Shouzer

I check up on Shouzer several times a day, and there has been no activity for almost 2 weeks. That makes me bored, and I suspect that the same holds true for whatever readers we do have. For me personally, I’ve been trying to come up with stories to write about, but I’m drawing a blank. Not much has happened over the last 2 weeks either. Life is settling into a groove, which is nice, but it is not conducive to story-telling.

There are some news articles that have come out recently that I feel are worth mentioning. The first is GM’s quarterly earning release, which is important to me. They lost $15.5 billion last quarter. Ouch. From what I’ve heard, my department won’t be going through any forced layoffs, despite a 20% company-wide reduction in salaried “expenses”. There will be a few people leaving my area through early retirement. I could go for some of that. I’d probably take it if I got the offer.

In much, much better news, the death toll in Iraq in July was at its lowest since 2003. It’s nice to hear some good news coming from that region after years of bad news. Honestly, I have become a bit numb to it. I am at the point where the news of a suicide bombing in Baghdad does little to pull my heartstrings. That is honestly a sad reflection on both me and the situation as a whole, I think.

The other big question I hear a lot is, What exactly do you do at GM? (I think it’s mostly my parents that ask me this.) Well, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure yet, but I am starting to get a grasp of it. I am a controls integration engineer on the 6 speed transmission platform. My group manages the releases of software for these transmissions, and troubleshoots any problems that come up. We are the go-between for the core software people, those who write the code, and the calibrators, those who test and tweak the code in the vehicles. I am mostly on the troubleshooting end of that spectrum.

For example, I am at a plant right now helping with a problem with the transmission output speed. We are getting some noise on the signal related to the sensor that is used to measure said speed. Lots of people from many different groups are involved in the troubleshooting process, but my group is spearheading the effort. It’s what we do. I have a few other responsibilities, including tracking CPU utilization on all of the software releases and handling serial data communication mismatches. Often, a test car will be put together with a hodgepodge of components. Sometimes, the controllers for these components are using different versions of the serial data protocol, and I have to sort that out. I haven’t done too much of this yet as I am not fully trained in this area, but it will become a big part of my job.