Work

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 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.

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...