Yet another in my series of critiques of my coworkers.

Greg is a true asset to the timing team. He is an excellent programmer, and unlike me, he understands the core timing and EDA infrastructure well. He agreed to debug a problem that we were having last night. In this business people draw up boundaries, assign blame and are rarely willing to help. Greg in sharp contrast gets in, gets his hands dirty, and has a positive upbeat attitude with a slight sardonic overtone (he likes to mimic his coworkers). I went home at like 8:30pm, seeing that there was no more than I could do. When I got into work today I found out that Greg and Alex had solved the problem (which, to my surprise actually wasn't in my code after all). I called Greg with the cover story that I was finding out what I needed to run with the fix (although I already knew), but really with the intent of thanking him for his hard work. To which he responded: don't mention it; that was a fun one.

Update: This entry was about Greg as a cricket fan.

Today, I found out one of my coworkers is a Cricket fan. This, in and of itself is hardly surprising. Many of my fellow software engineers are of Indian origin (as in the sub continent), which is a country which follows the sport avidly. What was strange, is that this coworker of mine is from Pensylvania, which is not known for its interest in the sport.

So they asked me how closely I follow cricket. The answer is not really at all, but what I said was: "The only thing I care is that Australia beat England." Which is sort of true. I've inherrited my mother country's sense of rivalry with the England in an amusing mock sense of the word. I also added "Indian's will tell me that I'm silly, because England sucks at Cricket, but it's still the only thing important to me." I also told them about The Ashes.

Anyway, none of this is directly related to the subject I intended to write about (and the photograph I put up there at the top), except in that all this talk about Australia and Cricket got me to thinking about Australia, America and the fact that I was only naturalized as an American citizen last October. I never thought it would, but my attitudes toward America has changed completely now that I am an American. Even when the politicians do things which I think are wrong, or unethical (I won't get into politics here), I still feel as though, at least in some small way, we are all on the same "side". We are all Americans, for better or worse, and we are all, in this together.