Alright, so after endless requests, threats and subtle mindwashing attempts I’ve received from you (my dearest readers), I finally got off my lazy ass and set up photo sharing.
You should probably keep in mind that no amount of technology will change the fact that I’m too lazy to carry a camera around. Even when I do, I’m generally too lazy to take pictures.
By the way, the girl above is a young bride from Geneva. I’m not very sure if it was a special occasion or just a normal occurence. You could buy stuff from her basket, to “help” — Mihai bought a pair of kinky-looking panties for 2 francs or so.
I’m not dead, just been very busy. I returned to Dublin at the end of April, then had to find a place to live (got a nice one bedroom close to the city center/Temple Bar). I went to France (and Switzerland and Italy) last weekend to visit two friends of mine that are studying in Annecy. I got a Flickr account and uploaded some photos. The comment spam situation is the same — they don’t show up in the blog, but they spam my inbox with “please moderate” reminders (I just had to delete 250 of them!).
Looks like I’ve been hit pretty heavily by comment spammers, while I wasn’t paying attention. I just had to delete about 200 spam comments (some were caught by WordPress, some weren’t). The result is that posting comments will be a little more annoying now (and will require my approval) — until I find another solution to it, that is.
One of the really nice things about Google is that we have a lof of internal “tech talks” — either by our engineers or by various guests (you can see most of the non-confidential ones on Google Video – just search for “google engedu“).
So anyway, yesterday we had some nice folks from the US Copyright Office come in and talk about the Anti-Circumvention Exemption process, orphan works, the DMCA and stuff like that. Now this might sound silly to you (blame it on the Slashdot culture if you must), but I was quite shocked to discover that, well, they are not dumb! They are very aware that copyright was devised to work with physical objects and that it doesn’t map very well to digital information — but the problem is to find viable alternatives that make both producers and users happy.
Interesting stuff.
Ok, I’ve been lazy and haven’t posted much lately. So sue me.
Lots of things happened this week. Most notable:
April arrived in the area for the MAAWG conference. I finally met her after working together for almost 5 years. Went together to a couple meetings and met a bunch of interesting people working on interesting (mostly antispam related) things. Also visited Ironport and met even more interesting people over there.
We also attended a product presentation at Greenplum about their Bizgres MPP product. They built a data warehousing thing on top of PostgreSQL that segments the data across a cluster of machines, then executes queries in parallel across that cluster. It’s supposed to be very fast. I haven’t tried it yet, but the presentation was interesting enough that I’m anxious now to set it up and play with it.
My new digicam (Kodak Easyshare Z730) arrived so expect pictures soon. The memory card was back ordered (it should be delivered this week) so for now I can only take a couple pictures until the internal (32M) camera memory fills up. I also plan on getting a Flickr account to make it easy to categorize and post the images.
I drove into San Francisco on Saturday (against the advice I got from my team mates in Dublin). I did get lost, but not so bad as I expected. Traffic is quite busy, parking is almost impossible. I also witnessed a movie-like (to me) police operation: several police cars converging at full speed in an intersection in front of my car, pulling over about 50m after that, storming out, and arresting somebody on the sidewalk. When I passed the police cars, there were something like 5 officers piled up on top of the “suspects” on the sidewalk.
Oh, and before you ask: I don’t know much about what happened in Dublin this weekend besides what I’ve read in the news.
I finally got a rental car (Nissan Sentra) yesterday so I’m much more mobile now. Now I’m missing a digital camera — stay tuned for when that happens — I hope to post nice pics and stuff.
Went to visit the Computer History Museum today (it turns out that it’s within walking distance from where I’m staying). Free entrance, and fascinating content — almost everything from an abacus to one of the first Google server racks. Highly recommended to visit if you ever come near the Bay Area.
First weekend in California — unfortunately I’m kind of trapped, not having some kind of transportation to get around. I guess I’ll get to see what’s interesting right around where I live, and get some walking exercise.
I got to move into my shiny apartment this monday, at Park Place Apartments (in Mountain View). It’s really nice, big, and with all the stuff needed for self-sufficient life. Having no way around it, I even got to use the washing machine — something very new for me (yeah, call me spoiled). The place is reasonably close to Google (about 4km) and many of the other apartments in the complex seem to be inhabited by other googlers.
Google’s Mountain View offices are really cool. The first feeling I got when arriving there was that it was an university campus. It’s more chaotic (in a good sense) than the Dublin one, but in a way that caters to the (mostly) geek population that inhabits it.
Haven’t seen much else (besides home and work) in the past couple of days — perhaps due to the fact that it’s hard to get around without a car, and I haven’t got one yet.
Arrived safely, but with one missing bag (which seems to still be in London). They promised they will deliver it tomorrow. I will probably ritually burn that bag (it’s the second time I travel with it to the US, and the second time it gets lost).
Staying at the Residence Inn for the next 2 days. Looks very clean and nice, and includes WiFi with no (apparent) strings attached. Quite a difference from the zillion (non-free) networks in Heathrow.
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