Mountain View

Maintaining a weblog indeed seems to be one of those things I'd better not be doing. I'm in Mountain View for a month and two days already and this is the first time I actually write something here instead of postponing it. Good, because in five days I'm leaving already so it'd be too late. Today's Memorial Day, an American bank holiday, so I'm not even at work.

Had a good time here, both at work and in the weekends. More productive than last year, and more exciting evenings and weekends. My bicycle was still waiting for me, and after I blew off all the dust it gathered in almost a year time, it's quite capable of getting me to and back from work again. :-)

Of course with how well EUR is doing compared to USD, one should always spend some of his/her time in the US on Amazon.com. I decided to do the same and am quite hooked to Mario Kart DS now. It's just a fantastic and very addictive game. Also bought a Nokia N800, which is a great toy, but not as great as the DS.

Last Saturday hoyhoy took me to a comedy club in Santa Cruz. Kasper Hauser (of SkyMaul fame) was there, which was quite amusing. We failed to see what was funny about the other artist though, especially since we were pretty much the only persons not laughing at all. :-)

Other hilights include how I found out telephones do not like salty water and taking a non-triband spare phone to the US is pointless. I'm a bit sad about my poor 6310i (I tried to save it by washing it out with non-salty water and then letting it dry for more than a day but it didn't help) and am not sure about what to get now. I'll probably wait for the GPhone, which' existence I don't have to deny anymore. :-)

Anyway, it's almost twenty degrees (Celsius, obviously, Fahrenheits are just too confusing and illogical :-P) outside so what am I doing in the living room? Time to check out this "sun" thing while I still can!

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? ;-)

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 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.

This post says it's 4:00. Well, in Ireland it is, but here it's 20:00. Certainly not a time to go to bed. :-) Arrived here yesterday, got through the customs reasonably quickly (even with a family of retards in front of me who, even though we were told to do so in the airplane already at least three times, were filling in their immigration forms on the spot...). Found the hotel (well, it's not the usual kind of hotel, the rooms are all in little 4-apt houses), saw some colleagues around here already. Went outside for dinner a short while ago and found a supermarket where I could buy some stuff for in the evenings.

Weather isn't that great right now. You can see it on the right (please ignore the error message, I don't know where it comes from exactly and might fix it later). The sun shines from time to time, but there's also rain, and more rain than I ever saw in Dublin so far. :-)

I think I don't have a very strong jetlag this time, fortunately. Although I am getting a bit sleepy already... So who knows what will happen.

Tomorrow it's time for work again, but this time in the headquarters. Will be cool, I hope. :-) Oh yes, I also found my current home on Google maps. It's in the group of four houses somewhere in the middle (the group further away from the big street). It's probably something like 2-4 kilometers away from the Googleplex. Fortunately there are shuttle buses from here to there. :-)

In about six hours a taxi will pick me up here and take me to the airport. In these six hours I have to finish packing my bags and catch a little bit of sleep. At last, I'll get to know this thing called jetlag. Here it's nine o'clock now, in Mountain View it's one in the afternoon. Quite a difference for sure.

My flight leaves at six in the morning, will have a 2.5 hour stop in Amsterdam and meet some family there, that's very nice. :-D Around noon (Dutch time) I'll continue my trip, a direct flight AMS->SFO, takes about ten hours. And hopefully not too boring...

Got everything sorted out, I hope. Printed some instructions, including phone numbers to call in case of panic and/or emergency. Will stay in a hotel for two weeks before I can get into my apartment there (there are more visiting employees than apartments ;-)).

Anyway, time to put everything that isn't in a bag already, into a bag. And hope that it'll fit.