, which I will allow to remain nameless, that receives a lot of “off-shoring” of software engineering from US companies. I teach a fair number of engineers from that country and, for whatever reason, I have to say they seem to be grossly under qualified. By and large, in the classroom they ask few questions – that could be a cultural thing, I admit – and in the labs they have more problems than others in following the detailed instructions – again, that could be a cultural issue.

What follows is an email to an associate about to travel to Cedar Rapids Iowa from which I just returned. He’s a martini man, by the way; Loves his martinis.

Once upon a time, there were three RTOSes named VRTX, pSOS and VxWorks.

Assuming flights are on time today, I’ll be at the customer’s location late this afternoon to re-image the disk drives of our lab systems (via Ghost) with the correct contents for tomorrow’s class.

No doubt you remember where you were and what you were doing when you first heard of the 9/11/2001 attacks.

I’m reading a non-Bullseye book that has, nonetheless, a lot to say about how we succeed or fail at many aspects that directly contribute to our performance at the firing line.

Today is a travel day, driving from Huntsville to Nashville and then flying home on Southwest.