The Good Life

lordspaz @ 2008-07-18T09:24:00

2008-07-18T16:25:11Z

Here's the bridge segment from yesterday's post. Apparently somebody loves Gina.

lordspaz @ 2008-07-17T09:13:00

2008-07-17T16:38:27Z

Yesterday I jumped off a 35 ft bridge.

A bunch of interns went on a kayaking trip around Lake Union. I'm still sore from that. At the end of this trip, we came to an unfinished section of highway bridge. It started a few hundred yards on land, went out over the water, and then abruptly stopped. At the high point of this bridge, it was 35 feet off the ground, and the water was probably around 20 feet deep.

The intern coordinator (basically, our nanny) was not thrilled about this. Apparently last year on an intern outing, they'd gone down a "lazy river" that abruptly turned into rapids. Everybody had been told that they had to get out before the rapids, but apparently some group of interns didn't pay attention, and accidentally went rafting - in an inner tube :). So, the coordinator probably wanted to avoid losing any more interns.

I watched a few people climb out of their kayaks, walk 1/4 mile to the end of the bridge, walk 1/4 mile back to the apex, and then fly over. It was a solid 5 seconds of free-fall. It looked like the most dangerous thing I've ever seen. No way was I doing that.

Then, I saw Alex, who I feel this constant urge to compete with for some reason, jump.

No way was I going to let him out-macho me.

Still, I hesitated. That bridge was awfully high, and I could probably let Alex win this round. I don't have to win all the rounds, right? Just most of them?

So my kayak was parked next to my friend Jessica's kayak. Jessica had no swimsuit, and didn't seem the slightest bit interested in jumping off the bridge. So, in a weak effort to regain my machismo, although I'm not sure how I thought this would make me more manly, I joked "Hey Jessica, I'll jump if you do it." There, at least I'm braver than the chick.

"Okay."

Well, shit.

So, out of the kayak I went, scrambling up to the shore. Stripped out of my shoes, walked barefoot half a mile through gravel and broken glass to get to the apex. The whole time I was on that walk I was thinking "You can still bail. They'll rib you a bit, but no big deal. You don't need to impress these people or anything." But despite how afraid I was, I actually really wanted to jump.

I'm afraid, like terrified, of heights. I had a hard time looking out of the St. Louis arch. Stuff like the Space Needle doesn't bother me, it's too high for me to realistically feel like I could fall. But moderate heights... man. So I figured jumping off this bridge would be a great way to face this fear.

So I make it to the apex. That bridge is an awesome commitment device, by the way. If you want to chicken out, it's a half mile walk of shame, barefoot through glass and gravel.

A couple of people are ahead of us waiting to jump. Jessica glanced over the edge, and didn't even flinch. I glanced over the edge, and couldn't stop glancing. I just stared down at the water. That 35 foot drop looks a whole lot higher when you're looking down it than when you're looking up it.

Jessica was ahead of me. She nonchalantly hopped over the side.

I waited about thirty seconds, then suddenly found myself in free fall. I have no idea how I forced myself over that ledge.

I hate to sound cliche, but those 5 seconds of free fall took forever. About halfway down I thought "Man, I should've hit by now." Then, I became very afraid, and yelled "OH SHI--," and got cut off by the impact with the water.

Once in the water, I tried to swim upwards as fast as I could. I hadn't got a good breath of air (thanks to the yelling "OH SHIT" thing), so I was kinda panicky. But then I broke the surface, and started to swim for shore.

I was thrilled. That was incredibly awesome. Best 5 seconds of my life.

Once I hit shore, I pulled myself out, and immediately was incredibly nauseous. I didn't throw up, but I came pretty close.

And I spent the rest of that day thinking about that jump. I felt so alive.

lordspaz @ 2008-07-13T10:52:00

2008-07-13T17:54:19Z

Awesome rant against the anti-intellectual movement in the US, from Esquire of all places. Yet Another Reason to Expatriate.

http://www.mywire.com/pubs/Esquire/2005/11/01/1037893?page=1

lordspaz @ 2008-07-12T17:12:00

2008-07-13T00:20:48Z

Well, some pretty long boring spots in the past few weeks, mostly me flailing about trying to find a new videogame to play. I'm seriously considering WoW again. But this weekend was pretty cool.

Yesterday I went sailing for the first time. We had a 4 person crew of interns plus an instructor on a J/24. It was a blast, but a lot more physically demanding than I'd expected - I worked the jib most of the time, which meant a *lot* of hauling on sheets. But it was one of the least intellectually demanding jobs, which was kind of refreshing. I could get into that kind of thing.

Immediately afterwards I went back to the conference room at work that my team had rented out for the ICFP. Me and one other member worked all night on our lightning round submission, after the other team members took off. I'm still pretty exhausted; I only took a 4 hour nap today. The contest is pretty crappy, though; I guess 2006 is going to stand out as a high point in ICFP problems for a long time to come.

Now, a nice relaxing weekend.

lordspaz @ 2008-06-30T22:34:00

2008-07-01T05:39:37Z

Spent the evening eating dinner with Mary's family, and then convinced them to play Pandemic. We lost really fast the first time, due to some bad draws; but we won the second time, with about a round to spare. That game is pretty luck-happy, but very fun. I felt like I was manhandling the other players some of the time, though; I should really chill more. That's the downside to co-op games; I tend to be more assertive than other players, and wind up running things too much to let others have fun (although I think they enjoyed the game this time).

Our GPS is now multiple personalities, and one of those personalities is Glados. It's awesome. I'm making a note here: huge success. I wonder how hard it is to make your own voice files?

Mid-term evaluations are due for my internship, even though it's more like a 1/3 evaluation for me (I have about a 14 week internship). My project is kind of end-loaded, so I don't have a lot of accomplishments yet. Oh well.

lordspaz @ 2008-06-29T21:28:00

2008-06-30T04:38:32Z

Wow - busy weekend. Mary's mom and brother were in from out-of-town, so Friday I took them out to dinner and hung out at some parks with them. I stumbled across a rock-climbing wall, but it turned out to be a pretty hard one - I've never rock climbed before, and I was definitely not making it up this one. Then we found some bike races and watched those for awhile.

Saturday I bailed and left Mary to show her family around; I watched Life on Mars, which turns out to be a really good show, if slightly cliche and melodramatic. The portrayal of Sam's "coma" state, and how it interacts with the world around him, is really interesting. They tend to beat you over the head a bit with the themes. The ending is really awesome, though.

I also tried to practice for the ICFP, but I don't currently have a Linux box around. I was going to practice by working on the 2007 ICFP in C++; but trying to develop C++ on windows is basically impossible. Visual Studio is sadly the best IDE for it that I've seen (besides vim), and I don't have a copy up here. So a friend of mine suggested VMWare, which is what I'm working on installing now. We'll see how that goes. I supposed I could always dual-boot...

Today we went to downtown Seattle. Driving around was a nightmare; there was a gay pride parade going on, so they had a bunch of streets blocked off, and I'd never been there before anyways, and the street closures made my GPS worthless... wound up paying too much for parking, and then staying over our alloted time anyways (which we didn't get fined for, thankfully).

The Space Needle was pretty cool. Reminded me a lot of the CN Tower, but shorter. The view was *way* better though. The mountains on the horizon, Rainier looming up out of the haze, Puget Sound and downtown Seattle... just awesome.

After that we went to the Science Museum (not the Science fiction museum). It was like the Omniplex on Oklahoma, only a little bigger. It was built around the arches. Typical science museum stuff; I beat Neil (Mary's bro) at huge chess, despite a stupid move costing me my queen. I need to play that game more.

Now, I'm totally exhausted.

lordspaz @ 2008-06-26T22:38:00

2008-06-27T05:41:24Z

Wow - long work day today. Spent a lot of time writing code, and screwing around with parallelizing SVD. Wrote a bunch of code that is now useless.

Joey mentioned I might be able to work with Gaurav and him on large-scale machine learning. That actually sounds really interesting to me.

Off to bed now.

lordspaz @ 2008-06-24T12:42:00

2008-06-24T19:50:38Z

Wow - long update gap. Sorry about that.

Not much to report. Let's see, my plane still has aileron jitter I can't get rid of. I got a flash cart for my DS. I put together a PocketCiv (solitaire civ-like board game) set. I've watched a lot of television - I watched Garth Marenghi's Darkplace and Man to Man with Dean Learner. Mary and I watched the first season of Lost. I also finally saw There Will Be Blood, which was pretty good. I started on Life on Mars as well, but I'm having a hard time getting into it. Mostly because the main character played The Master on Doctor Who, and I can't get him out of that role. And because the show is really cliche.

Work is going pretty well. My team launched its products last Friday and today, Trends for Websites and Ad Planner (currently invite-only). The first just gives you traffic numbers for websites; the latter gives you demographic information as well. I'm working on improving our traffic numbers.

Paul Crider for President

2008-06-14T02:02:37Z

Well, I know who *I'm* voting for.

lordspaz @ 2008-06-10T23:35:00

2008-06-11T06:35:58Z

Interestingly, after the previous post I got Salmonbotted. I didn't know that existed. I'm not sure what it's for, but it's an amusing idea.

lordspaz @ 2008-06-10T23:06:00

2008-06-11T06:27:00Z

Board games! Tonight was board game night, so I drove over the other office around 7:00 to play. After a bit of waiting around, we played a quick game of Gargon, which was a fun little card game with some interesting mechanics.

Then I finally had the opportunity to play BGG Game Number 5, Acquire.

I'd been wanting to play it for a long time. Basically, you have a grid that represents the world of investing. You play tiles on it (similar to scrabble) to show areas that have been developed. When two tiles connect, you make a company and get a share in it. When companies connect, they merge, and the smaller company gets bought out - its shareholders get lots of money, but the company goes poof! and the larger company grows in size. So, you make money by having stock in smaller companies that get bought out; but your final score is a combination of your cash on hand (which is a pretty major part of the score) and the stock you have in the remaining companies. Bigger companies are worth more. So it's an interesting balancing act - diversification is key. Took us about 2 hours.

To round off the night we played Royal Turf, another fun little race game, but it was by Reiner Knizia. Without going into it too deeply, you bet on various horses and then take turns moving them around the track. Took about half an hour, and was quite enjoyable, except I bet on things other people didn't bet on, so I got screwed over.

Work today was alright; I finally banged out some goals for the summer. They're a little more mathematically oriented than I'd like, but I guess that's what I get for putting myself into this position. Oh well, Matlab is really letting me down on this dataset (it's way too large for it to handle), so I'll probably have to write code to do the functionality I need anyways. More MapReduces FTW!

Still thinking about what I want to do regarding grad school - I've got about three options worth considering:

1) finish my PhD - the default.
2) do 1 more year of grad school and get a Master's, then get a real job
3) drop out now

3 is mostly in there for completeness's sake. If I had to play a mixed strategy, it'd probably go 30% - 60% - 10% right now. If I do either 1 or 2, I'm definitely going to have to get on a different project. The problem is figuring out what that would be, and who I could work with on it...

I'm not sure how to talk to Geoff about any of that really either. The best thing to do is probably to be completely honest with him, but I don't want to screw him over either - he's put a lot of money into me so far, and I don't want him to lose that investment. I'm sure he realizes that funding a student is a gamble, though. I'd just rather him not remember me as one of the gambles that didn't pay off.

The big question is obviously: what does a PhD do for me that a Master's doesn't, and what does a Master's do that a BS doesn't? Assume time out of grad school is more valuable than time in grad school (which may not be the case, but I think it probably is for me). The answer at Google seems be "it doesn't make a difference, except maybe at the very beginning." I'm not sure how true that is. Of course, it probably makes a difference elsewhere.

We'll see if I keep assigning such a high utility to non-grad school work after I've been at this for a few more weeks. And maybe switching projects would be sufficient to keep me interested. And there's the whole "everybody's first year sucks" thing. But I find all the conferences and paper-writing and talks and so forth really boring, and I doubt that will change.

As Chris mentioned today, I wouldn't be the first person to drop out of grad school to work at Google. And I've got a ton of time to think about it more, and further refine my objective function.

lordspaz @ 2008-06-10T13:17:00

2008-06-10T20:18:31Z

This just in, courtesy of my cubemate: Google Reader responds to the Konami code. It responds with ninjas.

That is all.

lordspaz @ 2008-06-08T22:21:00

2008-06-09T05:40:48Z

This weekend has been all about airplanes. Yesterday I decided to head out and pick up a new plane to fly. Of course, I needed to buy a ton of equipment, and a ton of pieces. It wound up being way more expensive than I thought it would be, but luckily almost all of it is reusable. The most expensive part was my radio. I got a top-of-the-line one, since I can use the same radio more or less forever. It's a Spektrum DX6i. It uses spread-spectrum broadcasting, so I don't have to worry about interference, and it's highly programmable.

I also picked up this plane. It's a lightweight 3D flyer. I'm hoping it'll work in reasonably rough wind, but since it's only 5oz it might not. I wanted to get an ARF kit (almost ready to fly) kit this time, since my last kit was a ready-to-fly (RTF). I thought it'd give me a better idea about how planes work, but I never realized how time consuming it would be to assemble! The box said 3-4 hours, and I suppose that's *possible* if you're really good at putting planes together. But since this was the first one I'd assembled, and my first "crafting" project in a long time, I made several mistakes which cost me extra time. And everything still isn't quite perfect with the plane. But at least it might fly now.

The biggest problem is that the ailerons shake. One thread I found says that this might be due to the large mass of the wing sections; the servo pushes the aileron, but it's not meant to handle that much weight, so the aileron goes a tad too far; so the servo overshoots and pulls it back, and again it goes too far... it eventually dampens out, but in the meantime the ailerons "flap" back and forth. I don't think that'd be great to have happen in flight, but then again maybe the air pressure would dampen it out immediately. Not sure if I want to take the risk.

Other than that, there's a couple of nicks in the foam, and some damage where I accidentally glued the plane to some cardboard (I was trying to figure out how long the cyanoacetate took to set, and I overestimated). And the control rod for the elevator is a bit too close to the horn, so I might need to chop a bit off the end and reseal it. I'm wondering if resealing the aileron arms might help a little too; the rods are joined to the control horn by heat-shrink tubing, which seems like a great idea until you realize that you have to shrink it with a soldering iron, b/c a real heat gun is going to damage your plane. I also nicked the plane with the soldering iron, which burned a surprisingly big chunk out of it - but it was a decorative little curve to the plane, shouldn't make a difference.

This whole thing turned out to be way more complicated than I expected, but also more fun than I expected. I'm looking forward to taking it out for a spin tomorrow.

Also, my friend Joseph is crashing with us for a few days until he can move into his summer place. There are a ton of CMU people up here this summer. And we ate dinner at the Black Angus Steakhouse, which had some pretty awesome salmon and cheesecake.

lordspaz @ 2008-06-06T11:35:00

2008-06-06T18:43:50Z

Sorry about the update gaps. Busy week!

Work has been fun. Yesterday I wrote a small MapReduce that tore through 20 gigs of data in about 5 minutes. It used 20 machines in the process. The code was about 50 lines, and took me a few hours to read the relevant documentation (very little time to write). I felt awesome.

Also got Age of Conan finally. UPS apparently couldn't find our apartment, even though the postal service hasn't seemed to have any problems. After a couple of days of screwing with them, I eventually wound up on the phone with the distribution center trying to give them directions. The guy I was talking to actually *punched in my address to Google maps* and printed a satellite photo with my apartment circled and gave it to the driver.

AoC is pretty fun. I miss WoW a lot, but I have faith that AoC will wind up better. I'm enjoying my Priest(ess) of Mitra the most so far, although I've poked around a few other classes for a few levels, and the Herald of Xotli seems fun too. The Priest is a very run-of-the-mill priest, which I enjoy. The Herald is a cross between a melee fighter and a magic user. She carries a claymore and can turn into a demon, and she breathes fire. Awesome. I haven't cared for the tanking classes much, though I might like the dark templar - I need to try them.

The AoC combo system isn't that big a deal. It just makes moves require a few extra button presses, and if I had a G15 I'd just macro it.

I really like the view of the lake from my office, even on rainy days (which all days in Seattle seem to be).

The food up here hasn't been anywhere near as good as the food in MV was, but supposedly it'll improve once we get a regular catering contract.

Anybody else see Amazon down today? Somebody got fired over that.

I played Go against Hubbe (my host) yesterday. He beat the shit out of me. It was worse than the Holocaust. Toward the end of the game, some other guy came over and tried to give me hints. I really find that annoying. I wonder if I do the same thing when I'm playing eurogames?

lordspaz @ 2008-06-03T21:52:00

2008-06-04T05:03:29Z

Another rainy day in Seattle. Nothing really interesting at work today. Screwed around with UPS about delivering my copy of Age of Conan some more. Supposedly they're going to deliver it tomorrow. At one point, while screwing around with them, I was talking to their local dispatcher about where my apartment was. I gave him pretty explicit directions, then he punched my address into maps.google.com and looked at the satellite photos... eventually I was able to nail down the location for this guy. I can't believe that a UPS driver cannot find my house. It's ridiculous.

Went with Mary to Taphouse Grill after work. They were kind of expensive, but they had a good beer list. I got a Redhook ESB, which isn't exactly top of the line, but was still really good. Bitter and hoppy. It's a local beer.

Then, we watched last week's BSG.

OMGWTFBBQ was that episode about. It was way too fast, way too much happened, and it was horribly disjointed and written. None of the characters behaved believably, and the whole thing felt like "I want these things to happen but can't figure out how to get there in one episode, which is all I have time for." Horrific writing, like something from the bad days in season 3. This episode really needed to be like 4 episodes. And the whole cat thing was retarded.

lordspaz @ 2008-06-02T20:15:00

2008-06-03T03:23:48Z

OMFG I have found the best Google job perk ever:

There's a fully loaded MAME emulator arcade cabinet.

It's an arcade cabinet, with joysticks and buttons. But you can select *any* arcade game every created, more or less. It's totally awesome.

In other news, I'm back in Bellevue, at my desk in Lakeview Plaza. I can see the lake from here; it's pretty awesome. I met with my mentor(s) today and discussed some of the work I'm going to be doing, and screwed around with Tech for awhile about my computer.

Another effing awesome perk: I have a 30" monitor. SO HUGE.

Wish I could talk about the work I'm going to be doing - it's pretty interesting. That's really the biggest downside I've seen to working at Google so far.

Ate dinner at a little hamburger joint called Kidd Valley - reminds me a lot of Braum's, but without the ice cream.

Not much interesting to report about the flight back from San Jose, except I sat next to two uber-stereotypical teenage girls, who were utterly amazed that I could solve a Rubik's cube. They were pretty annoying.

Still no Age of Conan, thanks to UPS not being able to figure out my address. Also, my computer has what are clearly graphics card problems, but I cannot for the life of me diagnose them. It's not overheating, and it's unlikely to be a bad card or drivers...

One bad thing about being this far north: my circadian rhythms are all thrown off. It's 8:20 and it's still really light outside; my body is never going to get enough sleep at night.

The thing that worries me most so far is that I've been here for 11 hours, and only spent about an hour of that not working. I am nowhere near this interested in my grad school work. Either I'll get less interested and start working less, and then go back and finish grad school, or I'll stay this interested and drop out. Only time will tell.

lordspaz @ 2008-05-31T10:01:00

2008-05-31T17:02:44Z

Here is a pretty cool article about Google's datacenters, to give you some idea of the scale they operate on.

lordspaz @ 2008-05-30T23:14:00

2008-05-31T06:21:59Z

Not much after lunch today. Worked a little bit, went to the Friday all-hands meeting. Apparently they showed Wargames and had a panel with the producer and writer of the movie to celebrate the 25th anniversary. A bunch of people got cool hats that said "DEFCON 1." I wish I'd stuck around for it.

Instead, I went to an Italian place for dinner with Mike and an undergrad named Danny. Reasonable food. Google doesn't provide dinner on Fridays, alas.

Hung out in the hot tub with some of the other interns. We talked about our mixed feelings about the MTV orientation overall; badly organized, and could've been a lot better. Lots of "waiting time," which was for the local interns to hang out with their teams, but left the interns from other offices twiddling our thumbs. They were clearly not equipped to handle 110 interns.

On the other hand, hanging out at the Googleplex was awesome. Life there is pretty pimp, and is way cooler than living in one of the "distributed offices." It was a great experience to spend time there. So overall, I guess it averages out. High on the fun quotient, low on productivity.

Now, to watch some x-files before bed. Tomorrow, back to Seattle. Then the real work begins.

lordspaz @ 2008-05-30T13:20:00

2008-05-30T20:25:45Z

Let me tell you about lunch.

We looked up today's menu, and it was something called Hot Pot - it seemed like a mongolian BBQ type of thing, so about 7 or 8 of us interns decided to head over there. We walked out the door and hopped on some bikes (since it was relatively far) that were sitting around. We biked over there as a pack, which is a pretty cool feeling, let me tell you.

We arrive, and have to wait in line for a table. Then we got huge heaping piles of raw meats, seafood, and veggies, and threw them into a couple of pots of boiling water on our table, and then pulled the cooked food out and ate it. It was pretty cool, even though I basically just ate beef and shrooms.

After lunch, we wandered back outside, grabbed bikes, and biked back to the office. The bikes we used for this are the general Google bikes that just sit in piles outside the main doors. It's a pretty cool arrangement.

I've definitely got mixed feelings about going back to the Seattle office, which I guess is the whole point of bringing us down to MTV.

lordspaz @ 2008-05-29T22:43:00

2008-05-30T16:00:36Z

Note: I got a really weird sense of deja vu while writing this - something about scrolling through the PDF, and the shape of the hotel room, and my posture, and some vague memory of having had a dream of this exact situation before, and thinking "No, that will never happen." I'm not a superstitious guy (of course), but I get the feeling I've had a dream about an exact situation probably once a week.
Some initial thoughts from the first part of the D&D4 Player's Handbook:

Wow they're going casual. They're also really trying to cash in on WoW. They've made the tank/dps/heal relationship explicit in their rules. I think this is good on the whole - having some idea of what to expect game-play wise from your class, and an explicit listing of what your combat strengths are, has got to be helpful. It took me a long time to realize that rogues were expected to be heavy damage dealers back when I first started reading this kind of thing.

They've also simplified out the alignment system, so it's not the old (lawful - neutral - chaotic) (good - neutral - evil) matrix anymore. I understand why they did that: they're trying to streamline things, and characters with complex motivations are much harder to play. Lawful evil, chaotic good, and the various neutral alignments are gone now - they were always the hardest to play.

The "threat" mechanic is built around "marking," where tanks mark enemies they attack. Being marked by the tank means you get hefty penalties for doing things that don't involve the tank. Interesting way to handle it.

Healing surges seem to be a big deal; all the healing mechanics are built around them. They're basically self-heals that you can do personally. Healing classes just make it easier for you to do them, ie. without consuming an action. I like this.

Sorcerers are now Warlocks, and behave very differently. Hooray for Faustian pacts! Also, the whole spell memorization by level thing is gone. I hated that system.

Characters now level to 30, and the 10-20 and 20-30 level ranges are meant to be very different from the 1-10 and each other, becoming progressively more epic. The concept of ascension is even explicitly laid out in the game - and I really <3 ascension.

lordspaz @ 2008-05-29T21:50:00

2008-05-30T04:52:40Z

Apparently the 4th edition D&D rules leaked today; I procured a copy. Is it weird that I really enjoy reading rules systems, even though I probably won't ever have the opportunity to participate in a D&D campaign? I've run Star Wars and Shadowrun in the past, but frankly I'm not a very good DM; I'd love to participate in a campaign sometime instead of running one. But mostly I like reading the rules. I think it tickles some crazy OCD part of me, or maybe it's my love of mechanism design problems - how can I exploit this rule system?

lordspaz @ 2008-05-29T21:13:00

2008-05-30T04:31:42Z

I got my username fixed from the typoed version of my name that they'd given me to my initials. I am now apm@google.com, if anybody wants to email me :). But I won't have that after the end of the internship. It was a huge hassle to get my username changed, and they blew away all my email and calendars and settings to do it... apparently they can transfer everything, but it takes much longer to do it, probably longer than I'd invested in getting things set up. So I spent several hours resetting my account today, and several hours before that waiting around without computer access.

Google food is probably not for me. I just keep eating hamburgers and hot dogs and cereal and Pepsi, despite all the "wonderful variety" they have. It might suck once I get back to Seattle and they don't have guaranteed hamburgers/hot dogs anymore.

I attended more classes today. Sadly I'm attending a whole bunch of software engineering classes (how to use the infrastructure), and I'm almost certainly not going to be doing any *real* coding, based on the impressions I've gotten from my mentor(s) so far. I still haven't even gotten to look at my data. Tomorrow is looking to be kind of empty schedule-wise, and I've exhausted almost all the snooping around I can do. I even found a page talking about the kind of resumes Google is looking for (it was just the opinion of one recruiter). Unfortunately, the stuff in there was all pretty obvious.

I got locked out of my hotel room today, and when I went down the desk there was a Rubik's cube on the counter. I thought it might've fallen out of my bag - after all, cubing isn't the world's most popular sport. I said something like, "Oh, did my cube fall out of my bag?" The chick behind the counter said, "No, we just kind of accumulate Google Rubik's cubes around here." This girl looks like one of your typical sorostitutes, so I joked, "Oh, are you any good?" She responded, "My best time is 1:57, but I got lucky. I need more practice. It's pretty easy once you learn the algorithms." I about died; I can barely break 3 minutes. Put me in my place.

lordspaz @ 2008-05-28T23:17:00

2008-05-29T06:29:55Z

Pretty run of the mill day. Attended some very interesting talks this morning; finally got some word from my mentors on stuff I can start work on. Also began familiarizing myself with Google infrastructure. I'm moderately surprised at what we can and can't see; I can see the source code for almost all of Google's products (although not like logs and data or anything - I'm not in ur inbox reading ur gmail), but all of the ongoing projects are top-secret.

I'm really liking the free food/drink perks, but I'm going to get very fat off it very soon. They've optimally timed dinner to start at 6:00 so that you're incentivized to stick around until then; I think a lot of people tend to leave around 5ish, and the thought of free dinner if they only stick around another hour is probably pretty appealing. Too bad I don't like the vast majority of the food I've seen.

The hotel is using its limo as a shuttle to and from campus, so I'm getting a free limo ride every day :).

I also stopped by the g-store and picked up a load of swag, including a Rubik's cube. It has "Google" printed on the squares on the red side, so you have to make sure that side is oriented correctly w.r.t. the others; this makes the solution space much larger (by removing some symmetries). Of course, you can just ignore these labels, but that makes it look ugly. And this cube is stiffer than my other one; it's added a bunch to my time. I'll probably stick with the old one and use the new one as decoration. I think I hit the two minute mark today on one cube; I got some lucky breaks on that try, but I wasn't timing too closely.

Hung out in the hotel hottub with a couple of engineering grad student interns, then some business undergrad interns showed up. I really like hottubs; my muscles feel great afterwards.

I've noticed that I'm a lot more focused here than I have been at grad school; I definitely function much better when I have a bunch of concrete goals I can pursue than in the free-form "Well what should I be doing?" research environment. Further reinforcement that I may not be cut out for grad school.

More infrastructure talks tomorrow, including style guides, and hopefully I'll start diving into my dataz.

lordspaz @ 2008-05-28T09:43:00

2008-05-28T16:44:23Z

Open call for swag: If anybody wants Google swag, just drop me a line here or by email. Particularly recommended: the Google Rubik's Cube.

lordspaz @ 2008-05-27T17:21:00

2008-05-28T00:47:14Z

Just finished my first day of intern orientation. A lot of waiting around; they had a lot of interns today, way more than they were equipped to handle. I'm staying at the Grand Hotel in Sunnyvale; they have a free cocktail hour from 5 to 7 every night, and limo service to Google. And the room is pretty big; one of the best hotels I've been in. The bathroom is huge.

I'm not sure how much of the Google stuff I'm allowed to talk about, especially in a blog post, so pardon me if this is a bit brief. They actually have a webpage that lists what numbers you're allowed to give to outsiders (search quantity, index size, etc.) They're really xenophobic.

After a lot of waiting, we got to sit through a bunch of OMG GOOGLE IS AWESOME spiels from the HR people. I really don't like HR crap. Then fooding in the *packed* cafeteria. Then more HR crap, and form filling. They managed to thoroughly mangle my username, then tell me the wrong username twice, so it's really screwed up. I need to get it changed if possible.

Part of the reason for the crappiness is that they mixed in the engineering interns with the undergrads and MBAs. The MBAs were disturbingly retarded; I couldn't believe the crap they were conversing about. All sorts of "Oh man I went to this crazy party and dropped some acid and then banged this smokin chick" conversations. I felt really alienated hanging around those guys.

On the limo ride up, though, it turns out that Mike de Rosa was in the car with me, who happens to be a CMU guy who's working at the Pittsburgh office. And he's just as nerdy as I am, and reads a lot of the same books, and he tabletop wargames. And plays Wow. So we had a lot to talk about.

The highlight of the day was the last presentation, from a guy named John Cox. He's an engineer, not an HR chick, so his talk was much more interesting. And he was pure geek, with lots of good nerd jokes and references in his talk. Basically he gave a general engineering-side talk about Google: details about what Google does, the hardware side of things, etc. Lots of good numbers in that talk, and lots about Google's xenophobia. For example, I'm now in possession of a Google Developer Handbook, which has "confidential" written in big letters on the front. It's a detailed guide to how all of the Google infrastructure works, and one of those things other companies (like, say, Microsoft) would love to get ahold of. John said: "Easiest way to get fired is to walk down to Yahoo with that." I feel special :).

Also, John says that Google's chief constraint is manpower. They have more money than they can possibly spend, and almost as much computing power as they need, but they really really need people. I was moderately surprised by that, but it goes a long way to explaining their huge hiring boom. They now have more than 15,000 employees worldwide, and judging by the size of this group of interns (which is only one of their groups of interns this summer) they're hiring strongly.

The big problem for them with hardware is power. I know you've heard about this, but Google has a hard time getting the electricity to power all of their data centers. Hence, they're putting them in buttfuck nowhere Oklahoma and Iowa. Power is by far the biggest deal to them. Their offices in Mtn View are entirely solar-powered. They even built covered parking just so they could put more solar power on top.

This begs the question: why isn't Google getting into the power industry? They claim a lot of it is politics, but if power is really such a big deal, you'd think they'd do more about it.

Also, Google claims to be one of the largest owners of computing power in the world; something like 1/3 of the world's (known) computing power. They think the NSA might have more than them, but maybe not. At one point, back when Google was renting data centers instead of building their own, between them and Yahoo they had purchased *all* of the computing power available in every country with decent IP laws. All of it. That's hardcore.

Overall, I expect to like working here. Except for the xenophobia, everybody seems really cool about stuff, and there's a lot of infrastructure built up to help with projects. I really like the culture. I really like not having to worry about necessities like food and stuff (there's a kitchen right outside my temporary office door with a fridge full of Pepsi). We'll see how I feel after my first day :).

Apparently a big part of this job is going to be learning infrastructure; I start that tomorrow.

G-Swag counter so far:
1 yellow knapsack
1 blue water bottle
1 white towel
1 notebook
1 black t-shirt
4 books: Code Complete, Design Patterns, Python in a Nutshell, and Pragmatic Unit Testing