Finally, Some Pictures

I had some good excuses to use my camera this past weekend, hence another post in a shorter-than-normal timespan (there is a TON of irony here, since it's now been a week since I started writing this post). On Saturday (that's now LAST Saturday, 6/23) morning, a few people from work planned a hike about an hour away from Palo Alto. It was in San Mateo county, near Half Moon Bay. I had actually been in that area a few years ago when my family and I were on vacation. I'm considering going back to the area to try and take surfing lessons, although I don't have a whole lot of time left for that. Today, I decided that the last day of my internship will be Friday 8/19, so that only leaves a few weekends left our west, all of which I already have plans. Maybe I'll see about staying here a little longer just to do some more things before heading home.

In any event, the hike on Saturday was fantastic. I haven't really done much hiking, and apparently it's a pretty big thing to do out here since there are a lot of places to go. It took about 3-4 hours in total, including water/snack breaks. I'm not exactly sure exactly how many miles we walked, or what the elevation was, but I would say it was a good trail for someone like myself that hasn't really done something like it before.

The hike started out in the foliage sprawling across the mountains, so there was a lot of green to be seen.
We were in there for a couple hours before hitting a bunch of switchbacks one the outside. Some of my favorite parts included walking across logs that spanned over a river, or something to that effect.

At this point, it is now Saturday morning, and I started writing this last Sunday, so my memory of the hike has started to fade. I'll let the pictures do most of the talking:

The hike begins

Found this log...

...decided to walk across it

Took my camera across this log

Picture from halfway across the log

Made it out of the forrest

Another artsy-fartsy picture

Since we were on the coast anyway, we decided to stop at a beach not too far away after the hike. Interestingly, it immediately became overcast once we got there, which was kind of a bummer.  As you'll see, the beach was down the side of (yet another) mountain that we had to scale in order to get to the beach. It was actually pretty fun - someone had put a rope in for some of the steeper parts. When you got to the bottom, there wasn't much ground to brace yourself, so the only good strategy was to just run down until you were on flat ground. Otherwise, your momentum was likely to wind you up on the ground.

Flying-V

What we have to climb down

After looking at the pictures from this trip, I realized how much better uncompressed images are. See, when my camera takes a picture, it actually saves 2 different versions. First is in JPG/JPEG format, which everyone is pretty familiar with. It's a compressed version of the image that saves space and is fairly compatible with a variety of applications. The second is known as a RAW image, meaning it is completely uncompressed, and about 3x the size of the compressed version. In comparing photos from the weekend, I realized there is quite a difference. Unfortunately, due to the vastly increased size of the images, most websites will not let you upload them. So, I'm stuck with the ones you see here, which I guess aren't that bad after all. They're certainly better than the ones I was taking before I got my camera.

Sunday I went to the park to read my GRE book. I finally registered to take the test, so now I can plan out exactly how much time I have to study for it. So far, it seems like a pretty straightforward standardized test, so I'm not too worried. Unfortunately, I fell asleep while reading the book (it's not the most riveting material on the planet). As a result, I got a pretty bad sunburn, which actually hurt a couple of days after the fact. By now (Thursday), it's peeling and doesn't hurt at all.

On Sunday night, my roommates and I went to go see Captain America. Overall, it was okay. It had some really great moments, and they do an awesome job tying it in with other superhero movies for the future Avengers film. I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone, unless they absolutely love superhero movies. Even then, I'm still on the fence...

Well, I started writing this on Sunday, and it's now almost the following Sunday. A lot has happened since then, but something I would have mentioned if I had finished this in time is that my mom is visiting this weekend. That combined with trampoline dodgeball (not trampolines, not dodgeball... trampoline dodgeball) will make for another interesting few days to blog about. No promises as to when that will actually get finished, though.

Waffle Withdrawal

So the title of this post only has to do with only a very small part of the last couple weeks. Since I started working, every Tuesday morning the company has had Belgian waffles for breakfast. For the last couple of weeks, however, I showed up bright and early, only to find no waffles. To be fair, the company lists the menu in advance, so I could have looked ahead of time, but I never thought to do so. I always just assumed they would have waffles. Then last week, they had omelettes on Tuesday, which were usually on Thursdays. That made me think they would switch and have waffles on Thursday. Yet again, my hopes were squashed as there were no waffles on Thursday last week.

This week, luckily, was a different story. I made sure to look at the menu, and on Thursday, my prayers were answered. I arrived, salivating, looking forward to my fresh, multi-grain waffle with chocolate chips, bananas, syrup, and whipped cream.It was as delicious as I had remembered, and I almost went back for a second one. I've since learned that they will be rotating between omelettes and waffles every Thursday, so I have at least a couple more waffles days before my internship is over.

On Thursday night, the company rented out a bar/restaurant for Trivia Night. Around 6pm, literally every person at the office got up to head over. We arranged ourselves into teams beforehand, and when we arrived, we sat at a table with our team. One of the prizes for the evening was best team name, and we thought we would win with this one:

'; drop table team_names;

I don't expect most people to understand what it means, but for a software company that deals heavily with database systems, most people got a kick out of it. Unfortunately for us, the judges of the team names are not part of the engineering group at the company, so they didn't think much of it. A familiar theme in my posts seems to do with XKCD references, and our team name is yet another one:

Exploits of a Mom - "Her daughter is named Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory."

There were 9 rounds altogether, with subjects including pop culture (not my best topic), history (even worse), sports, and famous mustaches. Each round had 10 questions, and we started off really strong with about 5-6 points in the first couple of rounds. We started to decline, though, as some of the questions became really obscure. There were 10 of us on the team, and we really struggled with some of the questions. I chimed in every so often with a couple things others didn't know. We ended up coming in 15th out of about 23 teams, so in the middle of the pack.

Part of Trivia Night included free dinner and drinks at the restaurant. They had a buffet of food there, similar to what we have at work, except with food from the restaurant. The wait staff went around to tables getting drinks, and there was also a bar where you could go up if you did not want to wait, although apparently the bartender had a list of 50 drink orders to fill at some point (so maybe it wasn't that much faster after all). The event took about 3-4 hours in all, after which some people stayed to hang out and continue having a good time. I thought it was a blast, and the "MCs" of the show did a great job - I was pretty much laughing the whole time.

I've also started planning some trips before the summer is out. I've already referenced my friend from school coming to visit, and vice versa. This are looking to happen in the middle and end of August. I'm also planning to spend a weekend in Vegas with some roommates from school. The plan is for some of them to drive across country from Boston to Palo Alto, where they'll spend the night on Thursday and I can give them a tour of the office and such. We'll leave for Vegas on Friday morning, and meet other roommates that are planning on flying in. Then probably on Monday, I will fly back just to save time and the flights are pretty inexpensive right now.

From the looks of it, getting to and from airports in the area isn't too bad. There is decent public transportation to the 2 airports closest to me, and they are reasonably priced. The best option is a bus that is only $2 and goes right from Palo Alto to the airport, and it's about the same time as if someone drove me. I actually have to buy the flights before I start thinking about that, though. I've got everything planned on a spreadsheet somewhere...

Earlier this week, the air conditioning broke in the office. I know there's been a pretty intense heat wave in various parts of the country, but it's still been somewhat moderate here (around the 80s or so during the day). I did notice the temperature rise inside, but didn't think it was unbearable. Some people just couldn't take it, and even went home early. I guess if you live out here long enough, you get used to the perfect weather, and any deviation from it feels like the most drastic change. Maybe some of them should spend a year in New England for a change of pace to know what they're missing.

I also recently decided to take the GRE in a couple months. I still haven't completely made up my mind about life after graduation next year, but graduate school is definitely an option. The ETS had a promotion for registering since they recently changed the format of the test (similar to what happened to me and the SAT in high school). If you registered in August or September, you got 50% off, which was a great deal, so a friend from school and I registered for the same day at the end of September. I ordered a review book on Amazon to start preparing. I had also looked at prep classes, but those looked VERY expensive and not to convenient to attend.

At this point, I'm not really thinking about it too much. I figure it will just be good to have taken the GRE in case I decide to apply to grad school. I think my ideal choice would be to just start work full-time after I graduate, and I definitely would not mind coming back here for that. I just don't know what my options are going to be, so I'm going to try and give myself as many as possible. So far, the test seems pretty similar to the SAT, except that you take in on a computer and that it's adaptive (meaning the difficulty adjusts based on how well you do). The math portions look pretty basic, and I've struggled with critical reading and writing in the past, so nothing new as far as standardized testing goes.

This weekend has the potential to include a hike, bike ride to San Francisco, going to see Captain America, and possibly other adventures as well. Sorry for the lack of pictures lately, I haven't done a very good job of utilizing my camera recently. Hopefully I'll have more opportunities for that during the weekend.

The Halfway Point

It's crazy to think that my summer here is about half over. I looked at my calendar today to actually sit down and count - this has been my 6th week here, and there are only another 6 weeks left until I go back to Boston. As part of that, there are only a few weekends left, some of which are already booked. My mom is coming to visit in a couple weeks, I'm planning on going to Vegas with roommates the weekend after, a friend is visiting one weekend, and I'll also be going up to visit him in Washington at some point as well. That only leaves a couple weekends open for me to get things done (and I don't mean work-related). This is definitely a glass half-empty deal because I find myself wanting it to go on even longer.

On Tuesday, Craig Newmark (the creator of Craigslist) came to speak to our company. There was a whole event with food and drinks, and we got there just in time to get decent seats. He spoke for about thirty minutes about how the website came to be, why he started it, and the things he's involved in now. He still works in customer service at Craigslist, but is soon moving on to other things. One of the most interesting things he talked about was the design of the website. As far as modern standards go, the website is incredibly rundown. It's a bunch of tables with text and links - nothing pretty or shiny. Craig mentioned that was done for a couple reasons: (1) he knows absolutely nothing about design, and (2) leaving out rich media content means fewer resources required by the servers, so it drastically improved performance of the site.

After his speech, Craig answered questions for another thirty minutes before the event ended. People stayed to hang out, eat, and drink, but the place was unbelievably packed so I pushed my way through to get some of the chocolate truffles and headed back. Overall it was alright, nothing spectacular or life-changing.

Craig of Craigslist (sorry for the poor picture)

There were lots of smaller things that happened this week, most of which didn't even involve work. When I was leaving my apartment one morning, there was a woman sitting on the steps to the sidewalk who I had seen earlier in the week at night when I was coming back from work. Seeing as this was the second time we've run into each other, she introduced herself and asked it I was one of the intern residents for the summer. I reciprocated, told her about my internship, and where I go to school. Although she is originally from Russia, she lived on Mass Avenue in Cambridge very near where my apartment at school is. It was one of those small world things, especially considering I expect most people from the area to be more familiar with Harvard and/or MIT over Tufts.

Thursday morning, I met a friend of my mom's at his office that just happened to be down the street from where i work. They had worked on a project together in Singapore right around the time when I received the offer to come work out here for the summer. He offered to give me a tour of his office, and so I finally took him up on that. They do some really cool work, including design and manufacturing of lots of different products. The coolest thing they do, though, is called human factors engineering. When designing a product, they get not only basic consumer opinions on things, but also resident "experts." For example, they were helping one company redesign some kitchen tools, including a potato peeler. Instead of just asking home cooks what they would like, they found a guy that peels potatoes for 10 hours a day because he probably knows more about the details of that process than anyone else on the planet. I got to see their workshop that had a bunch of 3D printers making some cool things, and there were employees on the street testing a motorized, front-wheel drive bicycle.

Another small coincidence happened at work as well. A full-time employee just started a couple weeks again, and he had interned here last summer as well. If nothing else, it's just good to know that interns are not only given the opportunity to come back, but that they take it. I found out he is originally from Livingston, NJ, not too far from where I grew up. He graduated a couple years before me, though, so it doesn't seem that we know anyone in common. Still another funny coincidence.

A cool music application, Spotify, was released in the US earlier this week. It's an interesting combination of things like Pandora and Grooveshark, things I already use. I managed to get an account, and have been using it. Basically you can select almost any song in their database and play it on your computer, mobile device, etc. There is a pretty wide selection, as they have deals with major music corporations. The only downside is that there is a 20 hour limit per month, similar to how Pandora has a 40 hours limit. You can also upload music files that you have so that they can be accessed in other places. There are also premium subscriptions that life the hour limit and give you some more things, but for now I'm gonna stick with the free account.

Probably one of the biggest things to happen for me this week was the release of the new blink-182 single, "Up All Night." This is easily one of my favorite bands of all-time, and this is the first new music they've released since their breakup in 2005. Their new album is supposed to come out at the end of September, and this was the first time anyone has heard their new music. I liked it, but I didn't love it. I'll reserve complete judgement until I hear the entire album in a few months.

And I can't end this post without talking about Harry Potter. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see it at midnight - we hadn't planned anything until all the tickets were already sold out. So we decided to go Friday night instead. After we had bought our tickets, the company organized an intern outing to the same theater and showing we already had tickets for, so we actually got reimbursed for them it helped a lot with rides there and back. To prepare, a bunch of us watched the previous movie on Thursday night to refresh us on what happened. The theater was pretty crowded, and there were plenty of people dressed up. We got there are just the right time so that we didn't wait in line for too long, and we got decent seats.

I thought the movie was pretty good. It seemed to wrap up the story well, but took more than a few liberties from what the book had. After the movie, everyone was discussing the differences. One of my friends actually hated the movie because there wasn't enough action, but that's not what this movie was supposed to be about. Watching it actually made me want to read the books again, although I'm far enough behind on the rest of my reading so I have no idea how long that would take.

And lastly. Carmageddon has not made its way here (at least not yet). Carmageddon has to do with the closing of highway 405, a major road in the LA area. It's so bad to the point where police are recommending people to just stay off the roads. Some airlines are offering something like $5 flights to alleviate traffic. I'm contemplating taking advantage of some of the incredibly cheap airfares, but no plans yet.

A Day Out On the Town

Things were pretty typical at work this week. I had lots of meetings about new software features being planned, and got to see some demos of them. Development cycles here are really quick, as I'll have seen at least a couple full iterations by the time I'm done with my internship at the end of the summer. One of the best things is that for every "major" release (the qualifying details of which aren't particularly important), the company releases a shirt, and we're actually a few shirts behind. I'm hoping to have enough by the end of the summer that I can go back to school and wear a different one every day of the week. On a related subject, I've also learned that the company is coming to the career fair at school in the fall, since apparently my friend here from school and I have been pretty good so far. They sent us an email asking for some info like where they should get food from, best places to put posters, etc.

Thursday night I decided I didn't have much of anything else to do so I went out to a bar with a couple friends. There are quite a few choices in the area, and we walked around perusing the options for a little bit. We ended up at a place we'd been to before since most of the other places either had a cover, were full to the brim, or because we were underdressed (since we literally went straight from work). Overall a fun night, we were only out for a couple hours but it was nice to relax there. Nothing exciting happened on Friday, except that there were Kobe beef burgers and root-beer floats for dinner at work.

Saturday was the real highlight of the weekend. A large part of my team from work planned an outing to Santana Row in San Jose, about 20 miles from Palo Alto. We all coordinated this past week to make sure we knew who was coming and so we could arrange rides for everyone. About 15 of us went altogether, and I got to drive there with my mentor is his BMW Z4 convertible, which was even more fun since he likes to drive fast.

In true California style

Once we got there, we waited around a little bit so everyone else could park and meet up with us. This gave me a chance to snag some initial pictures before we started walking around. It was basically another  open-air mall, the likes of which I am still not used to. Even more weird was that cars can drive up and down the main drag of the "mall", although it is definitely dominated by pedestrians. It is also right next to a couple of really nice hotels, so I guess they want all kinds of traffic to have access.

Interesting teams...

There were all sorts of shops in the area, some really interesting ones too. We started at the outdoor mall, just walking up and down the strip walking into any stores that interested us. We split up a few times as some stores interested some people more than others. The only thing I was in the market for was a pair of sunglasses, but I was willing to go around and see what else there was. First, we went into a little shop with lots of random stuff. Nothing particularly important, but they did have a ridiculous collection of fancy pens, with one apparently worth well over $1000:

...what?

We went into a few stores with sunglasses, but nothing that really stuck out to me. I also realized how expensive sunglasses can get, and so I needed some time to see what the options were. The best store, by far, was the Tesla showroom. For those of you that don't know, Tesla is one of the most expensive luxury car manufacturers, and they started out here on the west coast. The major differentiator for them is the fact that their cars are 100% electric, but they're also performance sports vehicles. The Roadster Sport  features 288 horsepower, and can go from 0-60mph in 3.7 seconds with a top speed of 125mph. A full charge will last about 250 miles. The place at this mall was only a showroom, but they did have a car for people to look at and sit it. I've only ever seen a couple of these cars on the road, and damn do they look good:

If you haven't noticed already, one of the things I want to do this summer is get a test drive of a car like this. We spent some time talking to one of the representatives, but they don't give test drives at this location since it's basically just a show room. They did have some cool stuff with touch screens where you could design your own Roadster. It was good practice for us for when we go to the location nearest to us in hopes of actually getting to take a car on the road. I've even been doing some research about the technology of how the car works so we know what we're talking. For instance, there's only a single gear ratio, which makes sense for electric cars. Pushing down the peddle just increases the strength of the magnetic field, and there's no need to switch gears. There are basically a couple buttons to push on the center console (park, drive, neutral, and reverse), and the rest is all power.

After spending more time than was probably necessary, we moved on to one end of the outdoor mall where there was an indoor one across the street. This one had some pretty typical stores, and we played in Brookstone for a while. They did have a LEGO store, though, and I don't think I ever wanted to leave it. There were kids playing some sort of game/race where they had to build the best thing in 4-5 minutes, and I was tempted to wait in line and compete.

SO many LEGOs

We weren't in that mall too long, since we had dinner reservations. 13 of us went to LB Steakhouse, where the food was delicious. We got all sorts of appetizers and amazing steak. They also had a version of molten chocolate lava cake, and my rule is if I ever go out to eat and the place offers that for dessert, I have to order it. It was pretty good, but not the best I've ever had. Maybe I should start keeping a list of all the places I've had it. The coolest item they had on the menu was the "Royale with Cheese," which my mentor ordered. If you don't get the reference, go watch Pulp Fiction... at least twice.

The Royal with Cheese - with extra meat

We also had plans to see a movie after dinner. A couple people had gone to the theater at the mall earlier to get tickets for "Horrible Bosses." Unfortunately, we stayed at dinner too long and when we got to the movie, the theater was already full. I felt slightly responsible since I wanted to stay and order dessert at dinner, but so did others. We decided instead to go get money back for our tickets and go to another theater down the street that was also showing the movie just an hour later. It was a little out of the way, but still pretty convenient. The movie was alright - it had some funny moments but wasn't particularly hilarious. Charlie Day (from "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia") was in the movie, and I love him on TV, but even he only had a couple moments of brilliance. It was still fun to go out with people from work for the day, especially somewhere I probably wouldn't go otherwise since there isn't any convenient public transportation out there.

For some reason, I decided to stay up really late on Sunday night (late being 3am) so I got to work really late on Monday morning (late being 10:30am, which is still before some people show up). I got to learn some really cool things about the software, and am definitely feeling comfortable with stuff. I'm even at the point where I'm helping new employees and interns with things they don't understand about features I've been working on. There are still plenty of things other people know a lot better than I do, though.

Tomorrow, Craig Newmark (the guy that invented Craigslist) is coming to talk in the area tomorrow, and the company got us in. Apparently, he was born in Morristown, right next to where I grew up, although I'd be surprised if I get the chance to talk with him and bring it up. At the end of this week, I'm going to see the last Harry Potter movie with friends. The 5th movie was on TV last night, and we had some people over to watch it. We also brought back pizza and ice cream from the office for dinner while watching it. I think the others are also on TV this week leading up to the last one. I saw at least a couple theaters where you buy a ticket for the midnight release of the last one, and you can go watch the previous movie right before it.

I've been playing around with Google+ a little bit, and am definitely getting the hang of it. I'm still not sure how it will fit into the whole social networking industry, but it has a couple cool features. My verdict on it is still out since I haven't used all the features. Amusingly, it's suggesting I know Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page, presumably because I'm connected to other people at Facebook and Google that actually know them. I also don't know if it's okay to refer to it just as g+, although one of the people I met from Google has done that multiple times. It's a little odd to see that, since I'm used to using g++ (the GNU compiler) when I do programming assignments, so it just seems like people are forgetting a plus symbol when I see that.

Amazingly, it's only midnight here right now - I'm used to it being later by the time I finish blog posts. Today, though, I left work a little earlier than usual (around 8pm), so I had some extra time. That just means I can get to sleep a little earlier and wake up in plenty of times for waffles tomorrow morning. Although last week, the switched waffle and omelette day, so it'll be a little bit of a surprise when I show up in the morning.