Serendipity: When I was interviewing, I came to the lobby early (attempting to make a good impression, y'know), but the person who was supposed to interview me had forgotten about it. I ended up sitting in the lobby for 45 minutes and talking with a girl from Cornell who was in the same situation. Today, months later, she walks up to the desk beside mine and sits down.

I was reading through some of Rob Pike (of Unix and Plan 9 fame)'s stuff at work and I noticed he mentioned Peter Mattis. Apparently both Mattis and Spencer Kimball (better known for creating the GIMP and GTK) work here too.

And today I went to my first "team" meeting, where I got to meet all sorts of smart people talking about interesting i18n issues.

Funny clothing tag.

Funny Apple ads [the 'photocopier' one is my favorite].

Someone on a mailing list captured it pretty well for me:

with _farenheit 9/11_ michael moore proves himself to be an apt propagandist, one whose stance i happen to agree with, but still, not a documentarian. in this age of "reality t.v." it's important to remember that just because there isn't a script doesn't mean it's the whole truth and nothing but the truth. it's important to think critically about the way arguments are being constructed and asking "what's the central thesis here?" real documentarians *demand* and *expect* their audiences to go into the theater with their arms-crossed asking to be convinced by the director, b/c real documentarians are critical thinkers themselves, even if they do have agendas to promote. propagandists have an agenda to promote, too, and play on the emotions, anxieties and fears of people in order to persuade. it *is* possible to combine emotional and intellectual appeals in order to construct an argument. michael moore has not done this in _farenheit 9/11_.

That's pretty much exactly how I felt about it. He takes a bunch of facts ("FACT: Bush shakes hands with foreign diplomats") and then sorta lines them up in a row to imply a conclusion that totally doesn't follow. What's frustrating about it is that I want to be convinced: I entered the theater wanting to have all of my awful impressions confirmed, but I left feeling like I can't trust any of the bits of truth because they were so quickly juxtaposed with misleading tricks.

Today was the company offsite, which meant we headed to the Santa Cruz beachfront for free rides and food. I spent a few hours basking in the sun, and I'm only a little burned.

The busses got back just in time for Thomas Friedman's talk, which was definitely worth staying for.

Every so often it hits me how important Google is in the world at large right now. Friedman listed ten major world events, including the fall of the Berlin wall, and included Netscape's IPO -- which led to the dot-com boom that got a lot of money poured into the internet -- and the last was the creation of Google.

I'm certainly just a tiny cog here and I probably will remain one for quite a while, but it's still great to be a part of it. I can see myself staying here for a long time.


(Obligatory rubbing-elbows reference: dinner with a woman who worked on the tactical language training project, which used speech recognition technology to classify speaking errors and is apparently being used to train troops headed for Iraq.)

There are five of us, all Googlers, in this two-bedroom (one bathroom) house for a few weeks until we move into our new house of awesomeness.
Matt and I are in the living room, Jeff's in the shower. We overhear this exchange:

Knock, knock (on the bathroom door).
(Tessa's voice:) I need to pee really bad!
(Jeff's voice:) What?
(Tessa's voice:) I need to pee really bad!
Ten seconds pass...
Jeff: What?
Tessa, more urgently: C'mon, I need to pee really bad!
Jeff: Ok, do it.
Tessa: No! Get out of the shower!
Sound of shower turning back on.
Tessa: Jeff! You're such a dick!

Poll #310164 snatch
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Do you know the slang meaning of the word "snatch"?

(Roommate says it's a Washington thing.)

Cory Doctorow's Microsoft Research DRM talk. A must-read. [via candid]

From the Brad:

One guy was like, "Because really, at the end of the day we're both after the same thing: money." I replied, "No, not us." He was just flabbergasted at that point, like that was beyond his comprehension. [more]

I keep seeing more and more famous people when I get dinner with Christophe at Google. But I think tonight capped it: Al Gore was at the next table over.

On Sunday Jag lured me away from packing to hang out, and cbradfield brought his friend. It turns out the friend was Dare Obasanjo, author of RSS Bandit. (But I mostly remember him as the guy who annoyed me away from the Atom mailing lists. More details.) I can remember thinking back then that since this guy was at Microsoft it'd be worth meeting him just because we were working on similar things, but I never got my nerve up to ask him 'cause he seemed sorta cranky. It's rad to run into him randomly now, especially two days before I move.

The drive into California was over 800 miles and exhausting. That's all.

We went out to dinner with Noam (who wrote the Google calculator, I think?), then I stayed up late chatting with my soon-to-be-roommate Becky (an olympic-class synchronized swimmer?). There are rumors of lunch with the Blogger guys today (also, unrelatedly, rumors of what I'll be working on: sounds like it'll be perfect for me). The longer term plan is I sleep on the couch right here until July. From college to a friend's couch!

Between packing and graduation celebrations, I haven’t slept a full night in three days. Though the graduation ceremony was this morning, but I just now finished some final grading-related work for my class. That’s it, no more school for me. And no more LJ, either. Now, just downloading all of my data off of the CS computers before I leave the labs a final time. Even though I’m not going to stop learning, I am gonna miss school a lot.

I put holyloki‘s excellent picture of yiyi spinning fire up with the filename atom, where it became the first hit in a Google image search for “atom”.
I got mail from a French textbook publisher, which I forwarded to Ryan, and now:
(See also: Reputation Enhancement for Felis Domesticus.)

Back from Cali, sunburned. I graduate this weekend. I move away in one week. I start work in two weeks. Rushing, rushing.

Great flame by solri:

For once, can't you swallow your pride and admit that as someone who has lived in a Muslim country for thirteen years (and known a large number of Muslims before that) and has read extensively on the subject, my ideas about what Muslims think might carry some weight?

I don't think I know anyone who's openly Muslim (or, to put it better: I can't think of anyone, so they're not as open about it as the many Christians I know), but I do know someone who doesn't have many positive stories to relate. (It probably doesn't help that she's a woman, though.)

I’m going to go join the middle class in a few weeks and I still know pretty much nothing. I asked about books before but I realized it came out wrong: I’m not looking for advice for things like investing, I’m looking for the more basic common knowledge that everyone but me seems to know. (People keeping telling me I ought to buy a house, to avoid paying taxes or something?) Should I consult anything beyond the web to learn what “non-qualified stock options” means? (I’m a little wary of free advice from random websites in these matters...)

Speaking of terrorist motivation...

Friends, Friends With Benefits and the Benefits of the Local Mall. (Contrast with a teenaged family friend, who reportedly spent her Saturday nights praying for God to bring her a nice boy and who now is married.)

Jens posted about Charles Stross stories. Here’s a PDF of the first one. [To warm up, I suggest starting with the future bites, some non-fiction of his.]

Labor day traffic made the drive to Portland use mostly the second gear.
I was eager to go to bed early because I know sleeping in at Meena's is impossible, and sure enough, I was awoken at 7:00am by a sibling screaming bloody murder.

But today: out to the countryside for wine tasting with brad and dina, and then to Dina's old house/farm, where I walked through tall grass and picked flowers. We walked up the hill to her neighbor's and she drove us out into their pasture to see the baby buffaloes up close. Awesome.

I had saved the rest of the evening for Powell's, which pretty much the best store ever. It turns out that the book Basic Category Theory for Computer Scientists was written by Benjamin Pierce, the same one who write the excellent textbook Types and Programming Languages. I also got DeLillo's White Noise (from a toddv rec a long time ago) and a Stanislaw Lem book. Also, considered: Russell's The History of Western Philosophy (jag recommended it) / searched for: an introductory Braille book¹ / observed that: Hofstadter's books were filed in multiple different sections. Oh, and keeping with my Powell's tradition, I picked up the new Verbatim, which looks like it even has an article about blogging jargon.

Then a long walk around Portland's downtown (have I written enough times how much I love this city?) watching people be merry and asking strangers for food recommendations, and then to a really quite decent Greek place, and then driving about with the Photek up until I could feel it in my chest to discover they've replaced the ghetto Safeway with a much classier one.

Now I'm at Meena's friend's apartment (she's away; the pictures of her remind me of a taller/younger snowgddess) where I anticpate a good night's sleep to make up for last night. It turns out that whitaker (whom we weirdly just ran into on the street on Friday) lives a block or two away from here so he gave me a parking pass for the street.

1. Powell's did have^a a book or two introducing Braille, and a book or five talking about the history of Braille, but none of them had the actual bumps in the paper to practice with. It's been a longstanding desire of mine (of like, years) to get one of those Braille terminals to hook up to my computer... anybody happen to know a good place to get one?

a. Powell's pretty much has everything, in case you didn't know, including a foreign language section (that's books written in foreign languages) (right next to the linguistics section!) that I spend far too much time at.

Tessa lent me her car, so on Friday I’m going to Portland for the weekend. (It’s such a shame that driving is so much cheaper than taking the train, but the trains are all sold out anyway.)

I‘d like to stop by the Danga office but I’m not sure I’ll be able to leave early enough...

Russian LiveJournal: National specifics in the development of a virtual community is worth reading. Even though the broad generalizations about "the Russian character" and LJ popularity make me a little suspicious of hyperbole, some of the more general comments about LiveJournal in Russia are pretty surprising:

...critic Dmitri Bavilsky beheld in it “an important link in creation of a new aesthetics uniting the conventional image of artistic text with a new, aesthetic product, emerging in the interior of Runet”. Russian Journal, an influential online magazine devoted to politics and culture, initiated a discussion about LJ as a literary phenomenon and a new media form and published a series of 23 interviews under the common title “LiveJournal in Writers’ words”.

And:

Moreover, if in the West, in the context of the blogging revolution, LJ is considered as one of many blogging services (and by no means the central one), in Russia it has been perceived rather as the blog. The power of its popularity together with the lack of knowledge about other blogging tools has lead to the bizarre fact that LiveJournal (Zhivoj Zhurnal or simply ZhZh in Russian) became the generic term for blog as such so that the word is often applied to blogs that are by no means related to the original LJ.

And:

For example, a music festival of RLJ users called Current Music has been conducted in Moscow yearly since 2000. The title alludes to LJ option with same name showing the information about music currently playing on a user’s computer. The festival attracted dozens of musical groups and more than a thousand listeners. It received wide publicity in the Russian media - mostly by the efforts LJ users numbering hundreds of journalists - and it was considered a vivid example of transforming a virtual community into a real-life community.

And I'm footnotes 7 and 40!