So on August 20th I found myself packing a reasonable amount of my belongings into my car and embarking on a journey that would lead me through America's desert land. After 1,854 miles I finally made it to Austin, Texas. To my delight, Austin was full of trees and rolling hills. Much unlike the desert I spent 20 hours driving through to get there.

My job consisted of a variety of activities. It seemed to focus on the characterization of AGP workload. In fact my work was acknowledged in an IEEE article: Generation of 3D Graphics Workload for System Performance Analysis. Other than that I thoroughly learned how to use a Tektronix Logic Analyzer and a few other in-house tracing tools. Not to mention the Perl scripts, web pages, benchmarking, and system admin activities. The workload did vary, however, there were times I didn't have much to do, and overall I didn't learn as much as I had hoped about Computer Engineering. But I'm happy I have the experience and I do think it will be beneficial.

Other than my work, I managed to do a few other things in my free time. After all I had from 5:30pm til 8:30am with no homework. I found an awsome church, First Evangelical Free Church. It had a college ministry that was larger than College Life, I wasn't sure that was possible.

I also managed to do my share of tourism. This is the Texas Capital building located in downtown Austin. The street you see is named Congress and is a straight line for quite some distance. It was designed to lead directly toward the Capital. The building was also placed on a hill and as a result can be seen from all over the city making some incredible evening scenery. Austin was chosen for obvious reasons to hold the state's captial. Having only seen the western half of the state, I must say that this is the most beautiful region of Texas. It actually has colorful plants and the Colorado River.

Here's that Colorado River I mentioned. This picture was taken from the top of Mt. Bonnell, the highest point in Austin. It was described as a very long staircase up a big hill. It turned out to be a couple flights of stairs, probably equivalent to main staircase in Shields Library. Regardless, it gave a nice view of the city and surrounding area. The panoramic picture at the top of this page was taken here.

Ahh, AMD. On your right is the main building to AMD's Austin site, Bldg 4 wherein lies Fab 25 (where all the K6-2's were built for you computer buffs). As you can see I haven't managed to get a good picture of it, but you get the idea. There's a nice pond and private park for us employees out front. Since it is on top of a hill, they have a couple retention ponds, which is probably why my apartment survived the 10 year flood. I worked across the street in Building 3, it's not as photogenic, but it gets the job done.

Zilker Park was within riding distance from my apartment. It provided a good quick place to ride. This picture was taken a little after the floods. The first weekend I was out here there was no water which allowed for a longer ride. My evaluation of Austin mountain biking is that there is some decent technical terrain, but they are a little on the short side and definitely don't require any endurance! Of course I brought my bike, shame on you for asking!