Moving Process Complete!
This morning I went and got my California driver's license. Unlike registering my car, this process was cheap - only 12 bucks. But it was a little trickier; I have a very old copy of my birth certificate (I presume it's the one the hospital actually handed my parents when I was born), and it's rather faded. The woman helping me had to check with her supervisor to make sure it was okay, or something. (Maybe this is a clue that I should order a new one just to be safe.) Then I had to take the written exam, which consists of 36 questions and you have to get at least 31 of them right. Of course, many of these are quite trivial; questions like, what is the maximum speed you can go under certain circumstances? And if you answer '10 MPH' when the answer should be '15 MPH', then you get it wrong, which isn't logically sensible. Go figure.
Anyway, I got four questions wrong, so I passed. (Yes, one of the ones I got wrong seems to contradict what the handbook you use to study from states.) I had my picture taken, and they handed me a photoless ID, telling me the photo ID would arrive in the mail in about 4 weeks. Geez, even Wisconsin basically hands you the photo ID on the spot! But otherwise the whole process was quite efficient and took about 45 minutes. (Making an appointment is definitely the way to go!)
I think once my photo ID arrives I will go get myself a passport, so that I have a redundant form of photo ID. I haven't actually used a passport in over ten years, but you never know...
So now I've pretty much finished all the major tasks I needed to take care of when I moved out here. I still have minor things to do like actually putting my new plates on my car, and closing my Fullfeed account (Fullfeed is really dragging their feet on setting up forwarding info for my mail and Web pages), and of course now there's the looming Second Move. But overall, it's good to have finally reached an endpoint. And to think it only took four and a half months from when John called me to suggest I apply for the job!
I'm finding learning about our QA organization to be quite interesting. It's quite a bit looser than what I'd been exposed to at Epic, although I suspect Epic's QA is as tight as it is largely out of self-defense. I think I'll be given a lot of leeway to have input into evolving out QA process, although the focus of my own QA efforts are paradoxically outside the mainline functional QA efforts. I think the bottom line here is that in many ways I'll be able to define my own job. Which was basically clear when I started (albeit not in so many words), but now that I have more of a feel for how the group is actually set up, the concept has a lot more meaning.
I've been at Apple for about two months. I have at least two major pieces of knowledge I need to gain in the near future to really feel like I have a handle on the nuts and bolts of my work environment, and then I've really got to move into self-motivation mode. It's becoming clear to me where I'll get direction and where I won't, and I feel like I'm developing a fairly good relationship with the developers, and that's probably as good a starting point as I can ask for.
It was fun. I'm making progress. It's slow, but oh well.
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