What do I do?

Last night we had some friends over and I was being queried on what I do during the day. My typical reply is

I'm a computer nerd at Novell

and usually that works. If queried further, I just use my title of Senior Software Engineer on the Core OS team. I then tell them I sit at my desk all day programming the computer. That always gets me off the hook and I don't have to try and explain further.

Not last night.

Last night I kept getting asked more and more what it meant to be a nerd at Novell and what work I really did. Now let me tell you that I don't feel comfortable getting deep into it because my wife has taught me. She knows more than anyone what I do at work, and typically her eyes glaze over about two TLAs into a talk on what I'm doing. She has assured me many, many times that nobody really cares about the deep level of detail of what I'm doing.

Last night I was faced with an intelligent person who might not understand the intricacies of what I'm doing, but definitely understands the overall look at it. And I got stuck. I've been getting better at communication and being able to boil things down and make them understadable. And last night I failed. I couldn't really boil it down. So today I started writing an email describing what I do and maybe with some photos and figured I'd blog it so I could just send the link to anybody who wants to deep end in my world.

Today I'm working on a problem in a piece of code I have worked on for years. I work on communication from one computer to another, and the other computer is answering a question I never asked. So I start looking at this...
and this...
And I correlate it with my C code like this stuff...
and try to find the problem. In this case, it is a problem of the other computer shouting at me when I was waiting it it to finish answering a question I asked before.

But this is what I do at Novell during the week. Hope it's clearer!