Incoherent Logic

Feelings... and the Zoo

2011-04-17T14:45:00.000-04:00

It's been a long time since I've felt this way. I don't know if it's hormones or what, but I feel overwhelmed, stressed, tired, sickly, unwanted. I don't feel beautiful. I don't feel smart. I don't feel successful. I don't feel special or even particularly notable.

It feels like my health, my work, and my relationships are spinning away, out of control. It's almost an intense anger, coupled with sadness; misdirected in so many directions, but mostly at myself. There's a lot of insecurity, and I'm not sure what can quench it. I wish I were a better person. I wish I weren't so needy. I wish my body would get its act together. I wish I had been more driven, focused.

I imagine a lot of it is psychological, worsened by the physical fatigue. I just want to lay down in a blue, peaceful ocean, with the sunshine streaming down on me. And just float there, worry-free, letting my feelings drop into the water below me and sink away. The best I can do is curl up in bed, and wait for myself to fall asleep.

Writing about how I feel sometimes helps. There's an entire livejournal out there of teenage angst and emotional mood swings, though I thought those times had passed. I think my worst fear of letting out all my negative feelings is that people who care will stop caring, and realize that "being there" is not worth the time or effort. That scares me, so much. The rational part of me scoffs and laughs: "Being an emotional wreck won't get you anywhere; stop being ridiculous."

I wish I had a kitchen right now: cooking is methodical, emotionless. I've always found it a peaceful way to do some personal thinking while being productive, yielding a satisfactory end result. "Productive" is up for debate, certainly; it's been argued to me that purchasing prepared (healthy) food is a better alternative, time always being a cost.

On to a less fragile and emotional part of this post... last Saturday I went to Washington D.C. for a day trip.Friday night at 10:30pm the budget "crisis" was still ongoing, with threat of a government shutdown, which would leave the Smithsonian museums, National Parks, etc. closed. If it was truly an issue over women's reproductive care/Planned Parenthood and whether they deserve federal funding, I will be really annoyed. However, government got its crap pulled together and crisis was averted.

Here are photos from the National Zoo. It's truly a beautiful zoo; I would love to visit again and see the parts I missed.

Entrance; giant pedestrian crosswalk.

Meerkat.

Cheetah lunchtime.

Keeper talks about zebras.

Panda. I found it crazy that female pandas will only come in estrus only once per YEAR, and that period only lasts for 48 hours.

Elephant.

Red panda.

My favorite creatures were definitely the Asian clawed otters. They just look cheerful, all the time.

Komodo dragon. Pretty large fella, there.

Beautiful corals in the indoor exhibits. Watching them swoosh in the water is incredibly relaxing.

Hermit crab.

Tarantula, though not the giant bird-eating variety.

The silverback gorillas were grossing out audiences with bodily functions.

I'd love to be sunning like that right now...

Burmese python jaw: open and closed.

Some sort of large iguana, perhaps? I love the textures and patterns on its skin.

The tiger was ready to head indoors...

... as well as the entire lion family. Or maybe it was feeding time.

The Cherry Blossom Street Festival was just wrapping up as we arrived.

There was a mad dash to the Washington Monument, as the cherry blossoms were in that direction. I learned that I need to up my cardio.


Blossoming flowers were few and far between. Apparently most of them had blossomed a week ago, and only the stragglers were left. I was disappointed because most of the trees were pretty paltry.

Some nice views along the walkway.


Line of cherry trees in the back there...

Restaurant Week (Melting Pot)

2011-01-26T18:41:00.000-05:00

My boyfriend and I went to dinner at the Melting Pot last week for a nice restaurant week dinner!

The menu: a cheese fondue, salad, entree (also a fondue-type thing), and finally a dessert fondue.

I had some kind of fruity cocktail (Dragon something?). It was really tasty and had a cherry at the bottom :D

We started with a Fondue a la France for the cheese fondue. It's a mix of "baby Brie, Fontina, Gruyere and Radette cheeses accented with Nueske's bacon, onions, white-truffle cream and fresh chives." What I liked most was that the server mixed the fondue right in front of us, pouring in the different ingredients and explaining what each one was. There were veggies, granny smith apples and breads for dipping.

Individual salads came up next (no picture, sorry!); I picked their house salad with peppercorn ranch.

My entree: asparagus, chicken breast, sesame teriyaki sirloin, filet mignon, ravioli and spicy white shrimp. It's all raw, and you cook it yourself in the court bouillon broth that's boiling in the fondue pot. The server explained to us the different cooking times: the red meats take a little longer than the seafood and vegetables.

My boyfriend's entree: same as above, except salmon instead of shrimp, a dumpling instead of ravioli, duck a l'orange instead of teriyaki.

We also had extra veggies on the side. The mushrooms were my favorite! I was pretty impressed how many vegetables they managed to fit into this, so I didn't feel like it was completely unhealthy.

... and plenty of dipping sauces to give things a kick!

For dessert, we chose the Yin & Yang, which is a half dark and half white swirled chocolate. The presentation was really pretty.

As long as there is chocolate left, they'll keep on bringing you dipping stuff. A typical platter had bananas, dusted marshmallows, brownie chunks, rice krispies, pound cake chunks, cheesecake and strawberries. We asked for a few plates of strawberries and bananas because those are my favorite :)

Stuffed by the end of dinner... chocolate fondue was most definitely the best!

Overall, I had a fantastic time and the fondue experience was fun and romantic <3

Things Missed

2011-01-05T16:46:00.000-05:00

I was feeling sad, so I drew a squirrel to keep me company.

Grace Hopper

2010-09-30T22:20:00.001-04:00

Posting from Atlanta, Georgia at the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing! I wasn't sure what to expect, but I am really glad I had the opportunity to come.From the outside, it just seems like another conference, but after being here and seeing what the conference atmosphere actually is, I feel as if I've missed out the past three years and I feel so fortunate to be coming my last year as a student.

I've never seen so many technical women all in one place -- it's so strange to realize that every single person around you knows what computer science really is. And kind of feels the same way you do, being a woman in CS. (There are also some men attending the conference, but the percentage is fairly small.) I think the stats are about 2,000-something attendees, with ~960 of them being students.

I arrived Tuesday night, checked into the Hyatt Regency. The room is pretty sweet:

+1 for wi-fi in rooms (thanks to Grace Hopper) and a desk with a ton of outlets for all of the random things that need to be charged. :-)

The first day, Wednesday, I wasn't able to attend the sessions in the morning or afternoon because I had to work on an assignment that was due that day.

I did make it to "Job Search: From the Interview to Negotiating the Salary" late in the afternoon.This was a bit of a misnomer, as there wasn't too much specific advice on either of those. However, the presenters walked through a hypothetical scenario and pointed out errors and listed 10 specific tips for interviews, dealing with offers, etc. Then I went to the "Newcomer Session", where the event organizers highlighted the different things going on and made sure first-timers to the conference had a good grasp of the different things going on and where all the resources (to find slides, etc) are.

The career fair. I'm here as a winner of Facebook's Grace Hopper Scholarship, so a big thank you to Facebook! I got to meet up with Brynn, a former DMDer who graduated last year and is now working on the design team at Facebook. There's a bunch of (Penn) Women in Computer Science people at this conference, including this year's WICS board, so I got to hang out with them. I also found a friend from high school whom I haven't seen since high school graduation!

My Google host from this summer was also here. I caught up with her at the Google booth. It's really so cool to see people you know (and so many people you don't).

The hotel is really nice in general. This is a view of the inside -- there's this giant structure with room balconies (facing inside) around the lobby. I'm not living in this area, but they have a few buildings adjoined. I'm in the Radius tower, where there are ~10 rooms on each floor arranged in a cylindrical fashion around the elevators in the center.

These are "pokens" which are free for students (and cost a bit for non-students). It's a way of paperless networking; you basically wave two pokens together and it records the contact ID. You can then plug the poken into the USB port and sync the contacts online. Pretty cute :)

In completely unrelated news, I went to an Intro to Aerials one-time class with my boyfriend and it was really awesome :D

Static trapeze.

Silks.

And rope.

PennApps

2010-09-30T21:04:00.000-04:00

Two weeks into the new semester, the Dining Philosophers (the general CS club at Penn) hosted PennApps, an annual hackathon in its second year. Last year's format was something like ~two weeks and focused on web apps; we revamped the format to be 48 hours and removed a lot of the previous rules and restrictions.

My personal favorite is the "poorly rendered dodecahedron".

Although I was on the organization team, two or three (amazing) people really put forth 90% of the work to put this even together. My specific minimal contributions were:
* contributed to official rules document
* designed the PennApps logo and T-shirts
* designed the judges' voting slips
* emcee'd (is that a verb?) the awards ceremony and final presentations

It was amazing to see this thing come to fruition (and with no emergencies and few snags!).
The finished projects were great, and it's amazing how much sponsorship we got from sponsoring companies.

What's slightly more amazing was the amount of food and Red Bull that was consumed during this :-)

Vacation

2010-09-26T16:19:00.000-04:00

It's only been a few weeks into the fall semester and already I'm feeling swamped with work! Some belated things to blog about here - separated into multiple posts.

(By the way, Blogger's design options are awesome. You should totally make a cool design for your blog instead of using the default options.)

Family Vacation - Puerto Rico and surrounding Caribbean islands
The week before school started, my family went on a cruise departing from Puerto Rico and visiting five of the surrounding islands. We were supposed to visit a new island each day (because they're all so damn close to each other), but due to the hurricane we didn't get to visit St. Maarten, and swapped St. Thomas, Dominica and St. Lucia around.

A pretty beach we stopped at.

We were hoping to surf that day in Barbados, but the waves weren't cooperating so people were bodyboarding instead.

The cruise ship (Carnival Victory).

Emerald Pool in Dominica. Gorgeously clear water.

The waitstaff would get on tables and sing and dance halfway through dinner service. Bizarre :-)

A melon something (margarita or martini maybe?) and a screwdriver. Melon thing = blech, screwdriver = tasty.

We went ziplining in Dominica. I think this was my favorite activity the entire vacation.

I really like climbing things and doing obstacle courses :D

Coki's Beach in St. Thomas USVI. We snorkeled here -- the water is crystal clear and there are a lot of fish.

Had lunch at a place called Glady's Cafe, tucked away. Nice ambiance and homey decor.

View of Magen's Bay, acclaimed as one of the best beaches in the world.

View of neighboring islands from St. Thomas.

Lots of tropical fruit for sale!

One of the few pictures of myself that I actually like :-)

2010-08-22T18:05:00.000-04:00

I'm procrastinating, and there is a general lack of perceived happiness around me :( So instead, I'm going to post xkcd comics that I particularly like or find meaningful. Behold the geekiness...

/end 537

End of Internship

2010-08-18T01:37:00.000-04:00

I'm finally back home! It seems like forever since I've seen my family (and my cat). I spent only two days at home back in May after semester ended and flew out to California right after.

Cafe tour complete! So I completed my goal of visiting all the cafes at Google (the Mountain View campus, anyways). The list totals at 19 cafes over the course of the summer.

My team, being awesome, accompanied me to Lunchbox (one of the three I had left on the last week), on the Crittenden campus which is a ways from our building. So, we booked the conference bike and rode it down to Crit!

The majority of my team chilling on the 7-person conference bike. Everyone pedals, and one person steers (in this case, my host, on the far right). The thing has front lights and back reflectors and all. It barely fit in the bike lane; at times, we had to edge out onto the main road.

Lots of cars slowed down to take pictures and wave at us. We felt pretty popular ;) (Or we might just have been blocking traffic.)

Lunchbox Cafe has a pretty nice vibe, with cute old lunchboxes adorning the walls. It has custom sandwich ordering (which was MUCH faster than the sandwich line at Crave), so I got a bacon-chicken-avocado-lettuce-tomato-onion-sprout-cheddar with garlic aioli on whole wheat. Delicious :D Lunchbox also has a bunch of snack size ice creams, so I grabbed a Haagen-Daaz vanilla to go.

The conference bike has its own parking spot (labeled "CONF BIKE", similar to the handicap markings on some parking spots). Unfortunately, when we got back from Crittenden, a car had parked in the former spot and we had to find a new place to park the conf bike. Makes for a fun story: "How was work today?"... "Oh, nothing new... had trouble finding a parking spot for my seven-person conference bike..."

Indian Independence Festival

Last summer, there was a huge festival with dancing (and a camel). This summer, nothing less! On main campus, they had 6-7 tents out with Indian food (mango lassis, iced chai, various biryani, curries, vindaloos, etc.) and even a henna tattoo tent!

There were a lot of Googlers at the festival. The main attraction: the dancing!

There were a lot of traditional dances, and then some not-so-Indian ones (lindy hop, anyone?). Here's a video I found on YouTube:

Boat Cruise

The hallmark of the summer is usually the Intern Boat Cruise in the San Francisco Bay. It was pirate themed this year (someone gave me a pirate hat which I wore for a bit). I could also legally drink this time 'round, which was nice given the free wine and beer at the bar :) My host was also cool enough to come along, so we spent awhile gambling fake money on the upper deck. I'm not so great at blackjack... even worse at roulette lol.

There was a funny intern "flash mob" including Alan Eustace, an engineering VP. It's pretty awesome that the execs are willing to come chill with the interns and take part in a silly dance!

Here's a hastily taken shot of the city when we were leaving the boat:

Since the cruise was pretty similar to last summer's, I didn't bother taking too many photos.

Last Day

My team threw a mini party for me on the last day, complete with cupcakes!

I cannot express how awesome my host was, as she remembered I liked Reese's pieces and made chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting, Reese's pieces decoration on top and a hidden peanut butter cup at the bottom of the cupcake :) Clearly, one of the best cupcake concoctions ever created!

My work is all checked in to the public Chromium repository: http://www.chromium.org under o3d. I look forward to seeing the project site updated so developers can grab the latest source without having to check out the entire project.

In the off-chance you have a WebGL-enabled browser, you can check out the Bubbles demo which I ported (made some small nice changes to the original version made by a fellow on the NaCl/o3d teams). Overall, I'm quite proud of the finished product. It'd look better with antialiasing on...

Last couple of weeks

2010-08-09T05:07:00.000-04:00

Decided to make vanilla creme brulee a few nights ago. (Lots of eggs to use up!) Cream with vanilla infusion simmering, and then it gets tempered with the eggs.

The finished product. Yum!

Blowtorch for creme-brulee-ing. Tehe!

Went up to Pixar a few weekends ago, which involved Caltrain and then BART and then a long long walk... only to find that the pedestrian entrance is temporarily closed during construction and I had to walk around the entire complex lol. Had a friend interning there who showed us around the lobby and atriums.

Made of Legos! (Custom pieces, from what I could see.)

After Pixar, we went it Golden Gate Park (with a segue to Costco for beer, and then a Thai place for lunch - Baan - would highly recommend!) to hang with a group of LucasArts/Terry's high school friends/DMD west coast meetup. Nice barbecue, pretty cool people. (There was a looooot of alcohol, and I have learned that sangria is fairly vibrant in color.) A groundhog/gopher poked his head out and made a hole near our picnic setup.

The Chinatown gates in a weekend trip up to the city.

Chinatown streets.

They were selling cheapo nunchucks. I found this extremely amusing :)

We had lunch at a Szechuan Chinese place (spicy... which is generally not good for me given my pathetic tolerance for spice). I thought it was funny how the menu omitted the English translation of just this one dish on the list ;)

Palace of Fine Arts/Presidio area. Looking beautiful as always.

The Exploratorium was celebrating its 40th something... Some new exhibits since I was there last summer, but it seemed like a lot of it hadn't changed :) Still didn't manage to see everything though... it's a surprisingly big museum!

We caught a bus to the Golden Gate Bridge and walked about a quarter of the way across. You get some nice views of the Bay, but the skyline is less splendid because the city is so hilly.

The restaurant we were at, Trattoria Volare, in North Beach (Little Italy). They were playing some scenic documentary on Sicily in the background. The decor was very nice; service was okay. One of the guys in our group is vegetarian/vegan, and the server had a long winded explanation to finally get to the fact that they purchase their bread from somewhere and didn't know it there was eggs in it...

I had pasta with calamari, which was quite nice. Pasta was cooked to the right texture and the flavors were nice.

Gelato afterwards at Naia. They have cute plastic containers that they recycle (I'm guessing?) and a ton of flavors, including: Earl Grey, Semifreddi Biscotti, Mocha, Ferrero Rocher, Gianduia (chocolate/hazelnut), Cannoli, Chocolate Malt, Coconut, Limonetta, Mojito, Ginger, "Death by Chocolate". There were also dairy free sorbettos: mango, watermelon, nectarine, pineapple, strawberry, blueberry. I got watermelon and tiramisu -- both really tasty :)

Art Post

2010-08-04T04:08:00.000-04:00

"Nap"

Minion in the Rain

2010-08-01T05:49:00.000-04:00

Doodle from my moleskine (for someone special :D). It's cute though, and in my mind, cute = shareworthy! I was lazy and instead of scanning the sketch, I took a photo from my cell phone and then bluetooth'd the file to my computer haha.

You can also see my pixar guest sticker on the opposite page. I'll update later about my visit to the Pixar HQ, the Golden Gate Park barbeque, and today's trip to the Exploratorium/Golden Gate Bridge.

Birthday

2010-07-21T00:13:00.002-04:00

Had a good 21st birthday. Not much you can do on a Monday, but Pandora played Disney music all day at work (despite the fact that it wasn't a disney music station... somehow it knew tehe). Cupcakes were baked for me, and there is now ¡Mango! (Yes, for real, the exclamation points are there) Smirnoff Ice sitting on my bookshelf.

Carrot (cup)cakes with apricot jam filling and cream cheese frosting, thanks to Petra!

I have two beaaaautiful birthday cards :)

And (supposedly "girly") alcohol.

On Sunday I went to the beach in Santa Cruz. I decided to pass on surfing, since our car didn't get there until ~9 (there was a cherry incident that took all of half an hour at the Farmer's Market...) and by then, most of the morning waves were starting to subside. Instead, I sat on the beach and read the Elements of Style. And of course, only when you have a bunch of Facebook engineers (and a friend who is interning at EA this summer, and me) together, do mathematical puzzles come up. Two of their fulltime engineers sat on the beach trying to figure out these two proofs. It was pretty funny. ;)

Unfortunately, I got some crazy sunburn (it doesn't hurt but my skin looks pretty red and irritated, almost like I ran into poison oak or something). I'm hoping it will go away on its own. On the boardwalk I discovered I'm pretty awful at carnival shooting games but fairly adept at laser mazes ;) Being flexible has its perks!

Fourth of July Round Up

2010-07-10T21:45:00.001-04:00

Last Saturday I went surfing in Santa Cruz. It was super foggy and non-glamorous when we arrived there at ~8 in the morning, but the waves were good. I had the guys who went last week (and had lessons) teach me the basics: watch for waves, paddle like crazy, and if you happen to catch the wave, you're all good to stand up. I discovered the "standing up" part really isn't the hard part, but rather the "paddle to catch the wave" is where it gets you. I clearly need some more upper body strength it be successful at this :(
[Thanks to Ian for a few of these photos!]

The surf shack we rented boards and wetsuits from:

Overall, surfing was really fun and I caught enough waves to feel decently successful! By noon, the fog had cleared up and it was beautifully sunny. High tide was in (waves gone) so we went over to the boardwalk. They had an amazing mini-golf course that was all pirate themed -- how can you resist pirate mini golf??

A mural on a building:

People on the beach:

Walked into downtown Santa Cruz to get dinner. Street performers:

We got Indian for dinner. Butter chicken, but just can't match the stuff you find at Penn :( Naan has got to be the best bread ever, though!

Google had Tuesday off as well (4 day weekend!), and my intern cohort had a trip to Great America. (I was there just a few weeks ago with the Facebook crowd, but this time I got to go on more of the rides and hit the water park too!)

I've discovered that you can get some great pictures of the rides from the gondola that zips across the park:

I decided to do the XtremeFlyer thing... the very first drop when the ripcord is pulled is an awesome rush! (That dark spec would be me)

Video:

Googleplex Revisit

2010-07-10T21:19:00.001-04:00

The Googleplex hasn't changed too much since last summer, but here are some photos from this summer.

Stan the T-Rex is still chillin' with the flamingos:

However, there are some new lawn statues featuring ocean/sea-faring celebrities (think Jacques Cousteau). I'm not exactly sure why they are here, but they are quite decorative!

My favorite statue would have to be:

The bridge from main campus across the Permanate Creek is finally in place! A while back, engineers would zipline across the creek (until the city deemed that to be unsafe).

Here's the landing next to my building. There are two cafes to grab food from and then eat out on the patio (one has a superb sushi bar and boxes of legos on the indoor tables).

The building next door to me has a loopy slide that goes from the fourth to the third floor. Very fun!

They've gotten rid of the midget G-Bikes (that were really nice for short people like me), and brought in some colorful clown bikes instead. Some of the old blue ones now have a Chrome wheel inset too.

And joining the Android, Nexus, Cupcake, Donut, and Eclair is the new Froyo statue! Next is supposed to be Gingerbread but I would have totally named it Gelato if I had a say ;(

Week in Review

2010-06-20T17:20:00.000-04:00

Last Sunday: went to Great America with a bunch of Facebook interns (and one other Google intern). Most people didn't bring swim trunks so we didn't really take advantage of the water park.

I totally ignored the 'splash zone' signs in the walkway (in the middle-left) and got really wet as a result :(

Yay for swings.

Great day to be outside. Remembered the sunscreen too!

There was a nice two story carousel that I insisted we ride before we left the park. :)

We mostly went from coaster to coaster... I think we got to all of them except two or three. Surprisingly, the lines were pretty good for a Sunday. I think this was the Vortex (which you ride standing up!). I also really liked Top Flight/Top Gun, which skims you right near the water.

Bubble tea = delicious. I particularly like the honey milk tea with pearls.

Yesterday we had an intern trip up to the San Francisco to see Wicked. Had dinner at a nice Thai place beforehand, and then walked over to the Orpheum theater. Great show, really nice stage and special effects. They had a mechanical dragon that I would totally want in my room ;) It's nice to finally know the story behind all of the songs.

Went back up to SF yesterday to see Toy Story 3 in IMAX. We thought we were early, arriving at ~2:20 for a 3pm showing, but a line was already forming and everyone was having fun with the giant 3D glasses.

The movie was great (and made me cry, like usual) and the 3D effect was quite nice in IMAX size and definition. It was slightly distracting because I kept on seeing floaty bits across the screen -- I'm not sure if it was dust on the projector or what.

After the movie, had dinner at an Italian place and then drove back to MTV to get gelato (hazelnut and lychee here). Wasn't quite as good as Capogiro in my opinion but still overall tasty.

And two random pictures of things I've been cooking for dinner:


Chicken parmesan.

Sweet italian sausage stuffed mushrooms.

Zoo Sketches: Part 2

2010-06-05T23:05:00.000-04:00

Blue eyed lemur on the top, and a mangabey on the bottom.

Half a giraffe, because he didn't stay still long enough :(

Ostrich head.

Brown pelican. Proportions are a bit wonky here...

Cute little prairie dogs!

Zoo Sketches Part 1

2010-05-31T20:01:00.000-04:00

These are sketches from a trip to the Philadelphia Zoo before semester ended (one of the sunniest and happiest days I can remember!). Scanner didn't catch all the little details and things are a wee bit fuzzy because they were sketched originally in a small moleskine. Part two coming later.

Monkeys with an 'additional prehensile appendage' (aka limb-like tails).

Gorilla and a black and white calobus. (Traced over in Photoshop.)

Large cats exhibit. Snoozing tiger on the top and a jaguar (I think) snacking on a bone on the bottom.)

Discovery of that day: it's tough trying to sketch animals in the zoo unless they are cold-blooded or sleeping.

(And my experiment in trying to type with Dvorak is thus far a failure given the pathetically long amount of time it took to type this post. In case you ever feel inspired to give the keyboard layout a whirl, here's a good typing tutorial: http://learn.dvorak.nl)

Google I/O Roundup

2010-05-29T20:34:00.000-04:00

Photos from Google I/O 2010.

Moscone West in San Francisco. This is 7am on day one (which is when the place is supposed to open).
I'm there pretty early, having caught a 6am Caltrain up from Mountain View.

There's a giant map pin outside the doors!

Inside, I check in and get a conference pass (has my name and a QR code that others can scan to save my information to get in contact with me) and a black Google I/O T-shirt. Those who didn't pick up their phones also got their Nexus One/Droid from the Stuff booth. My Droid's already been mailed to me a few weeks ago, and I've been having fun using the free Verizon service. Not a bad phone at all!

On the first floor there are round booths for Tech Help, check-in, print stations, and charging stations.

The keynote's up on the third floor, so I head up there. It's still pretty early (7am, keynote doesn't start until 9), so there aren't too many people in. It's 10am on the east coast and I have a Skype meeting to dial in to. The connection is bearable, but not strong enough to hold the entire call, so I end up dropping out partway through. This is just the first of connectivity issues to come...! At this point, I also finally get to meet in person Keith (one of my heroes, and the person who got me in to programming) and Alex from Agoge Inc.

By now it's ~8:30am, many more developers have filed in, and the place is milling as I go grab a quick breakfast (Starbucks coffee, bagels, fruit and pastries are put out). We follow a big sea of people in to the keynote stage and get some seats in the leftmost front section:


Day 1's keynote address. The talk went over the scheduled duration...

... but luckily they delayed the start of the session! The first session I attended was an Introduction to Android. It was so packed that attendance was standing room only in the back. One benefit of being so short is being able to duck in small spaces behind seats I guess ;) The I/O crew very generously had outlets hooked up every other row every 5 seats or so, so you were never too far from power!

They had a glass case displaying every Android phone manufactured so far. There's a much better picture here that shows off just how many Android phones are out there!

The sessions from Day 1:

Introduction to Android - went over design principles of Android applications, but didn't talk much about starting up code or implementation.
Lunch, and the last half of Programming with Native Code: NativeClient. There was a nice demo of Unity and their game creator that runs with NaCl, but perhaps I missed too much... didn't get too many personal takeaways from here. But then again, I haven't really used NaCl before!
Beyond Design: Creating Positive User Experiences - a lot of great tips here. Many were "common sense" if you think about it, but overall it was an excellent round up and presented the tips in clear language with a great presentation.
Developing with HTML5 - excellent visual demonstration of the new goodies that HTML5, CSS3 will support. I'm really excited about offline storage and native notifications. (Web sockets... gotta figure out what those are.) There is also going to be background thread support for tasks in Javascript. The presenters used HTML5 and Canvas to make a quick Photoshop-like image editor and drawing tool.

Ignite I/O - short talks by guests on a variety of [non-eng] tasks, with 20 auto-advancing slides. The speaker line up was pretty nice, including the guy who owns icanhazcheezburger and Matt from 'where the hell is matt?'. Some I found really interesting (one person designed the background animations from the keynote screens, another talked about rowing across the Atlantic Ocean); others were less engaging. Things I learned: Don't read from a script. Be exciting, and have your slides supplement your talk, not the other way around. Throw in some humor. Apparently there is such thing as model battleship, where you build model scale battleship replicas that have actual "weapons" (e.g. can shoot bb bullets), then take them to water and battle against other ships.

And that was it for the first day's sessions! Since we had some time before the after-party started, Keith, Alex and I went to get dinner (at a Chipotle... by request of a certain someone) before returning:

The After-Party!

Off to the side, there was some "chill out" space that was just bright and comfy, with these awesome inflatable igloo things. It was nice to grab some food, snacks and drinks and crash in an igloo or one of the couches.


Outside though, the party was going and Google brought in all sorts of really cool gadgets and toys. This is the Mondo Spider, made by an energy-awareness group called EatArt. Its site calls it the first zero-emission walking machine, and it is ~1200 lbs. Here's a youtube video of it walking... The MondoSpider blog has a photo of Sergey Brin taking a ride! VIDEO:


The "Terror Go Round"... You get a bunch of people to hop on, pedal like crazy and watch the dizzying screen panels behind ;) I took a ride but didn't end up on a pedaling seat. Wasn't "terror" per-se, but a little dizzying... apparently if you were pedaling, it was quite a work out as the bikes slanted inwards and required more pedal power. VIDEO:

Plenty of food, including CUPCAKES!!! That had Google written on them in colored frosting.

This was pretty cool! It's a virtusphere (and I'm guessing it wasn't disco colored in daylight,but the strobe lights give it a very disco ball effect at night). There is a guy inside, a la gerbil, turning and walking in various directions. Since the ball rotates, he doesn't actually go anywhere of course. Out in front, you could see on a screen what the person's virtual reality glasses were showing. So essentially, a way to play realistic simulation games while staying inside a big sphere.
A nice video showing the technology:

Overall, great vibe. No dancing, thank goodness. (Can you imagine 5000 software developers attempting to dance to music? LOL.)

Day 2's keynote is clearly Android based, given the cute backdrop. We grab awesome seats a few rows from the front of the stage (the first 'non-press' row ;)! Android Froyo is announced, with some great features like built-in tethering, sensitive voice commands and searching, a HUGE improvement in speed. Plenty of jabs at Apple and the iPad/iPhone: demo'd an iPad tethered to an Android device.

Here is an Android on Froyo (2.2, on the left) against an Android on Eclair (2.1) against an iPad (far right) running the same set of Javascript benchmark tests, visualized as laps around a swimming pool lol:

GoogleTV demo! Lots of bluetooth problems here... you would think they would avoid using a bluetooth device for the demo when you have 5000 developers each toting at least a laptop and a phone and possibly more...

Eric Schmidt brings in an impressive set of CEOs and head honchos from the television and hardware industry in support of GoogleTV. From CNET's live blog, these folks are: "Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel and a Google board member. Also here are Sir Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony; Jerry Quindlen, CEO of Logitech; Charlie Ergen, CEO of Dish Network; and Brian Dunn, CEO of Best Buy. Last but not least, Shantanu Narayen,CEO of Adobe"

Again, the keynote goes over time and the sessions run on a delayed schedule...

So a big surprise for keynote day 2 was the announcement that we all got SECOND free phone! The Sprint HTC EVO, runs on 4G, has a screen that is larger than the iPhone's and an 8 megapix camera. It also runs Flash natively. Here is the huge line of people waiting to get their new phone from the stuff booth... I decide to forego and get mine around lunch, when the line is much more managable ;)

So the screen on this thing is sharp and gorgeous! It plays high-def videos really nicely, and Flash on a phone is pretty well... essential in certain cases. The 8 megapix camera is awesome, and the phone actually has two cameras (one back and one front) so you can video chat or take pictures of yourself more easily. It comes preloaded with a bunch of apps (including some junky Sprint apps that I haven't figured out how to get rid of). I haven't been in a 4G area to really test that out yet, but the 3G speeds are good. The only downside so far is that the battery life isn't too great. Needs a daily overnight charge to keep it going...

Developer's Sandbox. The second floor was split into different sections where companies could showcase what they did with Android, Wave, Social etc. At the end of the second day I spent some time looking at the different applications and some really neat stuff has been made on Google technologies.

Day 2 Sessions:

Was going to do Go Programming, but end up instead at BigQuery and Prediction APIs. Some very nice SQL-like hooks to query data with extremely large data sets.
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People: The Joys of Engineering Leadership By this point, I am a pro at flitting in and grabbing a seat before the popular sessions get full and they start kicking people out ;) Brian Fitzpatrick (of Subversion and PubSubHubbub fame)and Ben Collins-Sussman (Subversion) give an excellent talk about engineering leadership. Some great insights... and again, showing that a great talk uses slides to supplement, laced with short stories and real examples.
Grab lunch and talk with some developers from Japan and Brazil who work in Social and with AppEngine. I feel a little out of place as I don't really represent a corporation...
Sit in in GWT Testing Best Practices but it's a little bit advanced/in-depth for me and I'm not really benefitting from this talk without more intricate knowledge of the GWT framework. The speaker does, however, talk about MVP instead of MVC, which makes a lot of sense.
How Google Builds APIs Interesting talk about the new API system. A little of it went over my head since I don't work with the public APIs too often, but the new system should support a lot of the existing frameworks in a sort of "unified" sense and be less fragile to API changes. From what I perceived, there will essentially be an API for APIs, and you can query for results in either rpc-xml or json (whereas formerly, a wrapper went around json calls to convert them to xml).

Great day; after we leave, we head down a few streets to grab dinner (Cheesecake Factory! But alas, no cheesecake... I honestly have yet to eat cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory. I always order food, and never get to the dessert part. Hum.)

The best parts were definitely the keynotes and the developer sandbox. Those two were the parts that really made me feel inspired to write something for Android/GWT/etc.

It's definitely worth watching the keynotes on the YouTube Developer Channel.

If not, CNET has a live blog summary of both days that you can quickly read through:
CNET Google I/O Day 1
CNET Google I/O Day 2

My Goals for this Summer

2010-05-18T13:36:00.002-04:00

My goals for this summer:

1. Learn chemistry to an adequate amount that I can pass the Chem101 placement exam in the fall. todo: get the chemistry textbook from amazon, set up a reading schedule, keep up with problem sets.

2. Revisit Maya, so I can model something nontrivial and actually know what all the buttons do.
todo: start cracking on the modeling/animation tutorial book I have.

3. Read the Elements of Style, Design Patterns. Read a piece of good/classical literature. (Suggestions welcome.)

4. Learn to a novice standing: Scheme, OCaml. Follow How to Design Programs in the process and Brown's CS17 course. Contribute 4+ hours/week to 120 course design.

5. Redesign both of my websites, including an entire backend overhaul of one. (Yay, PHP! Or maybe I will swap over to Django or something.)

6. Sleep, eat. Exercise (!!!)

7. Leave the house at least twice (2x) per month for a non-work related event.

Moving Google accounts.

2010-02-09T22:58:00.007-05:00

I'm currently in the process of trying to move Google accounts. My username "horseback444" is a little 1999 -- but of course, I wasn't thinking for the future when I created a username way back then. "ldvchen" is a little more timeless, provided I don't change my name in the near future.

The tricky part is moving everything. Unfortunately, Google does not provide a simple "rename" mechanism. I can see the difficulties that might cause; if anything, a lot of abandoned accounts (although that might already be happening). I also didn't find this useful thread until I'd already gotten started on my own.

In any case, my progress so far:

* Gmail: I'm using POP downloading to copy all my messages into the new account. It's going in blocks of 200 messages, which is taking quite some time... I found I could speed it up a little bit by manually asking Gmail to check the remote server and download available messages: each time you click "edit info" and "save", it will re-check for you.

Curiously enough, the "view history" panel shows you the progress of checking/downloading, along the lines of: 200 mails fetched. 335 mails remaining. The counts here are pretty inaccurate (though I don't know what they are counting, exactly) -- I definitely have a few thousand more messages to move.

Transferring filters and labels was easier thanks to the Labs feature. One thing that wasn't clear here was that Gmail could create the missing labels for you when you export in the filters. (However, don't forget any labels that don't have an attached filter!) Also, the bite here is that BEFORE you apply your re-imported filters, you need to have imported all of your emails first. So I'm waiting on that.

The last pain is that apparently Chat History is not transferred across. I like to have a record of my chat history, so it seems like I might need to manually move this somehow. (TODO)

Update: So I left it going overnight, and now all some ~8000 of my messages have been transferred. Unfortunately, manually marked labels -- those NOT added by a filter -- were not transferred in the process (label information is not stored with the message?) so I had to add those back in myself. So, last thing to do here: Chat History.

* Groups: I wasn't in too many groups to begin with, thankfully. Begin an admin on three or four made it easy to instantly add my new Gmail as members (from the admin panel, you can add members directly). The remaining groups I had to request membership for.

* Reader: There's a great "export" feature that I used to move my subscriptions. The only that does not seem to carry is "Shared Items". Presumably, this is because my new Gmail account needs to request permission/establish the right "friends" to share Reader items across.

Update: just copied and pasted the emails of the 8 people I was following. Yay for small numbers!

Update: Warning: export feature does NOT save your Shared and Starred items, unfortunately. Lost all of those :(

* Contacts: Easy. Thank goodness for the export/import feature. Not sure how this will correlate when I attempt to update my face-recognized photos in Picasa (Windows app).

* Calendar: Exported and imported individual calendars. I needed to create the duplicate calendars first, and then import the corresponding events into them. The one tricky thing was that I had a shared calendar. There doesn't seem to be a clear "transfer ownership" option for a shared calendar, so I'm afraid to touch it...

Update: this help post addresses calendar ownership. Simply sharing apparently works.

* Docs: Though it wasn't necessary, I made this process a little more cumbersome than it had to be. There are easy ways to "invite" your new account as a collaborator, so that documents are mutually accessible in the new account. However, the little "with 1 collaborator" tag really bothered me -- I couldn't tell whether the file was legit shared with another individual, or with myself.

So, I went ahead and: 1) put everything in a shared folder to give my new account access 2) modified ownership to the new account, except documents I didn't own in the first place 3) removed the old account from the shared folder, and 4) modified all documents I did not own, but had edit privileges, to add the new account and remove the old account from the collaborators.

The result: I "renewed" some old files (marking them as 'unread' for people with whom I shared them with). Also, my old account's Docs panel now has a few "ghost" items that simply won't go away. I think this is a problem with the transferred ownership: Docs still thinks that I own the file. Even if I select them and "delete" (it warns me about not owning, and removes it), when I return to Docs, the entries show back up. A little buggy, but in the end, all my files are moved :)

Note: this process would have been markedly MUCH more tedious had I had more files to deal with. Would not recommend doing that again.

* Voice: Requested a transfer on the official form. Will see how that goes.

Update: Fast turnover! An hour or two later, my request had already been processed and my Voice account is now happily sitting on my new account. I wish all Google services could be like this! The only thing I'll need to update here is the "recorded name" and "greeting" items, which are trivial.

* Wave: As far as I could tell, no easy way to move this privilege across Google accounts. Instead, I just invited my new account to give it Wave access and added the new account on the one/two important waves.

* Blogger: I thought this would be tricky to transfer, but surprisingly: not really so! I added the new account as an admin, and then removed the old account as admin. Seems to have worked okay.

* Maps: Okay, I didn't even know this existed. But when working on PennRoutes, I created a map of Penn campus locations, and I'd like to keep that. It seems like no change-of-ownership possible, so I used this solution to copy a brand new map on the new account.

* Profile: Not sure what to do, so I just deleted my prior Google profile and created an identical new one. Sadly, will take its time to get into the Google search results I imagine :(

* Sync: Followed the instructions in the help article to re-setup sync for my iPod Touch. After a bunch of errors (it kept on prompting that my password was incorrect, but it totally WAS), finally got it to work this morning. So I'm sync-ing my calendars and contacts into the native iPod Touch interface, as well as my mail.

* YouTube: I only have one video, so I just ended up deleting it. What would have been slightly smarter (but I didn't discover it until later) would be simply to delink the YT and Google accounts. This creates a "separate" YT account (had to reset my password...) though it has the same username as before. From there, I just deleted the entire YT account.

* Picasa: Again, not too much data here. Cal, Gmail and Docs are really the core trio where most of my data is. I deleted all excess albums, except for the one where my blog is referencing images from. (As far as I can tell, there's no happy way to change ownership of that while preserving the URLs.) So I'll leave the Picasa account sitting on my old account.

With regards to Picasa 3, it seemed to have happily switched over to the new account without messing up the face tags. I'm not really sure how the contacts transferred, but whatever. (It would be a shame to lose those...)

Miscellaneous Services that are listed under "My Products" but I don't really use/need data:

* Analytics

* iGoogle

* News

* App Engine

* Checkout -- bought two-three things a loooong time ago.

* Google Friend Connect

* Notebook

* Sites

* Subscribed Links

* Google WiFi - this is the free wi-fi in Mountain View, CA that I used over the summer.

So, as of ~24 hours later, I am MOVED and in a state of relative satisfaction -- some data (note above) I'm not going to bother with. (The exception of my old Chat Logs, which I'll slowly forward over, I guess...)

Intermediate Events

2009-07-19T02:46:00.002-04:00

Some intermediate small events that I forgot to write about:

- Tour of the Streetview Cars! There are a few street view cars parked outside one of the complexes. We got to talk with one of the street view engineers about the evolution of the camera systems. Apparently they have the cameras on top, plus lasers on the newer models. Inside, they have various stabilization systems to keep the drives steady while data is being written onto it. The street view pictures for Europe and Asia are supposed to be better than that of the US (in general) because most of the US footage came first and used the 2nd generation cameras which have lower resolution.

After looking at the cars, we also got to see the Holodeck (which is apparently open all the time). The Holodeck is basically a 360 circle of 8 flatscreen panels that go around you. Using the street view footage, they can simulate your movement on a route: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zpKwPe-GqQ

They showed us several routes, including Googleplex (shown in the YT video), Stonehenge (pretty awesome), the Swiss Alps (very pretty... and bumpy). There's even one with the streetview car going around a racetrack with other cars following it in a fleet :P Oh, and one from a NASA launch party watching a shuttle go up.

- Tech talk on interactive ray tracing. Some very cool technologies in the making, and some very sophisticated imagery! Can't wait to see that in commercial products.

- Trampoline Dodgeball. My team won the very first match, and then lost the rest lol. I'm very good at bouncing and dodging balls, but not at all at throwing fast (nor accurate). On the last deciding match, I was the last person left and had absolutely no hope at getting any of the last three guys on the other team out. fail xD

- Paintball. Again, my lack of aim is kind of a hindrance, and my strength is that I'm very good at hiding and not getting hit. My team (orange) lost miserably but I think we tied one game in the end. I have a very cool looking bruise on my leg that looks a bullseye.

Happy 4th!

2009-07-05T17:24:00.005-04:00

Happy fourth of July!

On Friday the 3rd, a small group of interns (Jeff, Kate, Tom, Mark, Andrew, Jo) and I drove up to Point Reyes for some hiking. I think there was also a third car going up, but we didn't hear from them so not sure if they ended up going or not.

On the way, our car (Mark, Andrew and I) stopped at Stinson Beach shortly to meet up with the car. Finding one another was crazy; we kept on calling back and forth with vague descriptions (You're near the people flying kites? There are people flying kites down the entire beach? Wait, are we on the same beach???)

The water was a little chilly, but there were a lot of a people flying kites and enjoying the beach. I hadn't planned on a stop at the beach so I didn't bring any extra clothes... made a mistake of taking off my socks to walk across the sand and testing the water, but there wasn't any way to get my feet dry without a towel lol.

Beach:

After the beach, we drove up to Bear Valley Visitor Center in Point Reyes. Instead of the nice and easy looping trails, instead everyone opted for the "strenuous" Mount Wittenberg trail which was pretty much uphill miserableness. Totally out of shape; my muscles are still aching lol :P ~Two hours in, we finally reached the "summit", which was pretty much a flat field where you couldn't see anything because of the fog. It was slightly disappointing, but aside from the out of breath and dying on the way up, it was nice. Downhill was much more friendly; there wasn't much to see aside from trees and fields. Overall, I think it was about 4 miles or so with 750ft elevation gain.

Trees and fog.

Really tall trees and Mark and Tom (I think?).

A pretty sky at road to parking lot.

Field on the way down.

Check out those branches!

The road up to Reyes was really windy with a ton of hairpin turns. In fact, it reminded me a lot of Hawaii's Hana shoreline, with the rolling hills, turns, and peeling tree bark. On the way back, I started getting a little nauseous from the turns: either from sitting in the back of the car (unlikely), or just feeling purely exhausted and then having to deal with a twisting stomach (more likely).

Our groups met up at a Thai place for dinner (declared to be "the definitively best Thai food" sans subjectivity). I had my usual pad thai, drunken noodle not being listed on the menu; stomach definitely wasn't up for any curry at that point. I felt a little better and less nauseous after eating some food.

In general, it was a fun day and a worthwhile trip. Need to get in better shape since I seriously felt like I was dying climbing uphill there lol.

Skydiving

2009-07-05T15:59:00.007-04:00

Last Friday I went indoor skydiving on an intern trip. The place we went, iFly, has a vertical wind tunnel in the center enclosed by clear plexiglass walls. There's a wire mesh floor where you step in; down below you can see a lot of metal machinery which (presumably) generates the wind upwards. The tunnel also extends upwards, though I never looked up to see how far it went.

General process though was: arrive, sign some waivers giving up my right to sue (yay), watch the previous group in the tunnel. Then my group got called: our "flight instructor" (fancy title there) was a guy named Ryan with an accent that was slightly difficult to understand. We watched a short video about the proper skydiving position, and also hand signals that would help adjust our position while in the tunnel: pointing up for 'lift your chin', two fingers straight for 'straighten legs', two fingers curled for 'bend your knees' and finally, the hang loose hand sign for 'relax' ;)

After this brief training session, we got suited up with brightly colored jumpsuits, ear plugs, goggles and a helmet, and traipsed into the outer chamber. Taking turns, each person went inside the chamber for about a minute or so (gets tiring pretty quickly) rotating, for two turns a person total. I think my group was actually missing a few people, so it turned out we got more flight time than usual.

It's not really a nervous or scary experience. Instead, it just feels like there's a lot of wind blowing in your face and you don't quite have control over where you're moving. Despite attempting to hold still, your body still bobs up and down and will randomly dive sideways into one of the walls. (Or maybe I just failed miserably at holding still in position... you can't really see yourself.) Luckily, the flight instructor is inside keeping a reign on where you're going ;) The first trip in, the goal was to get a solid skydiving position and just hold steady in the wind. (I didn't think I was very aerodynamic with all the plummets into the walls.) The second rotation in was a little more fun: the instructor twirled us around, and did one of these (except with only two people) while the operator adjusted the wind speed so you basically flew up and down, up and down. I think that was the most enjoyable part - I like movement, staying still bobbing in the air isn't that thrilling for me lol. He also had me try and walk across the tunnel from one side to the other. I think I made it about a third of the way before the wind blew me up back against the wall. (There must be some trick to it; after all, the instructor is upright the entire time while spotting everyone.)

Inside, it's surprisingly easy to breathe and since the area is fairly restricted, there isn't really any danger of crashing. With the air blowing upwards at ~100mph, even dropping down to the wire mesh is more like a light bounce.

Overall, it was a fun and worthwhile experience, but it wasn't as incredibly thrilling as one would expect. I think it'd be more nifty with a plane and no walls :)

Without ado, pictures! Unfortunately, none of these are of me as I'm the one wielding the camera. Also, I look pretty awful in a jumpsuit.

The wind tunnel.

You can see the wire mesh that forms the "floor."

Floating!

More flying. You can see people waiting in the second chamber on the outside.

Kind of looks like you're diving a bit.

(This is Jessica, one of the infrastructure people on my team!)

The dashboard that shows the windspeed and a lot of other stuff I don't understand :P

San Francisco

2009-06-28T16:40:00.006-04:00

Pictures from when I went up to San Francisco two weekends ago. Like the classic nerd I am, I visited the Exploratorium (which is surprising huge and awfully cool for a science museum) and then walked around Pier 39 to visit the sea lions and do tourist-y shopping. (I now have three hacky sacks that I shall use in my attempts to learn to juggle :)

Photos:

This is my landlord's Yorkie, Brownie. He's little, likes to jump around but is pretty well behaved and doesn't bark at all.

Huge seagulls outside the Exploratorium. Gathered a huge flock of 'em when I was tossing out chunks of bread from my subway lunch.

I'm not sure what these buildings are, but it looked like a hunk of ancient Rome got stolen and plastered in the middle of San Fran.

Can a straight bar fit through a curve? Yes it can, if it's a hyperbolic slot!

San Fran houses across the pond/lake.

Rotational inertia. Back to high school AP physics, eeks!

Rolling a square wheel.

You could experiment with wave motion by adjusting the position of the weights.

I never did figure this one out -- basically, there's a set of 81 of these numeric wheels. You spin them around, and then pick a number between 1 and 9 to start with. E.g. if I picked two, I'd start with the first "7" in the pic above, as it is the 2nd wheel. And then you count that many tiles to get the next number, so I'd count forward 7 wheels until I got to another number, and then would count that many and so forth UNTIL you hit the end where you can no longer count that many without running out of wheels. That one is your "ending wheel." The exhibit says that no matter which number you start with, chances are that you'll end up at the same ending wheel. I tried it, and indeed, I ended up on the same final wheel. As far as I could tell, each wheel was evenly distributed with numbers 1 through 9, and logically, you cannot guarantee an even distribution among the first 9 numbers (which serve as a starting point). I'm curious how this exhibit works mathematically... It's not deterministic (e.g. if, by some change, ALL wheels ended on 2, this would not work) but somehow the chances work out. Curious stuff :P

MUNI - public transport ftw!

Pier 39 with the cityscape in the back.

Noisy sea lions. Sleeping all day... looks like the life lol.

More sea lions.

Sun setting and pretty clouds.

While at the Exploratorium, I also went through their "TactileDome" exhibit. It's a lot like the caves at Albany Indoor Rockgym, only there aren't really tunnels but large walkways, and you can't get lost as it's pretty much one-way through. The premise is similar though - stick a bunch of people in an atmosphere with absolutely no light, have to find your way through using touch alone. It was fun, though I much prefer AIR ;)

Google: Week 2 and 3

2009-06-21T15:41:00.004-04:00

For the last two weeks I've been slowly settling into work. There's still a lot of puzzlement and swimming-through-code on my part; I feel behind already and I feel like I should have more done by now. What I need to do is get a higher level view of what I need to get done (milestones on my project have yet to be established), what my barriers are, and how to get past those barriers most efficiently -- whether it'll be asking a colleague or tracing through the code myself.

Here are some of my own photos from around campus:

GBus shuttle stop sign.

A nice day outside for dinner.

Dinosaur!

And one of his many flamingo friends.

Some Googlers playing volleyball at dinner time.

Google signs all over :)

A Gbike! These are the ones you can pick up/drop off anywhere around campus.

I also borrowed a VBike (visitor bike) that I've been using to bike to and from work every morning. It's a 2-mile bike ride every day, which is only about 10 minutes if traffic is good and I go down Shoreline. So far, it's gone pretty smoothly (cars are nice about giving you enough room) and there are only a couple of places where you have to cross a few lanes to get out of the highway exit lane.

The Android and the Cupcake. At first this made absolutely no sense to me, but it's based off of the Android platform, of which the current version is "Cupcake."

Some of the interns taught me how to play pool the other day; I am absolutely miserable at wielding the cue stick. Through pure luck, I managed to win a game of 9 ball (don't know what it's called?) where you rotate and need to hit the next higher number but the end goal is to get the 9 ball in a hole.

This Friday, we had a "field trip" to YouTube headquarters in San Bruno. Their office is much smaller, but it has a - get this - treadmill climbing wall(!!!). As you climb, it rotates the moving wall so you can just keep on climbing continually. YouTube is also the only Google office with a full length pool, yet somehow, it used to be a GAP building? We listened to a few tech talks about YouTube and what they are doing, and they brought in two YouTube stars to perform during TGIF.

Next Friday I'm going indoor skydiving with some interns, which should be really exciting!

Week One: Part 2

2009-06-07T19:40:00.007-04:00

Note: Writing comprises of my personal opinions and does not necessarily represent those of my employer or its employees. Also, there is a lot of stuff I'm not permitted to discuss, thus it has been ignored or omitted. :-)

June 1 - Google First Day!

Having walked the route the day before, I did not get lost walking to the Caltrain station Monday. (Insert happiness here!) Nooglers (new Googlers) were supposed to arrive for 8; my shuttle got there at 7:30-ish.

To kill time, I walked around the center of main campus -- the Googleplex is essentially several buildings that form a "main campus" cluster plus nearby satellite buildings. The outside of main campus is public access, so anyone can pretty much visit and look at:

- the dinosaur skeleton (dino is no longer pimp'd out with so many flamingos as of today...)
- list of (filtered) live searches, in Building 43's lobby
- volleyball court
- vegetable/herb garden, the produce gets used by the cafes
- I think from the public-area you can also see the treadmill pools :) (The 'swim' kind, not the pool with cue balls.)
- cafe seating area outside - you can see the colored umbrellas in the middle
^ Swiping image links from Google Image Search)

There is also a small nature trail adjacent to main campus. I took a brief stroll down there, and discovered a lot of real snails! Yes, the kind with a shell, and two antennae-thingies. I've never seen a proper snail like that in New York.

Anyways, around 8 I went back to the lobby and began orientation with a ton of other Nooglers. Some full-time, many interns. Set up accounts, got a badge, had breakfast. Met a few other interns, including one Ryan from Yale, an Andrew from Duke, a Mike from Columbia, another Andrew from WashU, a Seth from Bowdoin, a Charlie from Mexico... and I've forgotten the rest of the names by now.

After breakfast, we crowded into a large presentation room and were treated to a series of presentations (Google history, policies, blah blah). That was followed by lunch, then dreaded paperwork.

At the conclusion of the day (it was around 4:30pm by now), we were picked up by our mentors. Naturally, my mentor/boss/manager is one of the folks on the Blogger team; escaping the mob of Nooglers/wandering mentors, I was introduced to my desk! First impressions: "Hey cool! My name is listed on the wall" and "There's a huge dinosaur cutout by my door?" As there wasn't much to do without a computer (yet), grabbed some dinner and caught the shuttle home. End of day 1! (No injuries, no getting lost... amazing.)

Rest of Week One
Some random observations:

- Unlike the NYC offices, no scooters here :( However, MTV has "Gbikes" which you can take from any building, ride down the street to another building, and just drop it off there. Apparently the bikes will get redistributed daily. (For anyone who took EAS205... remind you of the bikes swapping/convergence problem that CJ was talking about?)

- The microkitchens are as numerous as in NY but not as well stocked (in my opinion... though rumor has it there is a microkitchen with Pocky?!) However, Mountain View has more full-fledged cafes with pretty much any sort of food you'd want -- Indian, pizza, Italian, comfort food, burritos to order. It's kind of like Penn dining halls, except gourmet and so much more variety! One good thing is that foods are color-coded, from green (healthy) to red (avoid). Sadly, my favorite foods seem to be coded red. Friday was apparently "National Doughnut Day" and there was a "Krispy Kreme Bread Pudding" that was marked red, lol.

- The atmosphere does feel a lot like a college campus, except coming from Penn, I'm used to walking down Locust to get everywhere. Here, buildings are separated by paved roads so you need to mind the cars too. (Potential for disaster.) And things feel very corporate, professional.

- I have been shown the free laundry room, but have not used it. Same for the two gyms on campus... need to start exercising.

- The weather here in Mountain View actually feels a lot like early-summer Philly. It's perpetually warm and sunny every day. The air is less moist that at home or in Philly though. (I've been told it'll probably only rain 5-6 times over the entire summer.)

- Everyone's really smart.

- There isn't too much to do in Mountain View. Had probably the most productive Saturday I've had in awhile: walked down to Castro St. and over to the Mountain View Performing Arts Center and City Hall. There was an art show being held, so I actually browsed around and admired some of the local artwork. I also signed up for a library card and took out some books (a few San Francisco guidebooks... hope to head up there next weekend!).

- On Friday, we got our Noogler hats. From afar, I also saw Sergey and Eric -- they DO exist! :)

^ My shiny Noogler hat.

Week One: Part 1

2009-06-07T18:59:00.006-04:00

Note: Writing comprises of my personal opinions and does not necessarily represent those of my employer or its employees. Also, there is a lot of stuff I'm not permitted to discuss, thus it has been ignored or omitted. :-)

Quick Facts:
Office - Google Mountain View
Team - Blogger
Position - Software Engineering Intern
Badge - check!
Noogler Hat - check!
Started working on code? - err, kind of!

Sunday May 31:
Woke up at 5am for my flight out of Albany International. Southwest is a particularly interesting airline: first, they allow two checked bags without additional fee (which is pretty awesome) and second, they don't assign seat numbers. Instead, you're in a "boarding group" and you just sit wherever you want.

Despite the early start, I was one of the last people to board but still got a nice window seat towards the front. My favorite part of plane rides: looking out the window and seeing the clouds below you. Pure awesomeness. Connection at Chicago Midway was smooth. I was in the first boarding group for this flight, so I grabbed a nice seat in the third row back. Strangely enough, two people (a mother and daughter) come and decide to crowd into my row, instead of picking any number of empty rows further back. (The pilot comes out and informs us that the plane seats 150 and there are only ~70 of us on the flight, why are we all squished in the front? ... That's what I was wondering too.)

Upon arrival in San Jose, a family friend picked me up. Some amazing stroke of luck had my luggage be the first two consecutive things on the conveyor belt, so we were out of the airport pretty quickly. (Usually my checked baggage takes forever to arrive, or ends up being the very first and then one of the very last items, hmm.) It was a ~30 minute drive up to Mountain View, and since my host/landlord was still driving back from a weekend trip, Wei (family friend) took me to Target where I got a lot of cleaning supplies and shampoo/soap/etc. She also walked me from the house to the Caltrain station, where there's a shuttle to Google HQ.

By the time we walked back, my landlord, Jenn, was just pulling up into the garage. (What good timing!) So, a step backward into the bigger picture: for housing, I'm renting a room in a private home that's occupied by Jenn, her boyfriend Nathan and their Yorkie named Brownie (think small, fluffy, lots of energy, but quite well-behaved). My room has a big closet, a dresser and a set of drawers. My clothes barely take up one dresser. It also has a bed, and I set up a table in one corner to serve as a desk. Not an ideal workstation, but I figure I'll be at my desk at work more. I also have my own bathroom, which is pretty cool :) The home is well-decorated, very clean and modern. It's more dim than I'm used to; my windows at home and school have always faced the sunlight in the morning.

After moving my suitcases in, Wei took me out on a second drive to the Googleplex. There was some kind of talk going on in the parking lot on main campus, so we did an awkward loop around without trying to look too out of place :P

Said bye to Wei after that, as I'd monopolized most of her afternoon. Jenn and Nathan showed me around Castro St, a sort of "main street" downtown that is lined almost entirely by restaurants. We ate at a place called Queen's House (good Chinese food and delicious milk tea) for dinner. After that, I did a little room arranging and fell asleep pretty early (3 hour jetlag, anyone?).

Nuclear Meltdown...

2009-04-16T22:29:00.006-04:00

<-- Current rigged Tweeter. (I can't figure out how to remove an embedded image in this Blogger rich-text editor.)

Nuclear meltdown ... in the form of no laptop. My AC adapter just decided to stop working yesterday. The little green light doesn't turn on when when I plug it into the wall, and there is also a very high pitched beeping noise from one end. The pitch wavers when I wiggle around one end of the adapter, so I think there's a circuit short somewhere.

My other evidence for this is that if I JUST HAPPEN to position things correctly, it will still work. But this takes about 30 minutes of shake-drop-wind-twirl, and doesn't always happen. Right now, I managed to get the right position and I'm not touching the thing in fear that I might disrupt whatever circuit I managed to temporarily fix. So, I have some limited power supply if I am at my desk. On the go, I'm down to whatever power's in the battery, or whatever I can sap from friends' Dell AC adapter (thank you Nicole, Grace and Ryan). Luckily, most Dell notebooks seem to run the same family of AC adapters so most are compatible with my system. I'm also going by the "if it fits in the power plug hole, then it should work... riiight?" mantra. Which may or may not be smart.

I called Dell Support yesterday and the lady there was very kind (albeit having a strong accent) and said a replacement should arrive definitely by Sunday. If you add in University mailbox processing, that's probably Monday/Tuesday. Because I was afraid that my enunciation of "Locust Walk" was not sufficient, I also online-support chatted with a representative this morning. Gotta say, I was surprised by the lack of proper spelling and punctuation in live chat. However, this fellow conveyed that the warehouse sent out the part and it should arrive tomorrow. (Yes! Hopefully?)

In any case, this will be about two full days of unreliable laptop access, which is a particular tragedy given the things I need to do:

a) Animation. Tweeter's rig is almost complete. I'm going to storyboard tonight and start building sets tomorrow.

b) CIS277. I need to fill in the geometry headers and start working on my camera code.

c) EAS205 - on the back burner for now. Eventually, I'll need to seriously sit down and read the book.

d) Topics - film logs. Yikes! Also on the back burner. Need to start thinking about my paper.

e) HCI. I'm so totally NOT building the entire project again.

f) 110. A lot of proofing to do. At least I should be done with grading (?).

g) Drawing. I need one image by the 20th.

Good point that was brought up today. It IS pretty irresponsible for me to inquire about research prior to doing some research on my own to figure out the parameters to start with. It makes me feel... substandard isn't the right word, nor is ashamed. Abashed? Is that a word?

A lot of people seem to see potential in me, that I don't see in myself. At the same time, I feel like too often I appear or try to be smarter than I actually am, and I can't substantiate myself. (Actually, I feel like this a lot.) I constantly have the fear of disappointing people who believe in me -- I don't have much belief in myself. I wish I were more intelligent, more thoughtful, more eloquent, and more able to back my thoughts and decisions with coherent arguments, rather than "because someone told me to" or "I just felt like it." I think the problem is that my nature is to be lazy, selfish. I will value my happiness, having fun over serious reflection and the eagerness to learn. That's not the kind of person I want to be...

Half of college is nearly over. What have I learned?

- How to do laundry

- How not to cook pasta

- First semester: Food for Thought - use punctuation sparingly; CIS 110 - object-oriented programming; MATH 240 - not much; LING 001 - grammar and IPA was interesting, but I don't remember much of it; Drawing I - didn't feel like my drawing improved much.

- Second semester: CIS 120 - basic data structure stuff that I didn't know before; CIS 260 - a whirlwind of logic, don't remember LaTeX. Perhaps my most important lesson here was that you need a certain talent and aptitude for thinking creatively to solve this kind of logic...; Digital Design Foundations - got a bit better with Illustrator and Photoshop. Everything InDesign has dropped; Film/Video I - it was interesting while I knew it, but I don't remember much about camera angles. Some terminology still lasts; rack focus, close ups, 3Ts, etc; Marketing - it gave me a better perspective on business and the strategies of sales. Sort of demystified the art of business into a concrete set of concepts.

- Third semester: MEAM 110/147 - learned nothing new; MKTG 211 - a really interesting perspective on human behavior and decision theory; PSYC 001 - pointless (too brief, shallow); CIS 121 - fundamentally, nothing new, just exposure to more data structures and existing algorithms. Perhaps the most important lesson here was big-oh analysis; 3D modeling - learned to use Maya (poorly).

- Now: CIS 277 - learning c++; CIS 399 - waste of time; EAS 205 - learning matlab, but also seems like a waste of time; Topics in Animation - I don't love this class, but I appreciate the exposure I'm getting to different kinds of animation. If I go in that direction, I think it'll help, but I wish I were better at analyzing and thinking critically about films; Animation - animating in Maya.

Looking back, I'm clearly not taking advantage of my education and picking the right classes where what I will learn will STICK and benefit my knowledge. Woe is me.

Loose Ends

2009-04-07T23:00:00.003-04:00

Tied up a few loose ends yesterday and today. I mailed in my horribly, never-was-on-time materials to Pixar. I imagine they're already done reviewing reels, but I did mention I'd send my stuff in so I thought it would be appropriate to follow through and do so (even if I've already got Google!).

I also went downtown - in the rain - to the Rosenwald-Wolf gallery to visit the Quay Brothers exhibition. It was interesting looking at the sets; I really admired the detail and intricacy, but it was not mind-bending or astounding.

I drew a pretty flower for my blog. See the left side.
<----

I had a meeting with Amy yesterday too, who highly recommended I not pursue my four computer science plus one psychology course load for the fall. I'll admit: to me, it sounds pretty daunting, considering I'm already doing kind of crappy this semester and one of my classes is pretty low key already. However, I kind of NEED to take CIS 240 and 262 to be on schedule, 460 is a given, and I would really like to learn about databases (sooner, rather than later)... At the same time, I kind of want to learn Maya really well and improve in that arena. I was also hoping to do some kind of research in the fall. So all of this (proposed) activity sounds great now, but will end up killing me come fall. I emailed a couple of professors to ask about their research; also inquired about a few properties in Mountain View.

Headache and exhausted. Oh, and I rediscovered A Brief History of the World today: http://www.shire.net/mormon/humor/histworld.html -- it so far hasn't yet failed in getting a laugh out of me.

TGIF

2009-04-03T14:26:00.004-04:00

It's a beautiful day outside -- not drizzly, slightly downcast, and with the post-rain breeze that I love so much. I did nearly slip and die twice on puddles, but that's an insignificant fact.

The only problem is I'm insanely tired, having pulled a solid programming jam to get my half-edge structure finished. Definitely time for a midday nap.

If I were to sum up the hours spent on this homework assignment... let's see: about an hour and a half of thinking/planning on Wednesday. Thursday was a long mess --(1:30 to 3, and then again from 4:30 until 7:12 (at which I was delightedly informed that my future is not a disaster!). This was followed by an hour of dancing up and down, celebration with ice cream, and generally happiness. I ordered food at 7:40, it didn't come up 8:30, and then I spent at least 40 minutes eating while watching an episode of America's Next Top Model with my roommate. So I guess I started working again about 9:30-ish, until 2:30. I took a three hour nap, woke up again at 5:30am, and turned in the assignment at around 11:30am.

Summing that up... wow, that's a lot of hours. 6+5+3ish+3 = 17 hours of tightly compacted work. Sadly, while I believe my code is functional, there are definitely a number of areas I could iron out for efficiency.

But the main thing is: SOFTWARE ENGINEERING AT GOOGLE!! YEAH!!!!! I'm a little wistful that it isn't NYC, since that's closer to home and I know the city better, but I'm thinking it'll be a really nice opportunity to be in a new place and be around completely new people.

I'm almost certain I'll be accepting the offer; Pixar won't have an answer back within ten business days (considering I haven't even sent in my stuff...). I'll send in my demo reel regardless, because I took the effort to ask Paul about it. It's really such a relief to know I'll get to do some awesome stuff over the summer. My new trepidation is that my skills may not be strong enough to fill their expectations. I think now would be a great time to work on getting more comfortable with C++ and Python, especially Python I'd say.

Alright, time to hit the stack.

About the Blogger

2009-03-31T23:15:00.004-04:00

It's the very first "meet the blogger" post!

So I ought to make this good, because I feel like this first post is one of those things that ends up defining the rest to come. Kind of like interviews. Or jellybeans. If the first one ain't good, the rest will all be the same. (Either you like jellybeans or you don't. There's very little middle ground.)

I don't really like recounting my entire history, so instead, I present BULLETED FACTOIDS. Yeah!

Me:
- My name is Lu.
- I'm a student studying digital media design at the University of Pennsylvania.
- I'm not really sure where I'm going to life... but hopefully it's related to digital media. (Otherwise my tuition-paying parents are not going to be too happy.)
- When it comes to code, math, and programming, I'm a real geek.

Life goals:
- Learn to juggle.
- Learn to whistle.
- Learn to use Maya.
- Get hired to a job that I really enjoy doing. (Yeah, cliche, I know.)
- Program something cool.
- Draw a really nice picture, that is high res enough that I can print it and hang it up somewhere.

Things about me that may or may not be important:
- I really like mangos, oranges, and I get random cravings for Thai or Indian food.
- I'm a really light sleeper; I rarely, if ever, miss my alarm.
- I sleep too much though. Constantly feel tired.
- I really like furry animals. And animals in general. I think this may be due to my lack of household pets. I happen to enjoy chasing squirrels on campus in particular.
- I'm usually low on self-confidence.
- I am incredibly shy.
- I feel unsettled when things are messy, with the exception of my own room. For example, if the kitchen is messy, I feel obliged to clean it otherwise the messiness will really bother me. But my own room can be complete tornado aftermath, and although it will still bother me a little, the overall annoyance towards the clutter is less.
- My birthday is in the summer, meaning I've lived through a non-optimal "years alive" to "birthday parties celebrated" ratio. Back in elementary school, it was a real bummer trying to hold parties when everyone was off on vacation.
- I wish I were a more articulate person. When talking and expressing my thoughts, it frequently comes out an inarticulate jumble.

I'm really interested in:
- Programming for the web.
- Programming in general.
- Disney movies!
- 2D and 3D computer animation

This post will get continually edited as I constantly discover new things about myself.