Hi fellas,
I’d consider this my first real blog entry for Penn State Geoblogs, so I’ll try to keep it not too boring while fitting as much info in here as possible. At this moment I’m in my cubicle in Cisco SJC Building 22, ARTG building. Don’t worry, I’ve finished all my work for the day and just like hanging out here. It’s a pretty nice cubicle, what can I say? I moved out to San Jose about 2 weeks ago, and things have been going pretty smoothly since, despite the fact that neither myself nor my roommate own a car. We both bike around a lot; bike to work, bike to pick up groceries and supplies, it takes some effort but it always works out. It’s also a great way of seeing the area.
Airplane window view, flyin’ in.
Oh, I suppose I should talk a bit about why I’m out here. I am an intern at Cisco Systems, which is a network company. They (we?) build from the ground up (hardware to software) and maintain network devices, mainly selling to the business/enterprise market but also to residential. Take a look at your router sometime or the ones you see in the store, most of them are made by Cisco or Linksys, which is also Cisco (Linksys by Cisco I think it’s called now). The group that I am working in is called ARTG (Advanced Routing Technology Group) and my particular team, which consists of just 12 guys myself included, in this group is working on VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) systems. In other words, we play around with phones. More accurately, the stuff that connects your phone to the phone (or phones) you’re trying to call. These first few weeks my team has been nice enough to just give me time to get acclimated to the working environment and hasn’t been demanding too much productivity out of me, and I’ve been trying to pick up as much knowledge as I can about the systems. It’s a little intimidating at times, but incredibly interesting and I am amazed and endlessly impressed by the skill and technical expertise of the people I work with.
The size and scale of Silicon Valley is truly astounding. Cisco alone consists of 60 buildings (and is about the same geographical area as my hometown, State College), and I live within sight of Samsung, Cisco, Canon, and within close walking distance to Sun Microsystems HQ (though it’s now Oracle). I often try to take the time to look around and consider what a wonderful opportunity this is for a lowly aspiring code monkey like myself to be given.
Some Cisco CEO’s Ferarri outside building 6.
At the same time, however, I’m trying very hard to gear up as much as possible to make that big trip over the Pacific to 東邦大学 (Tohoku University) in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture. I’ve been studying the language in what free time I can find out here; after completing Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji Part 1 (finished before I got out here, which was awesome!) I am now much more confident in my venture to learn to read, and eventually speak. If you are unfamiliar with that series, I definitely recommend checking it out. Those crazy 漢字 seem a lot less intimidating when you’re close friends with 2048 of them. Being able to write and knowing what they mean makes learning their readings and general sentence structure much more fun; currently I’m working on the smart.fm Core 2000 series and 2001 Kanji Odyssey, in addition to looking through comics and websites and with the help of god-like Anki every inch of the way. I think in these past two weeks I’ve put on 250+ words to my vocabulary, which is an okay rate as far as I’m concerned, would definitely like to start putting in more from here on out.
I really do love the way the kanji work together to form words. When by themselves they’ll mean one thing, but when multiple are put together they’ll turn into something different (sometimes completely different), but still logical. For example:
本屋（ほにや） means book store. 本 + 屋 = book + roof.
上手（じょうず） means skilled. 上 + 手 = above + hand.
And I could go on and on, but you get the idea. I was thinking about pressing on to RTK2 to learn the readings of the kanji, but learning them in context with sentences, or just by SRSing words seems a lot more fun and seems to be working so far. I am also just starting to be able to guess at the readings of some compound kanji words just from prior experience with other ones; it’s pretty cool! For example I figured out the correct reading of 人口問題 (じんこうもんだい) after a minute of staring thanks to knowing the readings of 人 just because it’s so common, 口 because of 火口 (かこう), 問 thanks to 質問 (しつもん), which I love because it looks like two faces next to each other, and 題 because of宿題. Of course when all was said and done I still had to look the thing up because I have no idea what jinkoumondai means! But you get the idea, and it means population problem, in case you care.
Though I do wish I had more time to study 日本語, because it really is a lot of fun, I do not regret working out here at all. To anyone who is starting out in the CSE/IST related fields, I would definitely recommend checking out Cisco. The internship is incredibly well run and organized, and the working environment is just awesome. In just two weeks I’ve learned so much stuff that would have been pretty much impossible to learn otherwise, and I hope to continue doing so for the rest of the summer.
If you ever want to talk Japanese study or culture, or computers and tech, hit me up at ems5311 on gmail or google talk.
Take it easy,
Erich S.
Location: Cisco Building 22, San Jose CA