Wibblelog

I’m back in Boston. Been back since Monday, but too lazy to blog. Plus I’m sure you don’t particularly care. Anyway, I posted some photos from my trip:

Photos from around the Google mothership. I realized after I came home that I didn’t take enough pictures of the iplex, but oh well. I saw some cute ducks, and at least one prosthetic duck. Also, a nervous little dog.

I went to a Pi Day Party on 3/14 (duh). There was some amazingly good wine (that is a three liter bottle of 1996 Silver Oak cabernet sauvignon!) I liked it. Damian smelled it, at least. (He doesn’t drink.) There was also a pi pie or , some smoking of fancy cigars, comparison of battle scars (he was in a paragliding accident in Mexico), and a Schwim. Sarah said that nobody ever gets good photos of her, and I promised not to prove her wrong. Brandon did a better job of making her look good. :-)

I had a great time in Mountain View. As I predicted, I already want to go back. It was great to spend some time face-to-face with the people I work with on a daily basis, and it was lovely to visit some of my favorite restaurants again. I should really take another trip to visit our New York City office before going to MTV again, though. Manhattan is an amazing place, as is the Google office there, so I’m looking forward to that as well, but it just doesn’t feel like home like Silicon Valley does.

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Greetings from Mountain View, CA. I’m here for a week (til Sunday) to mingle with people at work and generally visit the mother ship. Look me up if you’re also in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley area and want to hang out.

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Sorry I haven’t posted since the 23rd; it’s been pretty busy. We finally did make it to Ashland - here’s the route we ended up taking in the end, more or less. We left Sandwich on Thursday morning, stopped in Sturgis, MI to have a late lunch with my family there, drove all the way to Rochester, NY that evening, and somehow managed to make it to Ashland, MA by noon on Friday. It was pretty exhausting, and that wasn’t anywhere near the end of the turmoil. The movers had arrived at the new apartment before us, as had our realtor, and they were all anxious to get things … well, “moving”. So, despite running on something like 3 or 4 hours of sleep, (this is the point my mother calls me on the phone to scold me upon reading this post) we took posession of our new apartment for the first time and directed the moving-in operation.

Of course, there was one little problem. The carpets in the new place were utterly filthy. So filthy that we couldn’t even walk around in our socks on them, because our socks would end up black on the bottom. It took a few days of fighting with our landlord before we got them to agree to pay for a thorough carpet cleaning. It was truly one of the most stressful and annoying things I’ve ever had to deal with, and I wasn’t even the one doing most of the work!

The good news is that our carpets are now clean (ChemDry did an amazing job on them, but they were quite expensive…), so we finally managed to settle in a bit and unpack some of the boxes. There’s been plenty of other turmoil, of course:

• $600 spent at IKEA
• One of the cats stressed to the point where it peed on the floor. Twice.
• My car arrived from the shippers with a giant oil stain on the roof
• Comcast being difficult (big surprise, eh?) … “What? You can’t use that cable modem, it’s still in use on this other account! Oh that’s _your_ old account? Oh you closed it two years ago? But that doesn’t make any sense! You should have been getting billed! Oh look, you owe us $742 for service that didn’t exist!” Quality customer service, right there.

I posted some various bad photos of the new apartment from the day we moved in, some less-bad photos from the drive from San Francisco to Boston, and some completely unrelated photos from the week we were on Maui.

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Here’s the currently planned route, including where we’ve stopped so far. We’re at my mom’s place in Sturgis, MI as of now, and we’re planning (perhaps unwisely) to get as far as Schenectady, NY tonight. Wish us luck!

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My road trip is now well under-way. We’ve come 1158 miles, give or take a few, in two days of driving. The first night we stayed in Elko, NV, and last night in Laramie, WY. Exciting places, both of them. We’ve been making a feeble attempt to find good places to eat using Roadfood, but that has yet to actually work out. They need more spots along I80!

We’re about to ship out again for the day … the cats are in their carriers (much to their disliking, of course), and our stuff is packed up. Jenny is scolding me for using the computer instead of carrying stuff down to the car, just like every morning when we travel. We’re hoping to get to Des Moines, IA - about 9 hours of driving time, and then tomorrow in theory we should get to our parents houses in Stavanger and Sandwich, IL. I’m looking forward to being in Sandwich for a couple of days.

Time to go!

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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.

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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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I’m going to try to do something useful while I’m flying, for once: read a book, crop/process some of my photos, and maybe even do some actual work, such as the performance review stuff I’ve been putting off for ages.

Right now I am listening amusedly to some of the other passengers in Pimp Class comment amazedly at how fanciful their seats are. “You mean you have fifty movies in the seat? Incredible! Did you hear that, dear? They have fifty movies in the seat!”

Another point of amusement for me: the flight attendant has made a point of memorizing everybody’s name and is addressing them individually.

Last comment, since we will take off soon: this will be the longest wednesday ever.

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I’m finally heading for home, after 3 weeks in Australia. I’ve got a bunch more photos to post, but I haven’t got them processed yet. They’re safely stored on my laptop and a CF card for now. Jenny has another bunch on her camera that I’ll make sure she posts online.

Right now I’m in New Zealand - a country for which I don’t have any sort of visa to enter, mind you - killing time until my flight to SFO departs in a couple of hours. Jenny is somewhere between Sydney and here by now, because we weren’t able to get on the same flight home. Entirely my fault, of course. She’ll survive.

One thing’s for sure, though: it will be nice to get home and pet my cats.

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And so, our hero finds himself in the Air New Zealand lounge at 0500 in Auckland, NZ. It is TOMORROW here. I’m on my way to Sydney - I’m spending the next 3 weeks there on business. Let me just say for the record, Air New Zealand’s business class is freaking NICE. Seriously. A 4-something-hour flight in coach across the US seems much longer than the 12 hours I just spent in Fat Cat Class on a Sky Palace 747.

There’s only one thing I don’t quite understand so far on this trip: Why did we have to go through an additional set of security scans after disembarking from the SFO-AKL flight and going to the airline lounge? Are they looking for illicit fruit or something?

Update: I put up some photos from my office here in Sydney. The view totally rocks.

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