Day 5

It's finally Friday! I feel like i've been here for a really long time, but at the same time its hard to believe that our first week is drawing to a close. We only have one class today, then had some time to finish up our diversity posters, and then spent an hour presenting our ideas to Google interns and employees who dropped in to walk through our poster show. The presentations went well, and although some people tried to stump us with questions, I think we pretty successfully answered them. We then went to a different cafe for lunch with some of the Google interns between biking back over to Crittenden for our afternoon sessions.

Our first session of the afternoon was an industry panel. The panel included a tenured CS professor from Stanford who was also a part-time engineer at Google. We also had software engineers from some start-up tech companies in silicon valley. There was a woman who worked in marketing at Intel, a game designer from EA Games, and a software engineer/design lead from NASA. They all talked about the dynamic nature of the industry and gave us some really useful advice. The guy from NASA (whose name coincidentally was Guy) told us about the new rover bot they're building to send to Mars. So the way he's told to describe is is as follows: "a mini-cooper-sized robot with frickin' lasers." He also mentioned how cool it was to walk into mission control just to say "hi."

After a short break, we did an exercise called True Colors, a method of simplified personality typing using colors. We took a short little quiz to determine which of the four colors (blue, green, gold, orange) represented our personalities. My color was green- creative, logical, critical thinker, problem solver-- with gold-- dependable, parental-- as my secondary color. We did an exercise about educating each other about how to communicate with people of different colors also. And after we had revealed our true colors, we got on the shuttle to head back to SJSU before going on to Santana Row.

We ended up eating at the mall across the street before heading back to Santana Row to go into H&M. I did get a $10 pair of jeans.. and a scarf.. because I really need another one of those. But it is zebra print to match my shoes. We walked around outside and enjoyed the weather until it was time to get on the shuttle and come back to campus. I then lost horribly in ERS and then spent the evening with the roomies.

Sorry no picture today, its getting late! We're heading to Great America tomorrow, but we do get to sleep in!

Until then,

~Lynn

Day 4

Overall, today was probably the most normal day we've had so far here in the land of Google. We had morning classes, like usual, and I made the mistake of wearing shorts... it was fine while we were in the classroom, but even in the sun outside at lunch, i was a little on the cold side.

After lunch, we had a guest speaker come in and talk to us about presentation skills -posture, eye contact, inflection, the works. So after listening to elevator pitches on corn soup and pomegranate limeade, he knew what we were really interested in. I also tried a shot of wheatgrass. I think i was the only one who was okay with drinking it.. although the smell was certainly interesting!

We also worked on group projects because our poster show is tomorrow. Computer science is the WORLD: look around you. that's basically out pitch.. the show in general is all about computer science and diversity and how to make is more accessible to everyone.

I also tried Boba today! Or bubble tea as I know its called back home.. apparently boba is what its called on the west coast. Mixed in a kiwi smoothie it was definitely interesting.. I think the next time I try it I'll have to try it with something less fruity.

Tomorrow should be a fun day- we finish with classes early and head off to Santana Row for the evening!

Until then,

Lynn

Day 3 - phones?!

So today the day began relatively uneventfully. We did get to catch the shuttle 15 minutes later than usual, and we arrived in class and Charles was no where to be found... so while we waited and played Facebook Scrabble Jessica gets up in front of the class with a box and proceeds to tell us that they have a surprise for us. Since Charles wasn't going to be in until 11:00 AM, she figured giving us the surprise then was probably a better idea, since we were bound to waste at least 30 minutes of class time playing with it if they gave it to us later. she wanted us to guess as she was pulling it out of the box, and i don't even know what I was thinking.. somebody shouted out "books!" and there was a general murmur throughout the class, until she pulled out a phone. a Google Nexus One phone. For us to keep! i'm still kind of in awe of the fact that someone handed me a brand new phone today for me to keep... although it doesn't work with Verizon service, i should be able to get my GoogleTalk up and working so I can at least text and talk while on wiFi.

We had a different guy come in to talk to us in our after lunch sessions. He works in the part of Google that does Streetview, so he told us all about what he does, and we talked about how the different algorithms work for finding faces in the images to be blurred out and how to resolve problems between the known maps and the GPS maths of the Streetview vehicles- which include cars, vans, trikes, and snowmobiles.

We also started working on a concept for a diversity poster show that we're having on friday, although we'll spend more time working in our three- or four-person groups tomorrow on that.

Food today was mostly uneventful.. or as uneventful as Google food can possibly be. There was more corn soup at dinner, and I had to endure two of the Google employees talking about how disgusting it looks. If only they were brave enough to take a leap of faith and try some... we had real corn for dinner tonight too.. which of course was also very good. I tried some organic pomegranate blueberry juice today that was delicious. It may have just surpassed the odwalla pomegranate limeade as my favorite drink i've tried here. Although i still haven't tried that pomegranate Fizzy Lizzy...

One quick picture before I head out. I would upload more, but my files are so big that it takes a really long time.. the internet here isn't the fastest. This is Stan, the flamingo herder.. he's a cast of a real T-Rex skull and he's typically covered in the flamingos he's herded. It looks like a few of the flamingos have wandered away.. and a few have wandered into his stomach!

~Lynn

Day 2- more corn soup!

Another awesome day of weather. It was a little cold by Louisville standards, but biking from main campus to the building where our classes are was beautiful.

Programming-wise, we explored more mercurial stuff. Merging heads and branches and even though it gets a little crazy with all of the updates, it still would have made SpecTops more manageable =P. I've also been fighting the urge to stick semi-colons at the end of every line of code I write.. and resisting the urge to surround my functions in ridiculous amounts of parenthesis. We finished working on our factorial programs(and learned for loops and while loops, yay!) and wrote a program that lets you play rock, paper, scissors.

We also got to meet the CAPE students, rising ninth-graders from the bay area who are finishing up their three weeks at Google. I guess it was a lot like my MathPath days.. at least demographic and maturity level-wise, but we had to design kitchen devices that didn't already exist, and then pitch the idea in 60 seconds to convince the buyer to buy. So, the GPS-esque kitchen helper definitely wasn't the winner, but hey.. we tried. we also got to play in the ball pit before the CAPErs arrived.. and by play in the ball pit i really mean lounge in the ball pit. If i worked here, i think i would spend the majority of my time in the ball pit while on my laptop working. I could sleep in that thing, easily.

The food again today was really good. more corn soup for dinner! we've been trying to decide if the corn soup is a hit with the general Google populous or just with our small group. We'll have to ask around with our mentors and stuff i guess..

We got back to SJSU and headed out to Walgreens, so I could buy my hairbrush. (Yes, mother, i've got things under control) and ended up heading into Ross for a little while too. It's basically like TJ Maxx, but better? Walking through downtown San Jose was really nice though.. there are a bunch of cool little restaurants with lights and live music. plus, the weather is so gorgeous albeit a little chilly once it gets dark.

I did bring my camera to campus today, so I got some somewhat decent pictures:

here's a picture of the Google sign. If it didn't take so long to upload pictures i'd put on much more. I'll have to hook the computer up to the ethernet cord tomorrow so I can (hopefully) add a few more pictures!

~Lynn

Day 1

So today was our first day on Google's campus (yeah, like a college), and campus is somewhat like a college, but with more fun things to do. we took a tour and saw all the awesome things they can do. we got up early (i was surprisingly less jet-lagged this morning than i was last night) and caught the shuttle to Google. We got to eat breakfast in the cafe and take a tour. Google is definitely not your typical office building.. it still has the typical office building carpet, but there are random large circles of bold colored carpet thrown in and brightly painted walls to match. we started off programming in python, and using mercurial. If I'd known about version control software last year my spectops project would have been infinitely more manageable. Thanks, Mr. O'Bryan. But I guess its still nice to know now too =P.

We had an ice cream social where we got to meet our mentors and build large stand-alone structures out of paper. Let's just say some of us were more successful than others, haha, but my mentor was really nice, and we have some things in common. We're having lunch next Tuesday!

One of the most awesome things about Google though is the food! Not only was everything we ate in the cafes/restaurants good, but there are food/snack stations all over the buildings. So we can walk outside our classroom and there's a little glass fridge, like the ones in the grocery store, filled with Odwalla drinks- the Pomegranate Limeade is awesome. There are so many different vegetarian things to eat for all meals, so I have plenty of options. I had a bunch of different "salads" for lunch, all of which were delicious, and some lemon verbena iced tea that Leigh would have loved! Plus, there was delicious Pure Corn Soup for dinner. Liquid corn on the cob, but better. yummm. I'm definitely not going to go hungry while I'm here.

On Google's campus there are bikes that you can just get on and ride around. I'm definitely going to bring my camera to campus tomorrow, although we aren't allowed to take pictures inside. They have little bikes that are Google colors, and normal bikes too.. and we got to ride them after the ice cream social back to the building where our classroom is. It was definitely one of the most exciting bike rides I've taken.. we were quite a sight biking through Google's campus.

There are fun things all around Google to do.. who knows how anyone gets any real work done. There's a croquet set right outside our classroom, and they offer so many different exercise and dance classes for employees. There are whiteboards everywhere covered in doodles, signatures, and digits of pi, and Google-colored balloons and lollipops for all of the new employees starting today. There's also a scrolling live-search projection in the main lobby of current searches going on all around the world. yeah, the wikipedia article doesn't lie. I think I could stand and just watch the searches scroll all day. We also saw a globe app that one of the software engineers designed that shoes where the searches are coming from and what the volume of searches is for each region.

The weather here is awesome. Its actually pretty cold if I'm comparing it to Louisville's 95-degree weather with 70% heat index? Yeah, the weather is amazing. It makes me want to move here.. if only it weren't so far away from home! I wore jeans and a jacket, and I was still a little cold in the shade. Beautiful =).

My roommates are awesome, and the suites we're living in are far nicer than what I'll have next year. I definitely can't get used to this, haha =P

Until next time,

Lynn