Life

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.

A whole week passed again, pretty quickly. Making long days at work, learning a lot, and fortunately today also in a slightly less passive way. Yesterday I really got to the point where just reading things and watching presentations got too boring. So today things got a bit better, it all felt just a little bit more useful.

So hopefully next week things will continue like this a little bit. Got only five more days, because next weekend I'll fly over to Mountain View! That's where the real training will start...

Oh, and it does feel a bit strange that SlashDot was where I found out first about the 2007 edition of [http://code.google.com/soc/ Summer of Code]. I wonder if this is because of me, maybe I didn't find the right mailing lists yet. Not that I can participate anymore this year... ;-)

(TGIF == Thank God It's Friday! It seems to be the "Hello Weekend" celebrated at the end of the Friday in most Google offices.)

Another week in Dublin passed already. And the first week at my new job. Had a great time! From Wednesday I just worked from my desk, no more introduction stuff. Read a lot of things, learned a lot, asked a lot, all that kind of things. Getting to know everyone, getting familiar with the system, getting used to working with post-2002 computers (I've never had so much power on my desk! ;-))... :-D This is what my time will look like for now. Lots of learning, lots of reading, loads of new knowledge. A little bit chaotic, maybe, but I hope to deal with it properly, and hopefully I'll find my system.

As you probably expected I can't get into details though. Had a great time, at least! But ... I didn't get a [http://socrates.homelinux.org/gallery/California/imgp1017 Noogler hat]!!! Wilmer is, again, not pleased. ;-)

So it's Wednesday already, I already had my first two days at work. The first two days were mainly an introduction programme though (and IMHO not really aimed at the engineers), although yesterday I did see my desk for a while too. Today I can go there immediately and get used to everything, hope that I can use my desktop machine, etc... It's almost nine already so I should really leave now. ;-)

And I just see here that actually it's freezing here! -4 centigrades! Time to get a warmer coat, maybe... It's actually colder here than in The Netherlands right now. Wilmer is not pleased...

... if the guy right next to me in the supermarket is trying to use his [http://www.postbank.nl/ Postbank] (Dutch bank which used to have a bad interoperability record) card? ;-) And in other news, I got myself a year supply of flour because [http://www.tesco.ie/ Tesco] never heard of small quantities... ;-)

Anyway, I finally managed to connect to a nearby WLAN network in my own apartment. No need to sit in the hall anymore. :-D Went to the pub with some colleagues yesterday (including two people who interviewed me back in September), got to know my mentor (that's how they call the person who helps new employees with settling in the company) already. Great!

That's all for now. Let's see if there'll be Futurama or Simpsons on TV again tonight.