Interns.

Yesterday I got a chance to help interview several potential compositing interns for a position here at Digital Domain. It was the first time I've been a part of the hiring process, albeit an intern position. Just to give you an idea, each session was about 30 minutes long, and we delved into all aspects of the work we do, and what the intern might be tasked to do over the course of their internship. These phone interviews are a vital step in describing your talents, hopes and dreams to the recruiters as well as senior artists which may be conversing with you. They are also very fluid, and while there are a set of questions I set up to gauge the level of commitment from the intern, they do vary based on the responses that they give. We'll be calling the selected interns this week, for a start in two weeks! It's going to be pretty interesting.

My fancy Drobo (2nd Gen) came last night in the mail, along with two terabytes of storage (effectively one terabyte when used in the system), and it was a cinch to set up. Very plug and play, which I have started to like over time. Basically, you take your SATA II HDs, put them into the drive bays of the Drobo, and use FW800 or USB2.0 to connect it to your computer. From there it's just another external drive recognized by the system. I really like the redundancy it provides, and the simplicity of its upgradability. One of the drawbacks, for me, is the lack of an ethernet connection. This can be solved by buying the DroboShare product, but unfortunately that connects to the Drobo via USB2.0, not FW800. USB2.0 is the bottleneck here. The Drobo itself is very much a JBOD, and the firmware (hardware?) of the product seems to do a good job of providing RAID 5 performance and managing the data redundancy without much user intervention. Here's a review from two years ago that Engadget did with the first gen Drobo.