Phil’s blog

The past five days have been a bit of a blur - way too much information to digest. I don’t feel like I’m accomplishing much despite being at work for a long time. For the moment I’m primarily learning things, and progress feels slow, partly because the material is so complex I’m sure, but partly because I need to learn how to absorb things efficiently. I think I absorb most quickly when people explain things, which probably has more to do with people’s clarity of communication than my ability to digest. Most of this explaining has come from my APM buddy, whose time is a very limited resource, so I’m to primarily rely on documentation to learn about most things. I’ve been wading through one document in particular that talks about core search, end-to-end. Just looking at it makes me tired.
Anyway, I haven’t been doing much after work every night, so I have a ton of things to sort out this weekend. I haven’t even finished unpacking. I hate feeling behind on things! I’m really glad this is a 4-day weekend; I totally need it. Here’s a brain dump of Google-related things in no particular order:

• My favorite refreshment is Naked fruit juice, conveniently located in the lobby of my building
• They do indeed have sushi every day, but it’s prepacked in little boxes, and it isn’t great. Each box has one piece of nigiri (ingredient on a bed of rice), four pieces of maki (roll), and one piece of inari (rice in a tofu pouch). On Fridays they have temaki (cone-shaped hand rolls) made to order, which are pretty good.
• They have Japanese toilets (the good kind)!
• I’m annoyed by my Thinkpad because it frequently doesn’t come back from hibernation when I open it. The main thing holding me back from requesting a Macbook Pro is that it doesn’t support multiple external monitors, and I just had a second 20″ delivered so I’d look like a total ass if I sent it back right away. Plus I do feel that two monitors offer a productivity increase, so I’m still on the fence about the laptop.
• Went to the weekly TGIF event today where “nooglers” are introduced, announcements are made, and there’s a Q&A session. We had to wear big name cards and beanies with propellers.
• I try to get in by 9:30 every day because that’s when they stop serving breakfast (though there’s always cereal, fruit, yogurt, tea, espresso, and various other drinks and snacks in all the kitchens).
• Parking isn’t a problem at all.

That’s it! I’m off to my mentor’s house warming party.

Taking road trips to move my stuff around seems to be an annual tradition now. Last year it was Fairfax, VA to Bellevue WA in the car. A little background: last summer I interned at Microsoft in Redmond and decided beforehand I’d want to stay there to work full-time. I came back to UVA in the fall to finish my master’s and left my stuff in WA with a subletter thinking I’d return in a few months to start work. I ended up getting an offer from Google which I happily took over Microsoft’s, but which caused a logistical inconvenience as the job was in Mountain View, CA (though they do have an office in Kirkland, WA which is near Bellevue and Redmond).
Fast foward to two weeks ago: it was time to move my stuff from the Bellevue apartment down to Menlo Park, CA where I’m staying at a friend’s place while he’s at an internship for the summer. A much shorter trip than last year’s, but now I have a motorcycle in addition to the car. Teeny was once again my wonderful traveling companion and drove my poor Civic, overloaded with all my stuff, while I zipped along on my Ninja. We took it easy and only traveled about 4 hours per day over 4 days, stopping frequently eat and/or look around. We stayed overnight in Licoln City, OR (point 4 in the linked map image); Port Orford, OR (point 5); and Garberville, CA (point 6). The Tillamook cheese factory in Tillamook, OR was probably the most interesting stop we made, but it was nice driving through state parks and along the coast, though the strong winds made riding scary at times. Route 101 is great not only for the scenery; it also has few and fast-moving cars, reasonable curves and elevation changes (as opposed to the straight, flat nothingness we drove through the midwest last year), and we didn’t see a single cop.
As for the towns along the 101, I initially referred to them as crapwater towns because there isn’t much to see or do, but halfway through the trip, Port Orford’s small-town (population ~1100) charm grew on me and I saw these places in a new light. During dinner at the Crazy Norwegian (one of Port Orford’s three restaurants), I was looking through a local newsletter and started thinking it must be really nice to live in such a small, quiet place where people know each other. I always thought I’d prefer urban life but this little community seemed so much more appealing. Someone had an ad in the newsletter for running small deliveries to a neighboring town in his or her truck. How cool is it that this was the only person offering such a service in the only periodical (that I saw) in the town in one of only three existing dining establishments? One person can reach the entire community, and without even using technology developed in the past 500 years (printing press was 1440). Somehow that appeals to me. Anyway, after Port Orford I had a better appreciation for crapwater towns. Check out photos of the whole trip here.

Japan was great, and after much procrastination I’ve gotten around to writing a summary. I’ll keep this simple by listing the key points in no particular order. Teeny’s writeup is here, by the way, and my favorite photos are here.

• Our sightseeing was divided pretty evenly between temples/shrines/gardens/parks vs. urban areas
• Places we visited: Tsukiji market, Ginza, Ryokan Senkei (with indoor and outdoor hot baths), Hakone Begonia Garden, Gion, downtown Kyoto, Yasaka shrine, Nijo castle, Heian shrine, National Museum of Modern Art, Nanzen-ji temple, Kinkaku-ji temple, Kyoto Imperial Palace Park, Osaka Aquarium, Tokyo National Museum, Seibu department store (huge), various parts of Shinjuku and Shibuya, Inokashira Park, and the Studio Ghibli Museum
• Japanese food is delicious, always
• Most Japanese people speak enough english to help you with basic things like directions, and some will go to great lengths to help you.
  • Example 1: a older gentleman we met on a train offered to go several stops out of his way to help us find lodging on our way to Hakone when it was late and we had no reservations.
  • Example 2: a business man with diamonds in his front teeth (which creeped me out because I thought he was Yakuza or something) walked with us half the length of Ikebukuro station to guide us to our optimal exit.
  • Example 3: a shop keeper walked 2 blocks and spent about 3 minutes trying to help us find a nearby restaurant, then ran back to her shop. I love Japanese people.
• Green tea and a hot wash cloth are given to you upon being seated at most restaurants
• Toilets can be extremely bad or extremely good. Squat toilets are terrible, basically a hole in the ground in a tiny, cramped stall. On the other end of spectrum are hi-tech toilets with heated seats, water jets (hard to sit still initially), and air jets.
• The Shinkansen (bullet train) is a sweet way to travel; fast, lots of room, onboard snack cart and bathrooms
• Everyone loves cute things, even old people and business men.
• Coffee and beer are second only to green tea.
• Lots of people drive small cars, but different models than are available in the US. Honda, Toyota, and Nissan seem to be the most popular, and Toyota seems to have various sub-brands.
• Probably at least half the cars I saw had GPS devices, which is understandable because finding addresses in Japan is a total guessing game. Instead of street numbers, Japanese addresses are of the form x-y-z where x is area number, y is block number, and z is building number, none of which can be determined intuitively. It’s baffling.
• Almost everyone is fashionable. I was excited about shopping for clothes but ended up being overwhelmed by the selection. I just gave up.
• Almost everyone is skinny
• I couldn’t find shoes that were large enough; the brand I wanted to buy doesn’t make anything over 10 US (!)
• Games such as this one requiring ridiculous hand-eye coordination are popular