A new happy summer fun mixtape for y'all:



Guaranteed to contain melodies! choruses! lyrics! …so get it now!

Tags: mix

I should get back to making an attempt to have at least one good thing happen every day, and posting about same. The feeling that people might be paying attention does help me to keep the goal in mind.

Today:
• Had lunch with interimlover sitting in the lovely outdoors. Chicken vindaloo from the BigTable cafe. Talking about ambient music.
• Went to the fitness center and worked out, even without anyone else to remind/coerce me. (In fact, I ran into one of the coercers from my old team there.)

This does help balance out some not-so-great things, including more code-review / coding style aggravations. (The latest: it is apparently a violation of coding standards to break a line in a comment at the end of a clause, when several more words would otherwise have fit on the line. Because it's "hard to read".) At that point I had to go and lift weights, while listening to Godflesh at high volume.

Tags: awesomeness

If there's one Dilbert cartoon that summarizes why I switched teams, it's this one:

 

I have put this up on my whiteboard, with "function" in the first panel whited out and replaced with "pager duty", and "did the function" in the third panel with "handled DDOS attacks".

Tags: work

I've been getting pretty frustrated with my job. Web development is intrinsically sort of chaotic, requiring all sorts of different components (templates, databases, stylesheets, client-side scripts, directory servers, caches, ...) and Google's infrastructure brings in this endless landscape of internal proprietary systems. Then there's the fact that much of the work involves just keeping the servers running smoothly and reacting to a constant series of outages, upgrades, attacks, schema changes, and so on. And all this while trying to release new builds every two weeks.

I think I could have dealt with it if the product itself had been more along the lines of what I want to create; but the focus of Sites has shifted from what JotSpot used to be (a fancy wiki with lots of great collaboration features) into more of a general-purpose web site builder. Which doesn't really interest me as much.

I had been looking around at other teams inside Google for a while. One of the benefits of Google's transparency is that it's very easy to find out what's going on elsewhere in the company. There's a well-organized intranet website that tells you about almost all the projects at the company (with a few exceptions, like Google Wave, which was unusually top-secret until April.) Unfortunately the cool projects I found were either outside the Bay Area or not hiring. I actually really, really wanted to go work on Wave, except that the entire team's in Sydney. I'd love to visit Australia, but moving there would not be practical!

Two weeks ago there was an internal job fair. I walked over, with low expectations, carrying two old-fashioned printouts of my résumé with me. Being a Google event, there was food; I took an It's-It so the trip wouldn't be a total loss. Among the endless booths hawking boring-to-me infrastructure/search/ads projects was one for "Open Web Platform", a sub-team of the Chrome browser project that's in charge of implementing HTML 5 features, and designing new technologies to make web apps more powerful. This really intrigued me, especially the list of technologies on the poster – things like fonts, databases, graphics, cryptography, peer-to-peer.

So I talked with the manager there at the job fair, trying not to drop ice-cream on my shirt or smear him with chocolate when we shook hands. He seemed impressed with my background. I left him a résumé and emailed him when I got back to my desk. He had his tech-lead get together with me for an informal interview. I went to the team meeting to scope it out, and had lunch with a couple of the team members. I was expecting it to get more formal at some point, like a real sit-down interview, or paperwork to sign, but instead it just gradually became more and more solid, until last Thursday the manager said they'd love to have me and he'd press the button to start the transfer.

(I kept my current boss informed. He's known for a while that I'm looking elsewhere, and has been very cool about it. Google's culture encourages people to move around anyway, and I think it was clear from the beginning that I was a bit at sea with working on huge server-side systems.)

The transfer is still going through; I think next week it'll be rubber-stamped. In the interim, on Tuesday I moved all my stuff over to the new building. Technically I don't think I was supposed to do that, particularly not carrying all the computer equipment out to my car and driving it over myself, but I've had enough experience with intra-company moving to know that these things take forever unless you take over. I really wanted to move over quickly so that I could have people nearby to help me out with learning the innards of Chrome, and also just to feel that I was really and truly in the new job.

I was feeling kind of guilty the day of the move — you know, abandoning my old team, giving the impression that I was super-eager to get away from them, potentially about to get arrested for stealing company equipment — but by yesterday it was all worth it. I felt totally reset, ready to work, part of the team. Actually most of the team is on a different floor, but next week there's going to be a huge musical-chairs move of the entire Chrome group that will arrange everyone logically by team on a single floor.

I should take & post some pictures of the new building (1950 Charleston). It's one of Google's newest, and it's very posh. Not quite as over-the-top as the main campus next door, but a definite step up from the building I used to be in. The first floor sports not only a laundromat, but a medical clinic (with physical therapy) and a meditation room!

Up on the third floor, I'm getting up to speed. I've been looking through the bug database for some low-hanging fruit, since fixing easy bugs is a good way to learn your way around the code. I've found a couple of Mac-specific issues, which aren't directly related to what my sub-team does, but are easy for me to get started with. I've already added a unit test, and I've improved the implementation of tooltips. (Those links point directly to source code diffs. I'm still kind of in shock that everything I'm working on is open source. No more secrecy!!)


Summary for those who scrolled to the end: New job, new building, working on client-side software. I'm pretty psyched.

Tags: work

Yesterday, Diana found a peacock egg beneath a burned-out freeway overpass.

Is that not a total J G Ballard moment? (At least there were no crashing cars or rioting apartment-dwellers!)

Whew — I've put together the letters to the three credit agencies, complete with copies of my drivers' license, bank statements and W-2 forms as proof of identity, and they're ready to go in the mail.

Not big news, but a significant achievement for one as scatter-brained and getting-things-done-phobic as I am.

Now, of course, I have to wait an unspecified amount of time to get the lost PINs mailed back to me, and then I can use those to lift the security freezes and then go buy an iPhone 3GS…

Tags: iphone
Music: Ellen Allien - "Boogiebytes #4"

I really recommend putting a freeze on your credit reports at the three credit bureaus. This keeps anyone from accessing your report without your advance permission, so it pretty much eliminates those unsolicited credit card offers, and helps prevent identity theft.

But if you do this, don't ever lose the PIN they give you to un-freeze it with. Because then if you do need to get a credit check … say, hypothetically, for signing up for a two-year cellphone plan so you can get the hot new upgraded model of your beloved phone … then you will have to first jump through lots of hoops, involving sending certified letters with copies of your Social Security card, to get another PIN.

I've dug through a bunch of old credit-card-related receipts, but I don't think the paperwork is going to turn up, so now I'm getting out the hoops and doing my preliminary stretches.

Mood: frustrated

Last week's laser-cutting may not have worked out (most of the sheets not getting cut consistently all the way through) but at least I got some interesting photos out of it:





Fluorescent orange lucite is trippy enough on its own, you don't even need Photoshop!

Tags: lazzzor, photo

The Mandelbrot sets I cut out at TechShop on Thursday were a bust. Out of four contours I cut, only one of them (the simplest, n=9) came out intact. The rest were casualties of misalignment in the table — the front side seems to be about 1/16" lower than the back, and since I'd set the focus at the back left corner, the laser was out of focus enough at the front that it didn't cut quite all the way through. I struggled enough with the black (n=3000) layer, the Set itself, to get it all out, but lots of the little mini-'Brots broke off, and gluing all of them back on would look bad.

So, for next time I need to calibrate the focus lower, possibly decrease the speed some more, and definitely add some extra helper cuts around the edges so I can get the extra plastic off of the shape in multiple small pieces.

I also took some photos of the wreckage, since even broken pieces of fractal look interesting. I haven't gotten them out of the camera yet, but if any of them look good I'll post them.

Tags: crafts, fail, lazzzor
Mood: annoyed

After fixing up my Python script to make the Mandelbrot pattern more cuttable*, I looked up the plastic store and found it's closed on Sunday. So I went to Southern Lumber instead, a local hardware store that's really, really into wood. They have several aisles of nothing but exotic hardwoods, including wild stuff like Purple Heart (it really is purple) and Zebrawood. No ebony or ironwood, unfortunately, although at the other extreme they had big pieces of balsa; I had fun picking up six-foot-long 4x4s with two fingers and waving them around.

But it's hard to find solid wood in 1/4" or thinner. I only saw a few pieces (of more prosaic stuff) and they were only 2" wide. The staff said they could mill thicker pieces down, but I was unsure they'd come out flat enough.

In the end I went for some plywood, which comes thin and big and cheap. Good for experimenting with. I've heard mixed things about laser-cutting plywood, though; apparently the glue is the problem, and some varieties either block the beam or char. I'll have to see how these fare. I have two 2' x 2' x 1/4" sheets, one of a very light almost-white fir, the other of that smooth dark-brown stuff they make pegboard out of, whose texture I've always admired.

Now what to make? I don't think I want a wood Mandelbrot set. But I don't have any other patterns, or ideas right now. I like the idea of making something with hyperbolic geometry, but I never did figure out the coordinate transformations for making tesselations.

* When I tried to cut it before, the cutter kept beeping and flashing an error code when I sent the job over. Eventually I figured out there were just too many points and they were overflowing the machine; so I had to chop away at the file in @$&% CorelDraw to cut the contours into pieces and lase each one separately. So now I changed my Python code to output shorter contours.

Tags: lazzzor
Music: Miwon - "A to B"