Today, I gave the sermon at our church’s Wednesday noon service. This was the first time I ever have given a sermon to adults (not youth camp) and boy was I nervous! I wore flats so that my knees wouldn’t shake. Luckily, I started out with a joke so the laughter made everything less serious. :)
I talked about my aunt and uncle’s miraculous pilgrimage from Canada to Mexico City to visit the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Now that the sermon is complete, I can focus on other things, like my parents visit! They are driving to Texas tomorrow! Hurray!
My friend Amanda got to her desk one morning and her Dwight bobblehead had been stolen!
There were wanted posters in the elevators and everything. Then, this video showed up. Dwight went to our company's user conference.
This video concludes the Hil Street Prank Video ™ Series. And it is a perfect video to complete the Triune series of laughter. Great prank, Courtney. This is pure gold.
This weekend, Ryan’s family was in town. The Red Bull Flugtag was in Austin on Saturday so we went. It was funny to watch the people “attempt” to fly – but the most interesting thing about the event (that I did not gather from the commercials) was that each entry has a skit set to music. There was quite an emphasis on the skits – it really affected the judges scores!
Today’s post is in honor of my friend Shannon. Shannon is an editor here but today is her last day. She is leaving to take advantage of her year-long work visa in New Zealand! How exciting for Shannon to work in such a beautiful, exotic place!
Shannon informed us that New Zealand is looking for skilled workers, particularly florists. So to the large percentage of Hil Street readers who are florists out there, you can contact Shannon if you are looking for a change of scenery. Best of luck Shannon! I will miss your humor and general commentary on life.
I got home from work late the other night, and my husband informs me that my best friend, Ellie, looks just like a girl from the show, “Girls next door.”
Just what a wife wants to hear when she gets home from work.
Anyway, this morning, Ryan showed me the described playmate. It was Holly – who I think is Hugh Hefner’s girlfriend. Last time I checked, Ellie had short brown hair, but whatever, those are silly details.
In honor of summer's end, I am going to provide a Hil Street Prank Video ™ Series. Port-o-prank kicked it off yesterday, so we continue today with a compilation video of various Simpson characters prank calling Moe’s Tavern.
While we are talking about the Simpsons, I’ll go ahead and provide a Hil Street movie review. Ryan and I saw the Simpson’s Movie at the Alamo Draft house during one of their feasts. The Alamo feasts feature theme dinners during movies. We had: Duff beer, chili, three eyed fish (nuclear plant), lobster soup, a pork chop and a BIG donut at the end. Yum. The movie was great too – I laughed – A LOT. High recommendation from Hil Street.
Back to the Hil Street Prank Video ™ Series. Trust me – this Hil Street Prank Video ™ Series ends with a with a video of an amazingly-well orchestrated office prank from my friend, Courtney. You won’t want to miss it. Stay tuned.
Have I lost you, dear blog reader? I apologize for my hiatus. I return now with a “BANG!” to present to you my 100th post! For my 100th post, I will appropriately review Blogger.
Push button publishing allows anyone, ANYONE to be a blog journalist. I didn’t even have to get ordained over the internet. With this freedom, my opinions, disappointments, political views, buffet commentary and images are available to anyone who finds my URL. I can use this for evil or for good.
I have many friends who are also blog journalists. This is not a lucrative endeavor – but you won’t go in the debt because blogger is free. I am paid by the satisfaction of receiving your comments.
I should be back online now. We’ll start to plan for the ’08 user conference sometime in late August I am sure. But, I have at least a week of down time.
Even longtime employees at National Instruments Corp. give a chuckle when they talk about the raucous reception their work gets at NI Week.
Every year, the company uses its annual conference as a stage for its latest and greatest products. And every year, the thousands of researchers and engineers who crowd the hall react with wild applause.
Co-founder and chief executive James Truchard gets the biggest reaction, but the employees who work on new products and upgrades soak it in as much as anyone. As Eric Stark-loff, director of product marketing and witness to every NI Week in the past decade, recently said: "It's this geek fest we're pretty proud of."
So when the cheers start Tuesday through Thursday at the Austin Convention Center, Omid Sojoodi and Aljosa Vrancic might be tempted to take a quick bow. They managed development for the latest version of National Instruments' flagship LabView software, which the company plans to announce today.
National Instruments' products are used widely by engineers, scientists and researchers, who employ the software to design, run and measure all kinds of programs — everything from radio-frequency tests on cell phones to a recent test of shutters on a new space telescope NASA is building. The same products have played a role in creating many everyday items.
LabView is a vital piece of what National Instruments does, and the major updates the company issues about once a year help drive profitable software sales. And because NI Week brings together a large group of LabView's most loyal users, Sojoodi, a senior group manager, and Vrancic, a principal engineer, use it to get feedback on what they've done and what they might do next.
"We'll have closed-door sessions with our power users and talk about some of our products in development," Sojoodi said. "We target our power users, and they really help shape some of the more specific features we add."
New features in this latest version will bring the hardware up to speed with the changing computer platforms on which it runs, particularly the growing adoption of multicore processors. The new chip technology puts several processing brains, or cores, on a single piece of silicon, which allows the computer to divide and conquer large tasks or simultaneously run smaller jobs. The newer processors, and how National Instruments' products will take advantage of them, will be key topics at NI Week, Truchard said on a call with analysts last month.
Multicore processors already suit LabView well. LabView has been "multithreaded" for years, meaning its jobs can be split into separate threads, processed at the same time and woven back together afterward.
That means LabView users automatically get a performance boost when they move from traditional processors to multicore chips, Sojoodi said, "but with the release we gave more control to people who want to go in and specially make changes to take advantage of this hardware."
One key change will give users the ability to define which tasks should run on each core. For most tasks, that happens automatically. For example, a home computer user running the Windows operating system would see little difference between a traditional processor and a dual-core processor.
But for the highly technical applications many LabView users deal with, some tasks take on much greater importance than others. The new upgrade will allow users to assign a critical job to its own core, so the vital process runs uninterrupted by other calculations.
Some users might be perfectly happy with the automatic division of tasks between cores, Sojoodi said, "but in this particular case they might want to run this piece of code on core four. It gives them more control on where this code will run."
National Instruments is taking this idea even further with an expanding push into chips that users can customize and run at higher speeds. Using LabView, these field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, can be designed for specific high-performance tasks.
A prime example is the CERN Large Hadron Collider under construction hundreds of feet below ground in Switzerland and France. A global consortium of physicists is building the next-generation particle collider to conduct research they hope will unlock some of the deepest secrets of the universe.
Starting in 2008, they'll send beams of particles at super-high speeds around the 17-mile circle, smashing the beams together and analyzing the subatomic debris that results.
National Instruments is working with the team to build a system that can both control the particle beam and measure the results of the collisions, said Kamran Shah, manager of LabView marketing.
Controlling and measuring particles that move around the speed of light takes some quick gear.
Those high-end jobs continue to attract National Instruments' developers, and probably always will.
"The improved hardware and software capabilities are allowing National Instruments to push further into areas that once were the domain of the high-end guys like Agilent," said Antonio Antezano, an analyst at Bear Stearns & Co. Inc.
The company has started pushing more into radio-frequency testing, for example. Rivals such as Agilent will continue developing new abilities as well, Antezano said. But by capitalizing on hardware and software updates, National Instruments can push itself up into higher-end applications.
"Now they're more direct competition with Agilent, where before they were more focused on broad general applications," Antezano said. "With the performance in hardware improving, they will be able to push further into that high end."
That's not to say the company will move beyond the bulk of its customers.
The company's success has grown from its ability to make programming quick and easy for just about anyone who wants to keep their focus on research and development.
"We're targeting non-programmers with LabView, and we're certainly trying to make it easy," Sojoodi said. "Over the years, that has become more of a philosophy for us: Make it easy to use for engineers and researchers so they don't have to get bogged down in programming."
The idea isn't to transform easy tasks into simple ones, he said, quoting National Instruments' co-founder Jeff Kodosky. The idea is to take prohibitively challenging tasks and make them possible.
The company's success at accomplishing that has generated a lot of loyal customers, and it's at the heart of all the cheers that rain down each year at NI Week. In the weeks leading up to the conference, registration again was rolling above last year, and National Instruments was expecting another record crowd.
Scott Jordan will be one of the more than 2,000 people expected to come to Austin for NI Week. He's director of nanopositioning at Physik Instrumente-USA and one of National Instruments' earliest customers.
Jordan will head a panel called "Breakthrough Innovation" on Wednesday, discussing different ways people have applied National Instruments' technologies. Those sort of interactions make NI Week an annual stop, he said.
"There's a chance to interact, to collide and to collude with your fellow LabView users, and that's huge," he said. "There's nothing like that anywhere else in the industry."
