The Massage

So, I started my last week this Tuesday, and I still have my massage coupon they gave out to all the new employees/interns at the beginning of the summer. It's an otherwise $80 massage. (Although they subsidize it to $20 for employees - yay!) I'd never had a real massage before, so it was a new experience for me. It was pretty sweet. She managed to stretch me in a really weird way I've nto felt before. Just enough so that I felt two inches taller, but without really pulling on anything, just pulling the muscles along the legs the right way. The whole thing was 45 minutes, but seriously felt like 20. I was so relaxed, when she was done and waiting outside, I just lay there for a few minutes before I could even look at the time. I finally managed to sit up, and whoo! So woozy. I was a bit euphoric as I walked out, tipped her, then made my way back to my desk. My cube mates said I looked quite funny. I did notice myself being really slow to respond and such. It was really nice and relaxing. I'll have to do these things again.

The Crash aka The Lame Weekend

So... my computer broke this last Saturday. I let a process run away with memory, use up all my paging file, so the computer froze. I turned it off, but when I turned it back on, it couldn't find a bootable disk. Uh oh. I had had this problem a few (three?) times before, and fixed it easily enough. Except this time I couldn't do my usual thing. I couldn't attach another XP drive and boot to it because I didn't have one. In this past this has fixed the problem, which I think was a problem with the NTFS log file (it's a journaling system, so if the journal was corrupted, it would need fixing). Since I didn't have a drive, I tried to find someone who did. The closest I came was Lee, who was kind enough to drive over a Windows XP cd so I could run rescue disk. Yay! After 6 hours of chkdsk on Sunday, I finally tried various combinations of fixboot and fixmbr. Still, the BIOS wouldn't boot to the hard disk. I finally tried to tell it to manually boot from the drive, and voila! Success. Quite odd. I still don't have it recognizing the drive and auto-booting, but it will successfully boot if I tell it to manually. Quite odd. Maybe the drive/partition isn't marked as bootable or something. I'll fiddle with it more once I get to Seattle and have my other machine to help out.

So, the moral of the story is, Alden had a lame weekend. Ross was gone on Saturday and Monday, though he did hang out with me while I tried to fix it on Sunday. None of the nVidians were around for fun and games, so I didn't get any social activity. Garrett's moved out, so I can't hang with him. I spent Saturday and Monday playing Oblivion. It was fun, but I'm leaving, and I'd rather hang with cool people than play games. Sunday I fixed my computer, but mostly waited and watched, like, 10 episodes of Deep Space Nine. Fun, but a bit much for one day. It's not like a new Sci Fi show, I've seen these before, and they're entertaining and enjoyable, but not really fantastically fascinating.

The Next Internet

So we had a guy come to Google to talk about a new way to think about networking. The existing implementation and structure of the Internet is sufficient, but not well-suited to most of the use of the internet today. The problem is that the Internet is all about connecting point A to point B. Then they talk, share data, whatever. But most of the time you just have a few publishers (web sites) sharing the same data with thousands and millions of users. This results in a lot of redundant bits being thrown all across the Internet, sometimes routers can be servicing thousands of users, and all of them are getting the same data. That's a huge waste of potential bandwidth.

He drew a clever analogy with the original internet. Originally, the internet was built on top of the phone lines. The phone network was all about creating a circuit. It wasn't about a phone-call, it was about constructing this circuit across large backbones. Phone numbers weren't addresses, they were the programming to connect one wire to another. When the original networking people started sending computer bits over the phone wires, everyone was up in arms! This wasn't how communication is to be done! Everyone knew that communication was about circuit building. It was ridiculous to build this ad-hoc, failure-prone, best-effort network. That couldn't go anywhere!

Similarly, the new revolution today should be about data. People should just be able to specify what data the want, and it shows up. They don't care about where it comes from. The only reason to care about data's origin is because that's how the security model is based. No, I don't "trust Microsoft", but I do want to know that this is the update which Microsoft has published, and not some hacked version. Interestingly the best work going on in this field is peer-to-peer services. Bit Torrent is pretty good, but still not good enough. We shouldn't need to depend on trackers.

The internet is about data now. That doesn't make the two-way communication TCP/IP layer it was built upon obselete, it just shouldn't be the focus of research or advancement. It's done it's duty, now we shouldn't care. Just like we don't care what on top of which physical medium IP is overlaid.

You can watch the video here.

And now, for another use of the Internet, IM

The nVidians

I've been hanging out with Thayer's fellow interns from nVidia a lot lately. They're pretty cool guys, and I haven't found a good group from Google who wants to do stuff on a regular basis, so... nVidia it is.

Last Thursday Ross and I met up with Jeff, Carl and Matt and we went over to Craig's house. Crag is a "manager" at nVidia (I'm not sure if he's an intern manager or not). He doesn't like managers, or managing in general, so he finally decided he could fight the system by becoming a manager and not managing. Anyway, Craig has an awesome house. It's up in a really nice area of Silicon Valley, and is just all-around nice. He has a hot-tub, two living rooms with full entertainment systems, and a good-sized wine fridge. We had some good wine and cheese. Very delicious. After some effort Craig finally convinced us to go into the hot-tub. It had been a long time since I'd been in a hot-tub, and it was quite nice. Kinda weird having six guys in it, but still relaxing.

On Friday we watched some Eddie Izzard and finally a South Park episode which was so horrible it was hillarious. Saturday was another (but my first) nVidia LAN party. Six of us grabbed their machines (and test machines) and headed to a boardroom around 1pm. Eventually six new Waterloo interns showed up (at 5pm!), so we had a 12-person LAN party going. Definately the largest I've been at, and really fun. For the first five hours, there were no Waterloo people, and we played CaptureStrike, a Quake3 version of Counter-Strike. It was pretty fun, but Jeff was soooo much better than anyone else. I would have been almost as good as him, were I at my peak, but being out of practice, and with his strafe-jumping (which made him 2-3x faster than everyone else), it wasn't a contest. But the teams still stayed pretty even, and it was a lot of fun. After we tired of the FPS, we did some free-for-alls, where I ended up doing a little bit better, but still consistently around 3rd. I even had 1st for almost a whole game but lost it in the last few seconds.

The quest for food hit an unexpected snare. We got everyone's Quizno's order, and headed to the nearest one, which apparently closed at 7:30! What? We hurried over to another one (after a phone-call for directions), and managed to get there with our order of 12 sandwiches about 7 minutes before they closed. They were very nice and served us anyway, staying 15 minutes over to finish everything. Yay Quiznos!

After food, we played DotA. I hadn't really played before, but it was amazingly fun. We had a few unbalanced rounds, but usually the teams were pretty balanced. Unfortunately, there were no 6v6 DotA maps, so we had to split up into a 2x3v3 tournament thing. The teams eavened out pretty well after the first game, with the exception of the last game, which was 5v5, though a lot of that was just the random hero distribution. We went home at 2am. While Jeff was dropping someone off, I hung out at Carl's (Carl lives next door to Jeff, where I was crashing again). Surprisingly, we weren't tired, so we cracked open a beer and talked for a while. Another beer and several chocolate-mint things later, it was 4:30 and we realized we should probably be getting to bed.

Sunday there was another BBQ. This time it only had around 12-15 people, instead of the 25 from last time. I guess that's what we get when people start leaving. BBQ was fun, I got a little better at throwing a frisbee over-handed, but other than that, not much to tell.

The Un-blogged (Until Now) Week

Yeah, so... I didn't update last week. Things were quite busy, and I wasn't getting back home before I had to go to bed (sometimes after!). So here goes the big update.

Sunday

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Sunday, after the party on Saturday, the Simians went to San Francisco's J-Town for food, fun, and hot womenz. We ended up eating at this Korean place. I hadn't really had Korean food before, save teriyaki, which doesn't count. So, I've learned I don't like Korean food. They did the beef really nice, flavorful, tender, etc, like a lot of Asian beef, but the rest of it was not so good. Some of it was downright terrible. After the Korean food, we wandered around looking for cool places or bars, or what-not. I hadn't eaten much, since I didn't like it, and the Thayers were hungry-monsters, as usual, so we found more food. We walked by a pizza place which smelled really good, but I wasn't too keen on it, then after looking around the block and not seeing anything else, it seemed like our best bet, so we went back. Unfortunately, they didn't serve slices, and the Thayers were getting something I didn't like, so I didn't eat anything. As Chad kindly pointed out, this meant that we didn't go there because of me, then we went there because of me, then I didn't get anything. Take that.

After Food2 we continued our search. Apparently Pat's really good at finding these sorts of things. Cheers to Pat! We found this really quiet bar with a cool bartender lady, good music, and some neat art on the walls. They had a lot of good beers too, everyone found something, and from Chad's cidar, to Thayer's Chimay, to my Pyramid, everyone was satisfied. Even had some wine. After the bar we went to Rogue's for more Kobe Beef burgers. Delicious. I had a Chocolate Stout Float. That's their Chocolate Stout beer, which is a bit strong and bitter for my taste on its own, but excellent with ice cream. We headed back to the cocktail lounge Pat wanted to see, but it had only old people, so we decided to just head back.

Monday

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On Monday, Phil (Ben), got back from China, so we were going to meet up with him at Nipon, the Japanese Whisky Bar. The guys came over and had dinner at Google, as well as a brief tour. Everyone was quite impressed. We made it over to Nipon in good time, but since we weren't eatting dinner, apparently we couldn't sit upstairs. Unfortunately, Janet (the hot waitress from last time) and JoJo (the coolest bartender ever, also from last time) were not there. The present waitress was nice and asked a small party to move to one of the other tables downstairs so we could have room for all nine of us. Thayer's nVidians, Jeff, Carl, Lee, and Matt met up with us there. Quite a good time. I got to try a new beer, Hoe Garden. It was a very white (really, not light, but white) wheat beer. Pretty good. Not as good as the Green Man Tea (Green Tea liquor... ummm), but still good. The nVidians left a bit early, but the Simians went to find desert. After much driving around, we found this small place recommended by the Nihon waitress. It was pretty cool. Nice atmosphere, good food, decent prices, and pleasant waiters. I'd definately go back. We left around 12:30 am and made it back to my place around 1:30 am after driving away from Chris as he urinated on a tree. I showed everyone The Amazing Screw-On Head. I really liked it. It was funny and the animation and filming style was pretty unique. I hope Sci-Fi makes it into a full series. 'Twould be awesome. Maybe even... Amazing!

Tuesday

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Tuesday I hung out with the nVidians for the first time without the Thayer. It worked out nicely. I got inducted over a habarnero burger. Boy, was that hot. It wasn't the hottest thing I've ever had, but there was just so much of it. Apparently it made Thayer's eyes water. I suffered no such unpleasantries. However, after my mouth had cooled off, my stomach did start getting upset. Wednesday's bowel movements were unpleasant.

Wednesday

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Wednesday we had the 2nd annual intern cruise. It was pretty sweet. They took all the interns and their hosts (well, mine didn't come, but most of them did) out on the bay for a few hours. I wish I had had a camera. By the time I finally buy a camera, I'll not have anything fun to take pictures of. Sad. But other people got lots of cool pics, just not with me in them. I'll post some when I remember to bring them from work. The coolest part of the night was right as we were approaching and going under the Bay Bridge. I'm still not sure why, but someone was setting off a bunch of fireworks. Not a full-fledged Jo's birthday bash, but quite a few. They started as we were approaching the bridge and finished as we were leaving, so the timing was excellent.

I spent a lot of time talking to Alan Eustace, the Senior VP of Engineering at Google. Yeah, he was there. It was amazing how approachable the guy was. He's running a huge, multinational figurehead of a company, and he decided to spend an evening hanging out with interns, talking about intern things. We talked about the program a bit, and about patents, but the coolest part was him talking about college and education. He told us how he got to where he is today by his connections from grad school. Not so much the education, as the people he met. He really encourages students to go to grad school. I told him I was worried about Google changing and losing its awesomeness. Another guy pointed out that Google's already a big company. I can definitely see the signs already. Alan said that even if something happens to Google, there will be another company for me that'll be great too. It was really reassuring to hear this guy, who's so high up, who has a management perspective on the whole thing, to say Google would be as awesome as it is now for a while, and that school was worth the delay. I'm now leaning more towards grad school than industry right away. More inspiration for the GRE. I really need to start studying vocab. Suck. I think my final decision as to where I'm going to go will depend upon which schools I get to and what my offers are from various companies.

Thursday

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Thursday I got to come home at a reasonable time and just relax. I took a few phone calls and went to bed early.

Friday

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Friday Phil, his office-mate Ryan Peterson (who's dad wrote our networking book!), and I went to see the new Will Ferrell movie, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. It was okay. Not as funny as Anchorman. Some of the jokes were good, but they weren't as consistent or persistent, and the plot wasn't as nice and outrageous. Fun to see, but not much more. Old School was better. After the movie we hung out at MSR for a while, played some neat (for a while, anyway) video game, and some ping-pong. I went back to San Francisco and crashed at Phil's place.

Saturday

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On Saturday we were to meet up with the nVidians (Jeff, Lee, and Patrick, and a Googler, Aaron) and wander around Berkeley. We woke up kinda late, so we missed lunch with them. The place we had lunch at had a super-hot waitress. Like, amazingly hot. I don't know how they make them like this. After lunch Phil and I met up with the nVidians and walked down Telegraph. It was pretty cool. Amazingly liberal, but at least interesting. There was one hippie playing music whose CD I was quite tempted to purchase, but did not. I called Ben (Bad Ben) for some recommendations as to cool places to visit. He recommended Top Dog, a philosophical hot-dog stand. We had just eaten, so we didn't get anything, but we still went to check it out. They had lots of newspaper clippings and other articles on good philosophical topics. I'm not sure if they have any specific philosophical leanings, but I saw a few seemingly good articles on individualism (I didn't have time to read them all, and there are always important subtleties in writings about these subjects). After that, we took Ben's great suggestion as to going up to the top of one of the campus buildings. It had a deck on the top floor with a great view of the city. Really fantastic. Ugly building, but great view. For some reason, there was a lot of graffiti on the side of the building. We couldn't tell if it was put there on purpose, or if there was some attempt to clean it off. We saw some scaffolding and a rig, so it was probably recent, either way.

We then walked over to the Berkeley public library. I had spent a good deal of my childhood in this building, and had missed seeing it since its renovation in 2002 last time I visited, so I wanted to reminisce. They had totally remodeled it, so the floor plans weren't at all what I remembered them to be. Only half of one floor remained as I remembered it. Oh well. It was still cool to be in a library and appreciating it again.

After the library we went to a cool little local pub which brewed its own beer and tried some. I'm really bad at knowing what kind of beer I want. I asked the waitress what beer she recommended. She asked what kind I liked, to which I replied "usually a lighter beer." She recommended the pilsner. I asked about the stout. Sigh. The beer was pretty good. Not excellent or amazing, but not crappy like most of the bottled beer I've had so far down here. It was nice just sitting around with these guys enjoying a beer, even if only half of us had one. Phil left us to meet up with some of his friends, and the rest of us headed back to Santa Clara to Carl and Matt's for some Eddy Izzard. Unfortunately, by the time we got there, there was no Izzard waiting for us. We ordered Pizza and watched Underworld: Evolution instead. It was a good night.

Sunday

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Sunday I had an invite from the nVidians to join them for a LAN party at nVidia. Man, I wish I could have gone to that. It would have been a lot of fun and a great bonding experience. I haven't done a real LAN party since High School (well, kinda do some small ones at Chad's over breaks). Unfortunately, I was too wiped. I had been out a lot (as you can see), and needed some down time. So Sunday I just stayed at home relaxing, catching up on Stargate (which they cancelled! so sad.), and playing some games. But now I'm recharged, so I can do things again. Oh, by the way, I am sad I missed the live showing of SG-1's 200th episode (though our cable's been out for a few days, I don't know if it was up on Friday to watch this anyway). It was a really great episode. They had a lot of great sketches and made good fun of all the iffy/weird things they've done over the years.

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Wow. It took me 80 minutes to write this post. You guys better appreciate it!

The Simians

This weekend Pat, Chad, and Thayer's brother Sean, who I guess would also be a Thayer, came up to remove Thayer and return him to Simi. They made it in time for my party on Saturday, which was a good bit of fun. I did a little bit better this time. Two of the people I invited came. Sigh. Who needs Googlers? Thayer brought all his cool nVidia friends. Jeff (from nVidia) even brought with him little green glowy disks. Similar to glow sticks - crack them and they glow for eight hours or so. Well, Jeff brought a box of several hundred. At first we stuck them on people (they had sticky backs). Then we put them down in the drive way, so people would find our place (the street doesn't have street lights, and we don't have external lights). Then, as is only natural with disk-like objects, people started to throw them. We got a little war going on in the back yard. Cool people don't dance. Cool people throw glowing disk-things at eachother. They didn't fly so well, but they were fun to throw, and they went every where. The back yard was covered in them. Eventually, they got stuck to trees. All-in-all, a good night, even if there weren't a ton of girls.

The Thayersday

Happy Birthday Thayer! This Friday it was Thayer's birthday, so Jenny, Garrett and I took him out for dinner. We left my place at around 8:30, and got back around 12:15. That was a long time for not a long dinner. Anyway, we went to some Chinese place in San Diego. It was pretty cool. Nothing was amazingly delicious, but it was a good time. Yay. And today Chad, Pat, and Sean are arriving for Thayer. Should be a good weekend. Phil gets back from China on Monday, and hopefully we'll all get to go to the Whisky place in SF.

The Picnic

We had the Google Picnic yesturday. It was pretty cool. Very family oriented. Kinda like a big fair/carnival. But without all the rides. They had a petting zoo, carnie games, and some rock walls for climbage. The first rock wall was too easy, but the second one they decided to not give hand grips for after a certain point. Maybe they thought it would be funny if I couldn't even jump to reach anything. I watched several other people fail at it too, so at least I wasn't the only one. They also had a "Google Idol" competition. Ugh. I'm so sick of all these rip-offs of such a terrible show. The surprising thing was, they had a lot of good people. One girl played video game music for 15-20 minutes without any written notes. But the best by far was the girl who sang opera. She was fantastic. Apparently she was on an archeological dig in Sicily, and her team made her sing on top of a mountaintop. That would have been awesome to see. Yeah, I forgot how much I love opera. I need to find me some more opera music. The only bad thing about the picnic was not being able to really find anyone we knew. I went with Jenny, and we ran into two or three people we knew, but it was so crowded and big we couldn't really find anyone for more than a few minutes. Ah well, it was still lots of fun.

The (Hard) Drive

I've gotten fed up of my lack of disk space, so I purchased a new hard drive. 320 GB, well, 300 GB, more of goodness. I ordered it last Friday, but it didn't get to me until Wednesday. I was quite excited about it, but it took the people at work most of the day to deliver it. I biked it home, and was all ready to install it... except I didn't have a cable. Normally this isn't a problem, my mobo came with all the cables it'll ever need, but I didn't have my mobo box. No. That's in storage in Seattle. Gahhhh! So I had to wait until Thursday to get a chance to go to Frys (Best Buy didn't have cables?) and buy a sata cable. That should not have cost ten dollars. Sigh. But good ending. I got it installed, and I now have over a Terabyte (1042 MB) of disk space. Maybe this time I won't run out....

The Dance

Tuesday was pretty cool. We had the Google Dance. This meant we had everyone at Google partying from about 6:30 until 11pm. Pretty swanky. So many kegs of beer. Lots of cases of wine. Loads of smart people. Fun fun fun. They turned the main cafe into a club. They had the lights, the DJ, they even had a little roped off section with the low white leather couches. Pretty cool. At the beginning they had a really good music selection (even some of the new Thom Yorke), but it got quite clubby as the evening wore on. The last song they played was "My Humps". Fuck. I hate that song. I'd rather sing "Toxic".

I have gotten to the point where I can't drink most bottled beer. It's just not good anymore. So many pale ales (which I used to like) smell like puke. And it's not like I had a terrible puke-orific night with pale ale. Ever since Thayer pointed it out at Rogue's (brewery/restaurant), I haven't been able to really enjoy it. Sigh. I miss Seattle beer. I'll have to go on a beer tour when I get back....

The City

Wow. Apparently there's a City of Industry, CA. Weird. I wonder what other city names there are. "Welcome to the City of City of Industry!"

Oh, and for those of you who haven't noticed, you can now use your mouse-scroll wheel to zoom in and out of google maps. Oh, and it has a little box flash showing where you're zooming in on. And when it's loading tiles for an area one zoom above or below the current zoom level, it shows a stretched/shrunk version of the loaded tile from the previous zoom. Helps a lot against those worthless "I'm loading" tiles. Google rocks.

The Car

Thayer and I rented a car this weekend. I'm not sure we actually needed to, but it let us do things without depending on anyone else. On Friday we went to a party with some nVidia people. It was pretty fun. A few really hot girls - even got to talk to them (though didn't get contact info. sigh). On Saturday we went to Stanford. We just walked around the campus and played a few games of chess. I lost both. I'm really glad I didn't go to Stanford. I really don't like their campus. Lots of mexican architecture. I'm not a huge fan of mexican architecture, but when they try to romanize it with columns it's just gross. Saturday night we came back to my place and I threw some tritip on the grill. It was fantastic. And we had wine. Fantastic steak, wine, a nice night, good company. Good music (Thayer bought the new Muse album). Awesome.

Sunday Thayer, Ross, and I went to a barbeque with a bunch of cool nVidia people. Just went to a nice park, had some nicely merrinated burgers and chicken, and just hang out for a while. I played Thayer two more times. All four games, I managed to play unconventional openings. Kinda threw off all of Thayer's big practicing for the past few months. I finally won the second game when Thayer fell for a clever gambit. Woot. Anyway, the nVidia interns were pretty cool. Especially Lee and Jeff. I've seen them the most, and they seem pretty cool. I hope they come on Saturday. Oh yeah. I'm having a party on Saturday. Hopefully it'll go better than the last one. At least, have more people show up. And more girls. Ummmm... girls....