TAJ is an Acronym for Jazz

I went to see this dude on Friday, because of the Stanford Jazz Workshop.

It started out pretty awful by my standards. The first song was horribly compositional to begin with, and then for no particular reason went into a "let's just play notes and see what happens" mode. Also, they were all playing way too loud, and seeing how I couldn't tell what was going on, and I was sitting Way Back Here, and they were All The Way Up There, they probably couldn't either. I stuck around though, because I had hope for them, and because my ride wanted to stay.

They improved drastically over the course of the two sets, especially after the intermission. Although the drummer insisted on punishing his drums to no end until probably the last song where he sounded laid-back enough to be in a jazz band, they all got to a point pretty quickly after they came back where they were actually jamming together, and seemed "in the groove" (TM?). The one thing I couldn't get past was the saxophonist, who really had only one tone, and, while it was soothing, the "velvety-soft" thing doesn't really make it seem like you're improvising, and I don't think he was. Thankfully, as the only member of the band on a wind instrument, he had to take frequent breaks, so the rest of the band could play some good music while he rested to come back and monotonize it up again. Although I've spent some time bashing most of them, by the encore they had come around fully, and were extremely good, at one point even playing something I would consider applying the label "rockin' jams" to. 'Twas worth it, by the end.

Today I slept all day. That is all.

Gooooogol Conglomerate

This weekend, two interesting things happened:

1) My computer decided to completely bork itself, particularly in the area of connecting to the internet, and then when I got it working again, a new feature appeared that wasn't working before.

2) I participated in the first ever puzzlehunt at Google! There is a good definition and list of related links here, and the challenge's website (with soon-to-come full puzzletext, I think) here. Those sources will do a much better job of explaining it than I ever could, so I'll list only my personal reactions below, and leave the exposition to better sourced people:

Wheeeeee!

Usability

I went to a thingamajigger today where I won some entries into a raffle, some silly putty, and some chances for all of you to participate in google.

If any of you want to be registered for google's User Experience Research participant database, go here and use the Referral Code "MV2" to sign up.

Enjoy.

Pier 39

So I haven't updated this in (let's see...) six days (or so). Here goes, for the important stuff:

Saturday, I went to Big Basin with a few other interns, and walked around for a bit. The trail was fairly uninteresting (almost disappointing), but there were a few really great sights. Not many great views, because of the Huge Freaking Trees Everywhere Around You Effect, but there were a few pretty amazing picture chances (yet another reminder that I need to yell at Radio Shack, again). Also, we did the whole walk-on-a-log-spanning-a-river-to-get-to-the-other-side thing, which was fun. There really isn't anything more to say about that, which is why I wish I had my camera.

Sunday, I finally checked out Fry's Electronics. I don't know if it's because it was the one in Palo Alto, but I was pretty disappointed. Most of it was like a large-ish Best Buy, with one section for Large Appliances (washers and dryers...?). The only interesting section was where they had cases, motherboards, ram, CPUs, etc. all for sale separately, but unfortunately, the selection was puny compared to what I was expecting. I was later told that the original store is in Sunnyvale, so I might have to try that out. Anyway, I continued on my way to the Caltrain, which I took into San Francisco to meet up with Jason (for the uninformed, he was at Stony Brook last year on exchange, and is now back in Hawaii where he will be staying. He was visiting San Francisco, which is why I went to meet him). I biked from the Caltrain station there, along The Embarcadero (the northeast coast of SF), where it was quite windy, up to Pier 39 (protip: The piers are not numbered the way you would expect. Get a map.), where I walked around for a while until I met up with Jason. Yes, I did see the sea lions, yes, they looked exactly like sea lions always do on TV and in zoos, no, they weren't that special, but yes, the view of the ocean was pretty cool. Pier 39 was Yet Another Tourist Trap, so we played some arcade games, walked around, visited a magic shop, and ate dinner at the Hard Rock cafe (which of course made us both feel like awful human beings), and then I biked back to the Caltrain station as fast as I could because it was almost nine and the last train out leaves at nine on Sunday nights and oh my gosh what will happen if I don't make it I don't have anywhere to stay well maybe I can stay with Jason? but how will I get to work in the morning man this hill is steep what were they thinking when they planned this damn city?.... I got to the station just before the train left (I think I was the second- or third-to-last person on), and got home safely.

Apart from those adventures, I've just been working (my code finally compiles! Yay! But some of the unnecessary dependencies are broken! Boo!), eating great food, and relaxing with the other interns every night. This is actually the first time in a while that I've left work before midnight. Oh, and I got (Yet Another) free t-shirt today! Hooray for schwag!

#00FF00, #000000, and #0000FF make the colors in the sky.

Today I found a DDR 5th mix arcade machine in my office.

Apparently it had been out on loan somewhere for a few months, and returned today.

This just doesn't stop getting better, does it?

Suggestions

I'm starting to think about a side-project to do at work (with my 20% time), and although I can't talk about any of the ideas I'm working with right now, I'd like to open the floor to all of you. If there's anything you ever wanted to see the internet do (and don't want to keep the idea for yourself), let me know. I figure now's the best time to do something cool, since I already have tons of nice libraries to work with, so if you have anything, say it soon.

You can post here if you have an account (or want to create one, it's not hard), or e-mail me at "walshl" at the domain you'd think of. A human should be able to do here what a robot should not, which is to add an "at" symbol (@) followed by "google", a period, and the letters 'c', 'o', and 'm'. Eat that, CAPTCHA.

Great weather today.

Today was fun. After a really bad breakfast (I ordered crêpes with strawberries and nutella, and I think they used an entire jar of nutella, plus they butchered the cappuccino), I read for a while and then biked up to the park north of Google and Shoreline Amphitheatre and biked around there for a long time (good views, I wish I had my camera, thanks again Radio Shack), then found a place with a good view of some mountains to sit down and read some more. After a bit, I kept biking, got back to the main road, and headed back to the park because I had seen signs for a restaurant. I got there, and it was more of a country club than a restaurant (and didn't look that great), so I left, and went back to Mountain View to find a better place to eat. I think if you follow this link, you'll get to a page where you can follow the interesting part of my trip pretty much verbatim. Directions are to be had there; I didn't make a really great map, but you can get the idea.

I found one (some Turkish/Greek place), and ended up having these amazing ravioli that were filled with beef and topped with some kind of yogurt sauce, and had this really cool aftertaste that was almost like eating tea, but not overpowering. Anyone that comes to visit will definitely be brought here, unless I find someplace better.

How are things on the West Coast?

Last night, I was shanghaied into playing a few rounds of Warcraft with some of my co-workers. Yada yada yada, I didn't leave work until 8 in the morning. After a decent nap, I got some breakfast, went back to work to print out my ticket, and then went to Shoreline Amphitheatre for the show.

Early this week, I got a ticket to a music festival that some local radio station put on today. That ticket got me in the door.

I saw one weird and interesting, but not very good small band, and then went over to the main stage where some band called "Scissors for Lefty" was playing. The only thing worth mentioning about them is that most of them weren't wearing pants. After that was Kaiser Chief, who were pretty good, but I only recognized one of their songs (and the rest sort of sounded the same).

Interpol played, and gave me the title for this post (protip: it's in one of their songs). They sounded exactly like an Interpol CD, which was somewhat disappointing.

Finally, Queens of the Stone Age came on, and the real concert started. They played 4 new songs (from their CD that apparently is coming out tomorrow), which were mostly awesome (one was kind of mediocre), and a few of their old standards. The general awesomeness of the performance just really can't be put into serial form. I'll leave it at that.

And, actually, I left it at that (because I was really hungry and wasn't that interested in Social Distortion or Bloc Party (who are Bloc Party?)).

So now you know that work is not the only thing I do.

Those of you that have never played Mario are about to be left clueless. Be warned.

Hanging from one section of the ceiling of my office, by which I of course do not mean one panel, rather an abstract sense of section, there are some brick-patterned and question mark-patterned boxes, among some clouds and coins, on top of which I would very much like to place some pennies.

I'd also like to set up a video camera to capture responses, but they don't allow pictures, so we'll just have to let that one go.

I lied.

I will talk about one cool product release: Google StreetView. I think it's one of the coolest applications of Linear Algebra I've ever seen, plus, you can see the house in front of my apartment.

That is all.

Transportation Guidelines In French

Today, in addition to all the normal "sitting in a chair reading APIs and documentation and writing small pieces of code for practice" stuff that I've been doing all week, I went to an event that apparently occurs each week on Friday afternoons (TGIF, if you missed the title), and which is essentially a huge company-wide meeting with Larry and Sergei (and other people walking up to answer specific questions or discuss specific topics). They stood up in front of everyone and talked about some new product launches, the Developer Day that happened the day before, and a few extra things. I can't talk about a lot of the things they said, and I won't bother listing the product launches (because you can find them yourself if you really want to), but it was pretty cool and they were pretty funny all around. At the end, they took questions both from the audience and online, which ranged from policy/internal workings questions to "can we please get rid of the damn gradients that make all the Google Apps look like MS Office?" That question got an agreeable response, and apparently it is going to be gotten rid of very soon (oh, look at that, they're already gone). I considered walking up and asking them to get rid of the 'i' in iGoogle, but the line was already formed. I'll ask next week if it's still up.

Not a lot else to say, except that I'm going to be pretty bored over the weekend. Oh well, plenty of reading to do (they gave us textbooks!).