Inspire…

One of the coolest lessons learned so far is the ability to work in a small business atmosphere with the financial support of a large corporation. I have tried to do the whole spam email thing here in the morning for chocolate croissants, but when you sit only 2 feet away from the every single AE, you kinda lose the surprise. I also sit very close to CSRs and ISRs where I have learned extensively about what roles they play in the process of technical support. The closeness of this branch or family I should say is incredible. NI Italy has a very similar department structure/segmentation as corporate. If you can imagine taking 60 people here at NI Italy and asking them to maintain the structure of a 3000 employee company, then you are going to be asking for a hand full. Granted, NI Italy does not have an R&D segment yet, but they still provide feedback to R&D and are always looking for continuous improvement. I have also taken some pictures from the upper patio of our office in
Milan. If you look to the North, you can see the Swiss Alps:

And if you look South, you can see part of downtown and the twin towers of Vodafone. If you could imagine combining Sprint, Verizon, and Cingular then you would have Vodafone. Every single cell phone over here uses a sim card you buy from Vodafone that you have to continually recharge every month or so.. kinda obnoxious

And if you look really close at our adjoining neighbors, a group of homeless people have constructed a shack where I have seen some of the strangest behavior.

Speaking of strange behavior, I had an interesting run in with my English to Italian teacher today. Apparently, she was sipping on grandpa’s old cough syrup before she showed up for lessons. Unfortunately, I am more interested in learning Italian than drinking lemonchelos (Italian liquor) with my teacher at 5 o’clock in the afternoon so I will have to find a new teacher.

Other than that, things are running like a finely tuned machine over here. I’m excited about some additional training we have planned next week on LV RT and FPGA. I hope everyone is having fun back in
Austin and can’t wait to see everyone!