One chapter ends, another begins: First impressions of Google

Almost three weeks ago I wrapped up my work with the Northwest School's coaching gig, travelled around the country to visit friends and family (in New Hampshire, Ithaca, St. Louis, and Los Angeles) and now I find myself in Silicon Valley at Google's headquarters for orientation.

For the most part, my first impressions of the people and the facilities here match their reputation: the people friendly, smiling, and chatting eagerly in the cafeteria. Dogs at campus. The area beautiful. Tons of internal information easily searchable. Outstanding variety and quality of food. Equipment ready for you on your first day. (I already have my laptop setup on VPN and on the corporate wifi).

There were only a couple of things that I didn't expect:

1. The number of people at work late (until 8 p.m.). Which makes some sense, since dinner is served from 6:30-8:00 p.m.
2. Heated toilet seats (which were quite delightful).
3. Watching a live interview and concert by One Republic at lunch. That was really pretty fun!

And there were a couple of things I was disappointed by:

1. Completely unripe kiwi fruit (sad face) in the cafeteria.
2. Having to walk to a few different buildings to find a community bike (GBike) that was functional. I found one with a flat tire, but didn't know where to find a pump.
3. Getting a "rental bike" for "visitors" (i.e. Googlers who live at a different location, like myself) that didn't have lights on it.*

A friend asked me today how Google and Microsoft compare, and some obvious differences are these:

• Much longer orientation at Google (5-10 days vs. 1)
• Better food at Google
• Better drinks at Google. (In my time on campus today I consumed 2 Odwallas, a frappucino, and another juice).
• More bikes at Google: I saw a good number parked outside and inside buildings. Unlike Microsoft, there are bike racks in front of buildings at Google, which makes biking a little more convenient and "advertises" that biking is a viable option. Also, Microsoft doesn't have any loaner bikes or "community" bikes like Google does.
• Less of a corporate atmosphere at Google
• Smaller campus at Google (7000 in Mountain View, compared to 40,000 MS employees in the Puget Sound area)
• Much easier to find internal information at Google
• Most (80%?) of Google employees seem to have been here 3 years or less.
• People seem happier at Google (I'm not really sure if this is true or not...)
• Variety of operating systems at Google (Mac OS, Linux, Windows, whereas most machines are running Windows at Microsoft).

One perhaps disturbing similarity between Microsoft and Google is that at both places time can certainly fly by. I was there until almost 9 p.m. tonight, for a total of 13 hours of time on and around Google today!

On the whole, the Silicon Valley area has impressed me and been nicer than expected: San Jose seems to have a pleasant downtown (as does Mountain View), the hills of Rancho San Antonio were quite deluxe for trail running yesterday (they seem a bit too civilized to those of us used to running through mud, roots, and vegetation in western Washington!), Santa Cruz was fun to drive to and a fun little seaside town, and there seem to be a good number of trails right behind Google itself in Mountain View. And yes, there are plenty of mountain views in Mountain View. And although I saw (from a distance) some traffic this morning at 8 a.m., outside of rush hour, the traffic appears to be minimal... especially when compared with what I saw two days ago in L.A.!

* Apparently their policy is that you can go buy a bike light at a bike shop and submit an expense report for it. This is a silly policy for several reasons. Firstly, if I'm visiting an area, I probably don't know where the nearest bike shop is. Secondly, it will probably be dark after work when I'm looking for said bike shop. Thirdly, it's required by law to have both front and rear lights on the bike while riding in the dark.

More adventures in Geotagging

I was trying to figure out why my EXIF-tag reading feature of my little Flickr2KML app was broken and searching on the flickr API forum for an answer and discovered that flickr has a feature I wasn't aware of:

If you have EXIF geodata associated with a photo that you upload to flickr, it can use that geodata, but only if you actively opt-in to the "Import EXIF location data" feature.

I never knew that this option existed until now! For better or worse, if you opt into this feature after you've already added many EXIF-geotagged photos to flickr, flickr will not import the location data for those existing photos; it only does this for subsequent uploads. In this case, Flickr2KML's EXIF-to-flickr-geotag feature might be useful.

Brilliant pictures

I don't usually post links to other people's work; but I just have to share these brilliant photos:
http://legnangel.livejournal.com/564026.html

Enjoy!

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes! (from unemployed loser to...)

(How many "ch"s are there in that lyric, anyway?)

For many friends and family, this is going to be old news, but I'll tell the story anyway for those following along at home...

Back in May, while studying in Granada, I got an e-mail from a friend of mine explaining that a fellow runner she knew was looking for an assistant cross-country coach for the fall. At first, the idea seemed a bit crazy: take a part-time job in the fall?! There's plenty of good climbing to be done in September! Why would I ever commit to being in the city during the week when the weather is pleasant and the mountains are calling?!

But within a week I was starting to think a bit differently.

I had often thought about the idea of coaching. But I'd never had an opportunity like this come up. And even if one had come up while I was working full-time at Microsoft, I probably wouldn't have felt like I could do such a thing. Leaving "real" work at 2 p.m. for a few hours just isn't something that's usually done by Microsoft employees. Coworkers would scoff. Bosses would boo. Why would anyone do such a thing? would be asked.

So here was an opportunity to try something that I'd always wanted to do. I would still have 6 weeks of complete freedom in the U.S. before I'd need to start work: a good deal of time to visit plenty of summits. It wasn't long before I started thinking about fun things to do with middle school runners.

So.... eventually I returned to Seattle, two months later, and after some phone- and e-mail-tag, Joe (the coach) and I talked on the phone... and then four of us met in person (Joe, the director of the middle school, and the athletic director). And that (in addition to a resume and cover letter and references) was all that we needed to make a decision: I would be co-coaching with Joe for the fall!

Which brings us to September. This week I have transitioned from an unemployed loser to a part-time loser, part-time "Middle School Physical Education Faculty" member. Wow! On Monday I attended a few meetings and got a tour of the school and even got to go to my first practice! On Tuesday the entire staff, from cook to head of school, attended a retreat at the Kiana Lodge on the Kitsap Peninsula. What a treat! And today the cross country team had a great game of capture the flag. Talk about fun stuff!

I must admit that working with the faculty from the Northwest School is, um, a little different from working at Microsoft. It's amazing (and perhaps a little scary) how much I seem to have in common with the staff. Shouldn't I have more in common with the people I've been working with for the past eight years than with the people I've been working with for two days?

But the head of faculty whom I sat next to on Monday just so happens to have biked the length of the Danube, and then along the Elbe, this past summer. (I was on the Elbe too!) As we biked home from the lodge (yes, almost 20 of the faculty biked to the Bainbridge ferry and from the ferry to the lodge), I chatted with another faculty member about cyclocross. It turns out that he's raced it a bit and wants to race more this fall!

EJ, on the maintenance team, offered to show me a good route to bike home from the school, so she went out of her way to bike with me to the school from the ferry dock and then up north towards our neighborhoods. And yes, she lives just a mile from me!

When I google'd the head of the middle school to see if I could find any information about her, I read about her climbing Mount Stuart. Not exactly an experience I would expect a school administrator to have...

In sum, I seem to share more with the average Northwest School employee in terms of lifestyle (bike commute!), location (west side!), outside interests (climbers!), and gender (at least half of them are female!) than I do with the average Microsoft employee. I won't try to delve into the reasons that this is the case, but I will say that it made me feel comfortable and almost at home... with a group of people that had been strangers just a couple of days before. One of the Spanish teachers even invited me to join her Spanish I class if it fit in my schedule!

One of the memories from Tuesday that might capture the difference between working at a school and at Microsoft is this: we went around the room introducing ourselves (all 100 of us); just names, roles, and number of years we've been at the Northwest School. One of the teachers was bold enough to try to make an announcement during these quick introductions. Her announcement was that she was pregnant and expecting a baby in February! Everyone applauded, offered congratulations, and in general the mood was festive.

In contrast, I can't even imagine such a scene at Microsoft. Truthfully, only once in eight years was any of my coworkers ever pregnant at all! (Several spouses of coworkers were pregnant, but that's not quite the same thing.)

This may be a cliche sentiment or a bit of an exaggeration, but at Microsoft I always felt like kids and family were things that got in the way of work; at the Northwest School, they literally are the work! It actually feels really good to be in an environment like that.

Cheesiness aside, the transition back to commitments and work has been fun so far, but I'm already feeling restless to get back into the mountains. Lucky for me, Labor Day weekend is approaching and I've got a couple of friends happy to chaperone me on a trip to visit my tall friends. So with that, I'll dust off the GPS, get out the tent, and get ready for one last multi-day hurrah in the wilderness before the summer makes her exit!

A quick observation

Tonight I was feeling the need for a late-night snack and looking at my mostly-bare food shelves, decided I'd try out a PowerBar Gel that had been left over from my last trip to the mountains. I don't usually eat these things, but for the sake of variety I had decided to grab a few on my last trip to REI.

Once I started eating it I decided it was actually pretty tasty (unlike the flavor "orange" that I tried in the mountains last week).

Wanting to remember which flavor it was for my next shopping excursion, I looked at the package.

Here's the thing: the kitchen was dark when I opened it up and threw its top into the garbage. At my desk and in full light, it was impossible to tell what flavor it was. None of the ingredients gave me any hint ("C2 max carbohydrate blend?", "kola nut extract", and "natural flavor"), and without the bit of the label that told me what it was. At first I was thinking it might be raspberry, but maybe it's more of a strawberry-banana. But no actual fruit appeared in the list of ingredients in any way.

It's just another one of those scary not-so-real foods...

Adventures in the supermarket aisle

When you're unemployed, you finally have time to do those things you've been meaning to do for years, including those unexciting adventures in the supermarket aisles.

Well, actually, I was walking through the aisles of REI with (quad-ruled) notebook in hand, writing down the nutritional information and cost for various freeze-dried foods.

At home, I started a spreadsheet of various hiking foods, along with their weights, calories, costs. For the weight weenies among us (and who isn't, especially when packing for a 5-day backpacking trip?), some things really jump out - which I've highlighted in the spreadsheet.

When it comes to freeze-dried foods, the Mountain House Mac & Cheese is a clear winner. I've known for years that it is tasty and packs in a lot of calories. What I didn't realize is that its value in calories per cent, at 145 calories per dollar, is almost 50% better than any other freeze-dried meal out there! (Note that in the spreadsheet I've treated the "2-serving" freeze-dried meal packages as single-serving, since that's how they're usually consumed in the field.

When it comes to snacking, the Trader Joe's Sesame Sticks is the hands-down winner. At almost 1200 calories per dollar, you could (if you had a real stomach for oil, sesame, and salt) fuel an entire day of climbing (around 4000 calories) for under $5! These sticks get 63% of their calories from fat... yum!

One thing that was a bit surprising to me was that trail mix was a better deal than I thought. For its volume, trail mix usually seems a bit expensive, but it's actually very good in terms of calories per dollar, at about 6 calories per cent.

Having said all of this, the spreadsheet is incomplete. I'd like to do some research to add some other trail favorites, such as candy bars, salami, chocolate, and gummies. Another aspect that remains to be explored is the calories per unit volume, since being able to fit more calories in a smaller pack (to keep the weight of one's pack closer to one's center of gravity and squeeze through tight spots) is desirable, especially when travelling off-trail.

I'd also like to check out the value offered by other retailers, such as the bulk sections of Whole Foods, Fred Meyer, and others. I'm optimistic that Fred Meyer will offer good value.

Let me know if you have any other suggestions for additions!

A little funny, a little sad: GeoFlickr

I've put a bit of work into my Flickr2KML tool, which has been fun, interesting, and good practice for me to get my hands dirty in code after some time off. And I thought that I was doign something that no one had done before but would be useful to Flickr-philes who wanted to see their photos in Google Earth.

Today I decided that development work had gone far enough and that I should start putting my code into some kind of repository before I a) accidentally made changes that I would need to revert or b) suffered some kind of hard drive failure.

I checked out Codespaces, as a friend of mine is using that for a current fun project, and decided that I might as well go ahead and give their 45-day free trial a run. And when prompted for a project name, I thought about using "GeoFlickr" as a name instead of "Flickr2KML", since I recently realized that my tool could be used for more than just Google Earth integration (i.e. KML-file generation).

Before using a new name, I of course Googled it to make sure that it wasn't taken. Ah, the irony! "Geo Flickr" is an application, made by Ravensoft software! And yes, it brings Flickr photos into Google Earth! Egads!

My first reaction was to feel stupid about the fact that I hadn't discovered that someone had already done what I was working on. But two things made me feel better: 1) A Google search for "flickr google earth" doesn't find Geo Flickr (at least, not in the first 4 pages of results), so it's not that I missed something completely obvious, 2) the app wouldn't start for me (I've e-mailed the creators), 3) I'm not sure if it actually does everything I want anyway.

Incidentally, during this recent searching, I did discover www.trippermap.com, which seems to do a lot of cool stuff with Flickr photos on maps, including bring them into Google Earth. I'm optimistic that it does most or all of what I want it to, and am awaiting the results from its scan of my photos! One problem that I have discovered with trippermap is that it only works with public photos; another missing feature is that it doesn't allow you to look at friends' photos. My Flickr2KML supports both private photos and accessing friends' photos. On the other hand, trippermap is a beautiful website that seems to do a lot of great things!