Joe Auricchio

Hi everyone. I’m still alive.

I’m in the Bay Area, living with a bunch of neat people in a neat house. Not sure what I think of the area. On the one hand, it’s exciting to be in a setting so infused with the tech industry. On the other, Menlo Park is really not my style. I think I’ve found someplace even more rich and poncey than La Jolla. Some other areas seem a lot more suitable, though. And I love the expressways and freeways up here - off rush hour, driving between cities is a joy.

I’m interning for VMware. I’m working on internal debugging & profiling tools, trying to improve the VMX startup time. The early effort of tool-building is starting to pay off, and in the last few weeks my mentor and I have some really good changes ready to check in. If you run large ESX instances on contended SANs, and your VMs startup a lot faster in future versions of ESX, that’s all me. I met a lot of great folks here: on my team, on adjacent teams, and all those crazy hosted-ui kids over in the Xerox buildings. I’ve gained a glimpse into the workings of a Medium-Sized Software Company. And I’ve learned a hell of a lot.

I’ve kept pretty busy outside of work. I’ve hiked at Castle Rock State Park, bicycled for 20 miles down Foothill Expwy and around Menlo Park, gone to house parties in Berkeley with old friends from Cambria, became a semi-regular at a hookah bar on University, rode a motorcycle for the first time, drove from Santa Cruz to Palo Alto via Half Moon Bay, clubbed in San Jose, and watched the Perseids from the top of Mt Hamilton.

I went to Vegas for Defcon. That was cool. Vegas is a lot better when everyone in your group is over 21. Lots of stuff happened there. And stayed there. (wink)

A few weeks ago I went camping and hiking at Mammoth Lakes with some friends. This was actually my first time camping. Had a good time on the whole, and discovered that I may be more of an outdoorsy person than I thought. Hiking and scrambling up rocks is really really fun. I may pick up rock climbing as a hobby, once I get down to SD with the convenient climbing wall on campus. We’ll see.

I’m looking ahead to grad school. I still have another year to finish off the B.S. before the grad program actually starts, but until then I’ll try to spend some time working/researching with profs. Only trouble is… there are three professors I want to work with, each with interesting projects, each with different styles of research, each with different industry & academic connections, each with different things to teach me. How do I decide? Oh well. I suppose this is the Right Problem To Have.

There’s someone I miss very much. I wonder if she’s still reading this? Much of this summer has been a journey to find the meaning of “complete” again without her. I’m not doing very well.

This happened a few weeks ago, while I was biking home from work. I thought it was neat. That’s not a camera artifact, there really were two rainbows. It hadn’t rained a drop that day and the sky above was blue.



Apologies for the low quality, all I had was my phone. I’m no photographer anyway (Kim, I’m looking at you!)

I’ll try to update more often.

This entry was posted Saturday, August 30th, 2008 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Doing. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.