Katrina Day 1

After my short night, I was really dragging Tuesday morning but excited to find out more about the mission. I had a 15 minute drive down to the main Red Cross warehouse to meet the rest of the Intel team. Of course, thanks to the Austin freeway system, it took about 30.

I signed in with the front desk, had my photo taken for an official Red Cross badge (more on that later), and did intros with the other Intel volunteers. Sites represented included Santa Clara and Folsom (CA), Raleigh (NC), Hillsboro (OR), Chandler (AZ), and Rio Rancho (NM). In general, they were all technical staffers, but I was surprised to learn that some were from the sales force. I wasn't, however, surprised to learn that I was the only finance person. In general, I tried to mumble that part of the intro. "Hi, I'm Matt from mobile chipset *cough*finance*cough* in Santa Clara." Gotta keep my rep, bro. I never did a count, but there were probably about ten Intel volunteers on site. There are others already out "in the field."


After a brief overview from the Intel lead (the Red Cross overview was delayed to tomorrow to wait for a few stragglers arriving tonight), we got a tour of the facility and a highlight of its mission. Then, it was time to get to work. The first job on our to-do list was to unpack, inventory, and load the Red Cross software image onto the thousands of laptops donated by Intel and Dell (although we only worked on Dells today). The unpacking process was very manual labor intensive, but it had to be done. Then, we connected them, 112 at a time, to a private LAN and used Ghost to multicast an image. Then, they were off to get packed for delivery to the hundreds of individual field sites. These PCs primarily get used by the Red Cross for their administrative functions and for evacuee communications (personal email, etc).


A pretty uneventful day, but we did get 700+ PCs ready to go for shipment tomorrow. We have a few hundred more to get through in the morning, and then it'll be time for the next line on the list. As a mere worker bee, I have no clue what that will be, but the Intel lead did say that we would likely eventually be scattering the team out into "the field" to assist with PC and network setup. Sounds like that might happen towards the end of the week.

So far, a pretty dry account of the trip. I'll try to get into some more commentary in my next update, but my lack of sleep last night is really catching up on me....