Wilmer's stuff

There are two things in nature here that I don't like. The ever-strong wind that slows me down when I cycle to work ... and trees! I bought this radio-controlled airplane yesterday and went to the park to try it out. The flight went very well thanks to some help from ... well, the wind. The result?



(Try to find it on the big picture, it's not too easy. :-))

Something I really do like here is World Market, though. They actually sell this candy we call "drop" in .nl, and it tastes pretty good:



I just wonder why the German pack says "katjes" instead of "kätzes" or something like that. And there are fishes inside, not cats. They're pretty tasty though, so I don't care.

Work is still going well, my main mission for during my stay here is done. I got two more weeks here before I have to go back to Dublin, so that's well in time. It'll be nice to be back in Europe, at last...

In other news, worked on BitlBee a bit more again in the last few weeks. Worked on the API a bit, so the next time someone says porting Gaim modules to BitlBee is easy, please don't listen. It's a lie. ;-) And there's basic support for Jabber chatrooms now! Just for the non-anonymous ones, unfortunately. (And the majority of Jabber rooms I know of are anonymous.) Will work on that support later, unfortunately it'll be very complicated and hackish.

And this weekend, besides "dropjes", I'm enjoying eye candy from Beryl on Ubunty Feisty. Wobbly windows and all the other stuff. Hey, I wanted some of my OS X eye candy back, okay? ;-)

No trips for Wilmer today, it's raining! The always-beautiful weather in California seems to know about rain after all. Maybe I'll finally have time to reply to some e-mail and work on BitlBee today then. :-)

Last weekend the weather was pretty good though, fortunately. Had enough time to play with my new digicam.

I really don't like PHP ... Or maybe s9y is buggy here. All of a sudden (or probably since I upgraded to the newest version of s9y?) the timezone applet was broken. I just noticed it, it was two hours ahead of the real time in two zones. grmbl I have no idea why. So now I'm not using the PHP-internal Date module but just let libc do the work instead of the PEAR Date module. Calling /bin/date from a webscript might be considered evil by purists, but at least it works.

Just in case someone came here somewhere in the 5-minute timeframe where the whole page was broken. ;-)

cp: Dream Theater - Surrounded (yeah, still live)

The first week of April passed already. And I'm halfway my stay in the United States now. My colleague Rafael (who started working at Google Ireland on the same day I did) will return to Dublin tomorrow already. Because I'm in the Search/Traffic teams I have to spend a very long time here, apparently.

I'm making progress with the learning. Generally, my feeling of productivity is growing. It even happens sometimes that I can follow a complete conversation and understand it completely, which feels good, of course.

Didn't have too many trips lately. Bought a bicycle, cycling around a bit now in the weekends, and possibly from next week I'll use the bicycle to go to work. And I bought a new digicam this week, hopefully I can make some cool pictures this weekend. Pretty satisfied so far, even though I didn't manage to buy a cam that fits into my pocket a bit better than the previous one (on the contrary, actually). I hope the pictures will be worth this little sacrifice. :-)

Also, I managed to find some time to work on BitlBee. I'm finally working on replacing the old Gaim API. It's mostly a mass-rename of functions and, where necessary, rethinking some parameters. Got rid of a lot of redundant stuff like three different functions to report errors to the user. Once I finish this the handling of away messages should certainly get better, and hopefully I'll also be able to implement Jabber groupc^Wconference rooms properly.

Oh yeah, and indeed CD prices are pretty nice here. Porcupine - In Absentia for less than eleven dollars. IIRC I didn't buy it in .nl because the price was around/over 20 euros. I'll have to hunt for more good CDs here. :-D

cp: Dream Theater - Metropolis (Live at the Marquee)

So last weekend we spent time at Yosemite Park. The whole weekend, actually. Made a lot of pictures, actually it turned out my 64 MB xD card really is too small. :-(

cp: Tool - Lateralus

So last weekend we went to San Francisco. Looks pretty nice. See http://fotos.gaast.net/relocation/calif1/ for some random pictures. We'll probably go there another time, although we did most of the sight-seeing by now. We just didn't see Fry's yet. ;-)

Also I had my interview training last week. At the end I received this cool "Google Hiring Squad" T-Shirt. Wanted to link to a picture of it, but unfortunately I can't find one. Interesting fact, when I search for "hiring squad" on Google, the spell checker thinks I'm looking for "firing squad". Hehe, very nice suggestion, I just hope it doesn't come up with complete opposites too often. :-D

Anyway, not much to tell. Work is going well, just that I still feel like I know nothing, which isn't always a very great feeling. But I'll have to live with that for a couple of months more. At least I'm starting to feel a bit more productive at some moments. :-D

currently playing: Riverside - Volte-Face

So last week I decided to start playing with Cacti a bit. Too lazy to figure out rrdtool, and Cacti adds a pretty nice interface for actually looking at the graphs too. Somehow the machine that runs the graphing tools always seems to be busy, but I suppose this has something to do with quantum mechanics. ;-)

I'm especially proud of my e-mail statistics, because they're partially generated by a cool Perl script I wrote especially for this. It parses logs on the fly and returns SNMP stuff in a pretty efficient way. Maybe I should put it online, so far all the scripts I saw are pretty hackish and don't work if rrdtool and Postfix don't run on the same machine, for example, or just do more I/O than necessary.



So now I got pretty graphs that have so much information that they're unreadable. Got enough to do. ;-)

Oh yes, and the Google ice cream really tastes pretty good. Tried it last Friday, and I think I'll get me another one this week. :-D

Also spent some time in San Jose yesterday. Found out there's a "Woz Way" there, indeed called after the hero called Steve Wozniak. For the people who don't know, he and Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer (now known as Apple Inc, for some reason they deny the fact that they sell computers these days) years ago. Woz was the genius who designed most of the stuff, and tries very hard to not be famous. ;-)

Back to work tomorrow. And after work I'll go to my new home, which you can see on this map.

cp: Pink Floyd - Atom Heart Mother

So today the sun is shining, there are no clouds and you can actually walk outside without a coat. It's about time! ;-) So now I can finally see why this city is called Mountain View. Those gray spots in the far distance you see most of the time, they're actually mountains! ;-) Now that the clouds are gone and the sky is clear, I can finally see and recognize them.

Today we'll travel around a bit, most likely to San José. So maybe I can finally go to Fry's and spend that pile of money they all told about. And back home I can then worry about how I can ever take it all back home. :-D

Work is going well, I finally started to do some useful things. Couldn't do too much so far because I didn't know how and didn't have the privileges to do them. Slowly I'll be able to do more and more though, and I'm glad. It makes going to work more interesting and it makes me feel more useful.