Today was my first day at the new job.

For those not in the loop, I've taken Anders' old job - Help Developer for GE Fanuc. I'll be writing online help and documentation for their Intellution products.

Not too much to report at this stage, other than the people seem nice, and I have a heck of a lot of reading to do this week to catch up.

The hardware setup is quite nice too; though I was warned that the tech writers generally get hand-me-down hardware from the developers, it appears I instead got a nice new machine: A P4-2.66GHz with 512MB of RAM. In a few weeks I'll also have a second 19" monitor added to help me be more productive. (It'll be nice to have the applications I'm documenting running on one monitor while I'm documenting them on the other.

One slightly scary aspect of the new job, however, is that I'll have to take Six Sigma certification as a part of the job. In short, Six Sigma is a way of measuring the production process, involving sets of statistics and other mathy stuff like that. Since yours truly never was any good at the maths, the prospect is a little daunting. Nevertheless, my manager assured me that even the salespeople have to take it. So my current mantra is that if a salesperson can pass it, I sure as hell can.

I'm sad that Sandcastle didn't work out. I enjoyed the work I was doing there - especially since it was for such a good cause (preventing kids from smoking). I'm resolute not to give up the gig, however. Despite Sandcastle dropping off the face of the earth, I'm going to do my best to keep at least one contract open at all times. We'll see how it goes. :)