First days at JPL

I arrived at JPL Wednesday morning and so far the experience has surpassed all my expectations.
JPL orientation was in the Karman auditorium which also the JPL museum. After that I had lunch with my mentor, Rich Rieber. Rich as an awesome guy and a very smart engineer. He has a lot of energy and excitement for what he does, it's almost scary.
I've been learning the ropes of how to fly a spacecraft and its going very fast! The TLAs (Three Letter Acronymns) are daunting, worse than anywhere I have every been. NASA actually has an acronymn lookup tool on the intranet for employees. The Aerospace lingo is mostly new to me so I've been learning a lot about telemetry and attitude control, engine burns and antenna communication, yada yada.. it's all rocket science.
The NASA flight ops and test bench computers are Solaris workstations running CDE which takes me back to the HPUX days. Yeah it's old but hell, it works. The people at JPL are incredibly smart and I feel very honored to be working with them. I've been sucking up information like a shopvac and so far have been doing a good job at keeping up with the lingo and n-million acronymns.
My position has me working all over lab (JPL campus) and my main desk is in the SAF (Spacecraft Assembly Facility) testbed lab. This place is awesome! Upstairs is where the Mars Science Laboratory is being built, totally cool! Check out the video I took from the observatory. The campus is built on the side of a mountain so there is a lot of hill climbing to get to and from buildings.
I was lucky enough to have our Ground Data Systems engineer take me into the Mars Phoenix flight operations room and snap a few pics, that was like a dream come true!
This week is already over for me, I work 9 hours mon-fri and have every other Friday off; this Friday is a day off. Some of the guys and gals from the dorms are going to go explore Pasadena and LA this weekend, it should be a blast.

More pictures on the web:
http://picasaweb.google.com/dan.isla/JPL2008