What I do with my time
I work for Philips Electronics at their research labs in Redhill in the UK. Although my actual job title is 'Research Scientist', my job is mainly programming. I work in the Interactive Systems group, which is mainly concerned with multimedia and the fun technologies that are around at the moment. Since we're a research lab, it's obviously difficult to say too much about what I do. One of the advantages of working in a research lab, and especially in multimedia research, is that you get a load of cool toys to play with. We have most of the major games platforms lurking around the office somewhere (British and Japanese Playstation, Sega Saturn, Japanese N64, a dedicated games PC with Dolby surround sound support and a 3DFX Voodoo graphics board, plus various other bits and pieces), a couple of BIG SGI machines and a few other very silly toys like radio-controlled airships and even (shudder) a Microsoft Barney. If you haven't met one of these monstrosities, and if you're in the UK you probably haven't, you should be very grateful indeed. This beastie is so irritating that it took about two days for this to happen to it...
If you want to see more of what happened to Barney, take a look here
As well as the usual coding and stuff, I also sysadmin the groups PC network which consists of about 40 Windows NT and Win95 machines. This is a little more tricky than in most companies, simply because we have so much wierd hardware and software that has to work with it all. We have quite a few pieces of pre-release hardware from various sources, plus a load of bleeding edge hardware with fussy drivers. Life can get real interesting sometimes when you're trying to make it all work. If you are thinking of going into sysadminning for any reason at all RUN AWAY! SAVE YOURSELF NOW! Check out alt.sysadmin.recovery if your newsfeed carries it. It'll explain a lot...
back to my homepage