Yes, I went to Maui for a week. Spent the first half of the week in Hana, and the second half on the west side of the island in what I like to call ResortLand. I’ve got lots more to say about it, and a crapton of photographs, which I’ll say and post a bit later.
Vacation is awesome. It’s like taking days off of work … only you actually don’t work, or even think about work. It’s amazing.
It was a surreal week last week at work. The last half of it, anyway.
Wednesday: First there’s a company-wide meeting with Eric Schmidt. Then, I attend a tech talk by Vint Cerf. After his talk, I was supposed to bring him back with me to attend my team’s allhands meeting, which he attended as a special guest and told more stories. That was apparently not entertaining enough for whoever planned the meeting, so they invited yet another special guest: a real live pony. Yes, we had a live horse on the 2nd floor of the building. The best part was parading around the building with the pony, frightening unsuspecting people with it.
Here’s me and Vint and the pony, just outside the doors to the cafe in my building.
Pony. Dinosaur. Nerds. What more can I even say about this photo?
My officemate scored the best pony portrait ever. I’m trying to convince her to use that as her company phonebook photo. (update 12 Aug 07: she actually did set that as her photo in the phonebook at work!)
And for completeness, here’s the full gallery. There’s actually a few dozen more photos, but these are the ones I liked the best.
Oh, but the week did not end with that. On thursday, my team had an offsite adventure of sorts: we went and played Trampoline Dodgeball in a giant trampoline arena (not my video; found it on youtube, but it’s the same place). I am still sore from that, five days later. It was awesome.
Friday was practically a normal workday by comparison. We (the entire freaking company, or at least those of us in Mountain View) went to see Spider Man 3 at a movie theater. They rented out like 30 screens or something like that. When we got back, senator John McCain was giving a “fireside chat” discussion with Eric Schmidt in the main cafe. I didn’t actually go to that, because I couldn’t get back early enough to get a seat. It was videocast to the cafe in my building, so I watched some of it there.
Then I went and fought with my broken laptop and watched people play videogames for the rest of the afternoon. I’m sure you all care deeply. :-)
Jenny and I flew to Boston last weekend so Jenny could check out the Tufts vet school campus (which isn’t actually in Boston at all - it’s in Grafton). I went along for the heck of it, and visited the Google office in Cambridge, which was bigger than I expected, but still quite tiny. Arriving there was amusing - I initially went to the wrong floor, which had some other company on it. Thankfully they were able to direct me to the floor that Google was on, and I went there. Then when I stepped off of the elevator and walked to the reception desk, I discovered (after introducing myself) that the fellow behind the desk was actually there to fix the telephone and was not a receptionist at all. He suggested that I wait around a few minutes for the real recptionist to return. I did so, and someone who actually works there arrived shortly. He was also not the receptionist, he told me, and the real receptionist was on vacation. So, I wandered around on my own and introduced myself to a few random people. (I don’t actually know anybody in that office, and nobody knew I was coming.) I ended up camping out in their lunch/lounge area for the afternoon, and I left just in time to drive through the absolute worst part of Friday evening’s commuter traffic. It took more than 2 hours to drive from Cambridge to Shrewsbury (which is out by Worcester, and is supposedly a ~40min drive when traffic isn’t completely hosed)
I guess Jenny’s interview/visit/whatever went well, because she tells me that now she (we) have to decide whether to move there. That means she must have been admitted to their ph.d and residency programs. I’m *really* not looking forward to moving cross-country again, but oh well. You gotta take what life throws you. I’m just lucky that I won’t have to change jobs as a result of all of this - it’s extraordinarily cool that I have the flexibility to move to a new location like this, even though my team currently does not exist in Cambridge. I’ll most likely be the first one.
I forsee a lot of interviewing in my future if this comes to pass.
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