Today is our first real day of doing work in Pittsburgh. We don’t have much time to “settle into a groove”. We are going from “zero to one hundred” practically overnight. Today we got set up with an office in the bowels of UPMC Shadyside from which we will be working for the next several months.
We don’t have Internet access from the hospitals but we do have phone lines in the office that will allow us to dial up to our AOL account to get Internet access. This makes doing our work extremely cumbersome. But that is just the beginning.
We are equipped with a limited amount of physical computing equipment while in Pittsburgh. We have two Compaq Proliant 800 servers (each a Pentium III 500) that are being used for all development and we have two Hewlett-Packard Brio desktops (Celeron 433, 64MB, Windows NT 4 Workstation) that we have to use for all of our non-server work. This wouldn’t be bad but we have only two monitors which leaves us in a pretty tight situation. Andy will be stuck carrying a monitor back and forth from the apartment to the office many times over the next several months.
My parents left in the morning to head back home. For dinner Andy and I drove downtown and walked around for a little while to learn where we were and what Pittsburgh had to offer. We stopped at a small pizza shop near the confluence of the rivers to eat our first real meal of the project in Pittsburgh.