It has been a pretty tight week so far. Luckily my hotel is closer to my office, at least I don’t have to worry about getting lost. Talking about getting lost, people here use GPS heavily. The cab driver, when I came from the airport to the hotel, didn’t know where Holiday Inn was in Hillsboro. He asked me the address, entered that in to his Nuvi..bingo…he took the shortest possible route to my hotel. Pretty impressive!

Unfortunately, Hertz guys didn’t give me a GPS unit. Instead, they gave me 836 WMDs. Don’t believe me? Look at the picture of my car.

Car which I use for transporting WMDs :)

I am planning to make a fortune selling these to North Korea. ;)

BTW, this is the route I take daily to my office. It looks far, but is actually only ~3 miles.

Route To Intel JF Campus from Holiday Inn Express

Knut Grimsrud Since the group I have come here to meet/work with is one of those *pure* Research groups in Intel, every body here holds on an average 15 patents. Kinda overwhelming! But, it is quite fun to see all those great guys I have only heard of. Knut Grimsrud, the person sitting in my opposite cube is the director of Intel Storage Architecture group — he looks so laid back and cool that you won’t believe he holds such a high and important position! He has written one of the best sellers in Amazon on SATA. He is also one of the Intel fellows, which is a very high position in Intel’s technical ladder. In Intel, if you want to grow technically, you become a Principle Engineer, a Sr. PE, a Fellow and then a senior Fellow in that order. Pretty impressive accomplishment, but still I saw Knut to be a down-to-earth guy; Couldn’t stop thinking about some of the so-called TLs in Intel India.