Wibblelog

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. :-)

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I’ve been spending a lot of time on phone and video calls to Australia lately, for various reasons. The project I’ve been spending most of my time on lately is based there (which I’m totally hoping will score me a trip to Sydney), and I keep finding myself doing phone interviews of aussies.

Anyway, the audio wasn’t working very well this afternoon on the Sydney side of the VC meeting, and the microphones are in the ceiling (!?!) in that room, so one of my colleagues decided to get closer to them. Here he is dancing on the table so we can hear him.

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So I was wandering around a few days ago and I noticed that we have our very own manhole cover now. Pretty sweet if you ask me. It was actually sunny today for the first time since approximately January, so I took my camera along and snapped a picture. What’s great is that someone actually had to go to the trouble of making a die and casting this thing out of actual solid metal. There’s some sort of philosophical significance to this, but I’m really not sure what it is.

Also, I think I saw all of my group’s scooters in the same place for the first time in … oh, forever. There’s actually one missing - the one with the crazy broken throttle. That one is the best to ride, because it has two speed settings: off and EXTREMELY FAST. You control it by squeezing two bare wires together. When the wires touch, you accelerate as fast as the scooter can go. It’s awesome. Awesomely dangerous, that is.

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