Shanghai Tech Writer

This is my fourth week at NI and I’m still in training! There are so much stuff to learn — software (Lotus, Perforce, HomeSite, FrameMaker, oXygen, PaintShop Pro, FAR, Access, etc…), documentation process, style guides, and everything about LabVIEW including various modules and toolkits.

This week is LabVIEW Basics I training and it’s a 3-day intensive customer education course offered by NI. The class is for customers who have purchased LabVIEW and teach them how to use the software, except all new technical writers also have to attend the class.

What is LabVIEW again? Here’s another attempt to explain LabVIEW.

LabVIEW is a graphical programming software.

How’s that for being short and concise? (I’m still learning what LabVIEW is and does) Basically, LabVIEW is a programming software, like C++ or Pascal, except it’s object-based (graphical) so there are no lines of codes. There are cute little icons, wires, and blocks that you move around and use to build VIs (virtual instruments). These VIs are “virtual” versions of real-life machines that can solve real-life problems without actually building them.

Anyway, the LabVIEW Basics I course offered here at the Shanghai office is taught in Chinese. The textbook is written in Chinese, the PowerPoint slides are in Chinese, and even the LabVIEW software is in Chinese! My mandarin is conversationally fluent, but add some technical jargon and it becomes Arabic to me. I was told beforehand about the language issue so I perused the English version textbook prior to the training. There are about ten chapters and I was able to cover about three before attending the training.

The morning on the first day of training wasn’t too bad because I covered most of the material on my own already. In the afternoon, the instructor skipped chapter three and jumped right into four! From then on, I was completely lost. The instructor went through the slides so fast I was barely able to follow him. I could only imitate what the instructor was doing on the screen. I had four window panes opened on my computer — Chinese version of LabVIEW 8.2 (the version used for the course) and English version of LabVIEW 8.0 (the only English version on the computer). The versions are pretty similar but the layout and placement of the functions are slightly different. Since I wasn’t a “customer”, I had to sit in the back of the classroom (boo…). I couldn’t see the Chinese characters very well from the back so I was making all sort of programming error. While the rest of the class was making functions using the case structure, I had a while loop and was wondering why my VI wasn’t working! And then, the instructor had this lottery VI running (he was demonstrating a tool he built to randomly select students) and all I saw were colorful lights that danced around in a circle. I made one on my screen too except mine didn’t work. I started drawing a Christmas tree and decorated it with some lights. I couldn’t get the lights to dance in circles but at least they flashed sporadically. The instructor came by and asked me what I was doing. Oops.

This morning, the second day of training, I barely sat through an hour of class before I called it quit. I was practically just “decorating” my LabVIEW window with a bunch of little icons that didn’t do a thing! I told the instructor that I’d be much better off going through the training on my own. I have all the English version of the course materials on my computer but the training room had no internet access so I couldn’t remotely connect to my desktop. I left the training room and was happily back in my cubicle reunited with my English-speaking colleagues and my English LabVIEW 8.5 (the most current version). I spent the rest of the day going through the LabVIEW Basics course material. Not easy stuff to cram in three days.

Tomorrow is the last day of training and I believe they are covering hardware-related stuff so I need to be there. I wanted to cover all ten chapters on my own before the training tomorrow but I couldn’t get the VPN to work. I was able to connect to the VPN server but after that, I couldn’t remotely connect to my desktop. Either I forgot my computer name or my computer is hibernating. Boo… Tomorrow is going to be interesting … I hope I won’t fry anything!

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