Little Tahoma, June 26

Co-conspirators: Charlie Hagedorn David Teitlebaum Weather: Superb.  Freezing Level: 10,000'.  Breezy after 2 p.m. Pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/susanashlock/sets/72157627059611052/ Poor Little Tahoma.  Not only is he saddled with an inferiority complex by virtue of being known as the diminutive of his bigger brother, but ever since he got my attention a few years ago, all I've heard is a stream of complaints about his loose rock. "A pile of choss."  "I wouldn't do that one again."  "Ugh." Are we not skier-climbers of Washington state?  Do we not visit the likes of Jack Mountain, Boston Peak, Saska,andmore?  Do we not enjoy the challenge of trying to find one foothold that might not bonk our climbing partner on the head? At this time of this year, anyway, I found Little Tahoma to be a relatively solid, enjoyable scramble to the top. (Judging from their comments, my comrades on this outing might not have agreed...) But I've gotten ahead of myself... A 4 a.m. start saw us walking for the first mile and a half (something about the plethora of pine needles on the snow kept us from skinning earlier; it certainly would have been possible).  A couple of ski-carries across bridges, then back on the skins... until a beautiful boot ladder just below Meany Crest convinced us that our tentative steps with ski crampons might not be the fastest way. From there, it was skins and ski crampons all the way to the notch in the Whitman Crest, where skis were carried just a few feet.  We started booting again around 9600' and two of us stashed our skis next to the others we found at the ridge at 10,400'.  By then (11:30 a.m.) the snow had softened enough for knee-deep post-holing, but none of us wanted to scramble along the ridge, and instead opted for the SE-facing slope that took us to within a couple hundred feet of the summit. At least one of us didn't want to tag the summit without a belay (and we wanted to justify the cordelettes we had carried up!) so we set one up, tagged the summit, and came back down. Jealous I was of Charlie's skis, placed 500' higher than mine, but eventually all of us were shushing down the Whitman. Few joys are greater than straightlining across a glacier and watching the world go by.  The sloppy, sticky snow below Meany Crest was significantly less joyful, but the deep runnels did provide some adrenaline. At this point (mid-afternoon), there were quite a few folks about, out for a ski on the Fryingpan, heading to camp to prepare for a trip to Little Tahoma, or just out for a day hike.  Quite a contrast to the first half of the day!  (We didn't actually cross paths with anyone on our trip until 11 a.m.) We avoided the footbridge over Fryingpan Creek by crossing early, over a snow bridge; this shortcut only cost us about a half hour of sidestepping, tree straddling, and step-retracing. Unlike our previous week's trip out from Hoodoo Peak, where the descent through the trees was somewhere between terrible and miserable, the descent along the Wonderland trail was sublime: well-groomed and fast. Congrats to Charlie, who, except for one brief carry along the trail, kept his skis on to the car ... and demonstrated how to ski dirt and wooden bridges along the way! Total time: 13.5 hours.

Fast-forward 4 months...

... and here I find myself in New York City, returning back to an exorbitantly-priced, 'chic', hotel room after a shakeout run which doubled as a contact-lens-solution acquisition errand.

In two hours I'll be meeting with the "Google1" relay team to start driving to the start of the Ragnar relay in Woodstock, NY.  How did I let myself be convinced to travel across the country to run through the night in a race that I was ill-prepared for with a van-full of people I've never met?

I'm not entirely sure, but it seemed like a good idea just long enough for me to say 'yes'...

So, what's it really like to work at Google?

I've been a full-time employee at Google for about 6 weeks now, and I keep getting questions from various friends, family and acquaintances about how it is, so I figured it was time to follow-up after my first impressions post I wrote after my first day.

One question people keep asking me is where I'm working; some assume I'm in Kirkland, WA; others presume I've relocated to Mountain View.  Others think I'm in San Francisco, New York, or Zurich.  But no, I'm quite happily commuting from my home north of the University of Washington to Google's Seattle office, which is in the eccentric but yuppified neighborhood of Fremont.

The commute is pretty ideal for me: about 20 minutes of biking, about 90% of it on bike path, to a locked bike cage in the underground parking garage.  There are a shade over 200 Googlers (yes, Googlers) working there, mostly engineering, but some salespeople as well.  Our office overlooks the canal, right next to the Fremont Bridge, so we can see all sorts of watercraft going by: rowers, Argosy cruises, tugboats pushing cranes... and today I spotted my first police boat, zipping off to some emergency.  It's been surprising to see how often the bridge has to open for tall vessels.

At Microsoft I always had an office (although I did have to share one both as an intern and also for my first 6 months full-time), but no one at Google Seattle has an office.  My manager's desk is right next to mine and there are about ten desks in our room.  It's a bit tight, and we're in the process of finding a different space in the building to move to, but having a south-facing canal-view room is something we're willing to squeeze in for.

People ask how I like the shared space instead of individual offices, and thus far I'm a pretty big fan.   Being a noogler (yes, noogler) on the team, overhearing conversations gives me an idea of how things work, how the team works together.  The close proximity of coworkers allow me to quickly ask questions, sometimes to individuals and sometimes to the group at large.  I'm definitely trying not to ask too many questions, usually trying to figure things out on my own first.

The food in the cafeteria is superb.  In 5 weeks at the Seattle office, I don't think they've repeated entrees once.  It's a small cafeteria and due in part to lack of cooking facilities, the food is prepared by a catering company mostly off-site and brought in daily.  Some things, like omelettes (on Tuesday mornings), pancakes (on Thursday mornings), and some stir-fry items are cooked in the cafeteria, but even those things prepared elsewhere are high-quality and tasty.  There's always a good variety of fruits, vegetables and salads and the dessert is always fantastic.

And yes, the food at Google is all free: breakfast, lunch, and dinner (well, there's no dinner on Friday).   I'd probably be eating very well and healthfully at our office if it weren't for those desserts and the micro-kitchens.

Each floor at Google generally has a "micro-kitchen" which includes snacks and drinks.  The drinks range from juice to soft drinks to espresso to hot chocolate.  Snacks include fruit, nuts, cliff bars, dried fruit, potato chips, and (here's the problem) m&m's.  All right, the m&m's aren't the only problem... the cashews, almonds, and peanuts have been consumed in copious amounts as well.  So yes, it is safe to say that I've put on a few pounds in the last 6 weeks!

One of the features of Microsoft buildings that I came to take for granted in the eight years I worked there was the showers and locker rooms. There's only one shower per gender at our building at Google Seattle, but in the ~20 or so times I've used it, I've only had to wait a few times for my turn.  To me, the office in general and the bathrooms in particular have a relaxed, friendly decor.  There are pictures on the wall, all sorts of useful things in the bathrooms for all to use (saline! shampoo! conditioner!  toothpaste!).   And yes, there is a towel service.

Well, I think that sums up the building pretty well.  Next time I'll delve into what the work is actually like!

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!