Bryce Boe

First I’d like to mention the obvious; I sold the Porsche this morning. Hmm ok maybe that’s not the obvious. Anyway my 944 of 6 years is finally gone, and it’s sad. Maybe someday when I have money to play with and a child who is into cars I’ll get another 944. Onto the obvious news you’re probably thinking of; I changed the layout following a conversation with a Lauren who said the previous one sucked, which I agreed. Another slightly obvious is my lack of an update last week, so this one is a twofer.

Wednesday Art and Eric came to Google with their bowels full after reading about my bidet adventure. We ate a huge lunch, I gave them a little tour, and then they entered the post-bidet-experience world. On his way out Eric gave me two tickets to the Stanford vs. Oregon State football game which was the following night. That Thursday I played volleyball, and then took off a bit early to attend the football game with Julie which Stanford won. Friday after work I went to Chili’s with a Volley-oogler (I just made that up) followed by a few hours of open volleyball. This was the first time I had played indoor all summer, and damn it felt good.

Saturday I headed up to Walnut Creek to meet up with my high school friend Britt at her barbeque. I met some really cool people, did some back flips in the pool, whilst getting pretty hammered. Sunday morning I headed into Berkeley and met up with Mira, Bung, and Christine for breakfast. After Christine left, Mira, Bung and I headed into the city to meet up with Molly and Lindsey at Ocean Beach, where the wind was blowing hard making cool formations in the sand. We later went to sushi at an awesome place but I seem to have forgotten the name. After dinner I met up with Swardlick and Adam E. We grabbed a drink at a bar and then went to see Pineapple Express. Following the movie we headed back to Swardlick’s sweet pad to have some gin and tonics. In the morning we went to a little breakfast place down the street, then I headed back to Los Altos Hills.

That brings me to week 11, in which there was the usual Tuesday volleyball. Wednesday the Google dodgeball league started and our team won our first match. Our Thursday volleyball game was canceled but it wasn’t too bad since we had another dodgeball match which we unfortunately lost this time. Friday was pretty much a double dose of a short day as I played volleyball in the morning and then took off early for an offsite with the Autotest team at a beach a few miles south of Santa Cruz. We grilled some steaks and drank until our livers quivered. Yesterday was simply a recovery day in which I watched quite a few episodes of House.

And that reminds me I forgot to mention I finished the Star Trek series The Next Generation a week or so ago which I had started over Christmas break. I’m pretty sure it’s all downhill from here with respect to Star Trek, but nonetheless I will complete DS9, Voyager and Enterprise before I am done with my PhD. However my current TV adventure is catching up on House, which I just today finished the second season.

Finally, today as I already mentioned, I sold the 944. I also went to Google for some Sunday afternoon volleyball. After grabbing some dinner, I came back, watched some TV, and decided it was time for the two week update.

Entering week 12 means that I have two more weeks of summer, and more specifically two more weeks at Google. Breaking this down further: I have 4 more regular opportunities for Google volleyball, 10 more Google breakfasts, 10 more Google lunches, at least 8 more Google dinners and who knows how many more bidet experiences. In either case I’m going to make the most of these last two weeks, and enjoy as much as I can.

I overheard a retold conversation between two people this afternoon. The conversation went something like this:

Person A: I just heard the most ridiculous thing.
Person B: Oh yeah, what is it?
Person A: My friend who works at [XYZ Coorporation] told me they discovered the problem as to why a few of their servers crashed. They found wood in the CPU socket.
Person B: They found what!?
Person A: They found wood.
Person B: You must be kidding me.
Person A: Nope. It would seem that the people who put together the servers stick all the memory chips in the slots at once, place a wood block across them, and then hammer them in. Apparently this sometimes causes splinters to fly off into other locations, and then in some cases the CPUs are added with little wood splinters in the socket, thus causing future issues.
Person B: That’s ridiculous.
Person A: Indeed.

What the fuck? Why aren’t they using a rubber block or something that doesn’t leave pieces behind. More so why are they hammering them in? I guess if your job all day is to place memory chips into the motherboard your fingers are likely to get sore. Nonetheless I agree with Person B, that’s just ridiculous.

Two weeks into my Google Internship I, along with many other Googlers, became a holder of one very secret piece of information: Google Chrome. I’ve been dying to tell people about it all summer, fortunately I know better than to leak confidential information. However I no longer have to worry as Google Chrome was publicly announced today!

Apparently some snail mail was sent a little early so a few lucky people got their hands on the comic book earlier than expected, one of whom blogged about it. I didn’t even know that this book was being made. It’s kind of cool to find out stuff about the company you work for from third parties.

Anyway it seems the product is set to release tomorrow. I unfortunately wont receive immediate benefit from it since it’s currently Windows only. Having used it this summer, all I can say is it is awesome. The tabbed interface is very smooth and having each tab as a separate process is a brilliant idea. I cannot count the number of times that firefox crashes because of some JavaScript problem on one of the many webpages I have open at a time. On that note the JavaScript rendering in Chrome is unbelievably awesome. However it is still in beta, and as such is currently not up to par with the feature set that Firefox and Internet Explorer have, but I’m confident that it soon will be.

Check it out tomorrow!

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Also:

• A great prediction from someone who probably had inside knowledge.

A New York Time’s article today titled Wind Energy Bumps Into Power Grid’s Limits caught my attention. It seems that despite the ability to harness power from these resources we are unable to use them because of the inability to transport the power.

The power grid is balkanized, with about 200,000 miles of power lines divided among 500 owners. Big transmission upgrades often involve multiple companies, many state governments and numerous permits. Every addition to the grid provokes fights with property owners.

It’s times like this that living in a free market society sucks. Everyone is constantly trying to turn a nickel into a dime thus hindering the overall ability to accomplish things. I find myself thinking that despite all their problems, living in China wouldn’t be so bad. I don’t think they would have any problems running power lines.

So, what the fuck US? Stop bickering and arguing about whose power lines are whose or whose property is whose. Just build the damn power lines.

Damn! It’s been 9 weeks so far. Well the fun has continued. Monday through Thursday was pretty standard. I advanced my project more, which I realized I haven’t mentioned much about my project. Well if you’re bored or interested in what I actually do checkout the work I’ve done. The number of results for this search should continue to grow as more of my work is added to the project. Other than the standard work, Monday I attended a talk by Amos Guiora for his book titled Constitutional Limits on Coercive Interrogation which I received a free copy. It’s pretty thin and I don’t get free books to often so I’ll probably read it.

Thursday night I went up to Mira’s house in Berkeley along with Rashida, Evanne, Victor, his friend Glen, Molly, Jessika (Bung) and Dan. We went out to a Berkeley bar around 11 and I took off around 12:30 so that I would be rested for work on Friday. It was great to spend some time with old college friends. Ha! Old! My friends and I joke about how the ridiculous things we did during the last four years are no longer humiliating. Our joking rebuttal is simply, “guys — that happened in college.”

On Friday Rashida and Victor came to Google for lunch. That night I stayed in the Peninsula area as many of my friends were attending the Radiohead concert at Outside Lands. I ended up going out with Art and meeting up with Julie and her friend (I’m terrible with names) at a Palo Alto bar Nolas. We headed to the Rose and Crown and played some two-on-two cricket. Julie’s friend and I won the two games we played, though the second one was very close. I believe a rematch is necessary.

Saturday, in San Francisco tourist fashion, I went on an Alcatraz tour with a friend from high school, Mohammad. Prior to our tour we grabbed some lunch to validate our parking giving us the opportunity to catch up. We haven’t seen each other since our first college spring break so it was a great time. Alcatraz was pretty cool, but would have been much less so if there hadn’t been escape attempts. Following Alcatraz, Mo and I went to a Sushi place and then just chilled at his apartment and watched 12 Monkeys. It was on the in demand free movie list and though I had seen it before, Mo hadn’t so it was the obvious choice.

Sunday morning I headed up to Berkeley to help Bung move into the dorms. She previously attended SBCC and decided to transfer to Berkeley. Compared to the streamlined UCSB move in process that my mom and I experienced, Berkeley’s was ridiculous. We waited in line for approximately 30 minutes to get her room key and then had to make two decent treks with a laundry cart full of stuff up hilly paths from the car to Bung’s dorm. It really wasn’t that bad, as the company was awesome, however I worked up quite a sweat.

I can only imagine what dorm life at Berkeley is like. I remember learning that Berkeley dorms had coed bathrooms back when I was applying for colleges, however I had since forgotten. When I rediscovered this visually I shared it with Mira, which immediately after we decided it would be an awesome idea to team pee, therefore we did. We discussed how having a coed bathroom would be awesome in that it has high potential for shower hookups, but terrible for those mornings, after a solid night of drinking, in which a violent eruption of the bowels is imperative. Despite knowing that the bodily functions of men and women do not differ, I still refuse to realize that a female could have a post-drinking dump anywhere near as brutal as some that I’ve experienced. Unfortunately Berkeley dorm students probably cannot avoid that realization for very long.

Following lunch at the dinning commons I headed back to my summer place. After having gone through my five audio discs few times I decided that I needed to swap in my mp3 cd stereo from the Porsche. Despite this consumerist article and poor yelp reviews I went to a local car audio store to purchase a wiring harness and an antenna connection converter. According to the guy at the stereo store, Verena’s stock stereo “required” a special tool to remove, which I asked if I could borrow one. He informed me that they didn’t lend tools to customers but that he would remove it for $5. Last time I checked most auto stores allow their customers to borrow tools, and in some cases they will help their customers out for free. I definitely was not going to pay $5 for a 10 second job with a $20 tool. Being creative I used a few hex keys to remove the stereo; so much for a “required” tool. I crimped the wire harnesses together and then packed everything neatly back in place. Everything worked beautifully and I can now listen to ~30% more music before having to change a disc.

Spilling over into this week; Monday I made the decision to be a research assistant rather than a teaching assistant fall quarter. There are a few paper deadlines this quarter so it makes more sense to focus more on research than to TA a class. Despite knowing I will have future opportunities to TA a class, I am slightly disappointed that I won’t be in the fall as I had been looking forward to it.

Monday evening I headed to Art’s house where his parents had made a Hawaiian style barbeque. The food was delicious and after dinner Art and I watched For Your Eyes Only. I have been a huge 007 fan since Goldeneye and so it’s always enjoyable to watch one I haven’t seen in awhile.

Finally today I felt like I got a lot done at work after submitting my largest and most useful change list. Additionally I played probably my best volleyball of the summer making a considerable number of blocks, kills, and service aces. I’m still quite lazy defensively though. This evening I attended a Stanford Women’s Volleyball scrimmage which was pretty exciting to watch. Julie came for the last bit as she lives not too far away, so we chatted it up a bit. And that brings me to a close. Have a great week!

Almost forgot about this today, so it’s not quite as clever as I was hoping my Wednesday WTFs would be, oh well. I can’t live up to my own expectations all the time.

Michael Phelps in the wee stage of life

Quite hilarious I think.

Week 8 was easily the most eventful week of the summer thus far. Just following last week’s post I received an email to checkout a 1996 Vdub GTI at 8 on Tuesday morning. I was very excited, but not thrilled to wake up around 6:45 as my normal wakeup time is 8:30. Anyway I test drove the car, and was quite taken by it. The 2003 Golf I previously looked at had 103,000 miles with an asking price of $7000, whereas the Green Machine had 90,000 miles with a $4000 asking price. I thought the 2003 had a better looking body style, but both felt great to drive so Tuesday afternoon, after some volleyball, I made a $3700 offer via email for the Green Machine. I later received a counter offer of $3800 which I accepted.

Tuesday evening I was stoked that I would have a decent car with air conditioning and five seats. My first car, a 1991 Nissan Pickup, had a 3 person bench seat, and the 944 has 4 seats, but the back seats are basically a joke. I made arrangements to pick up the car on Thursday as that was the soonest it could be arranged. My excitement carried into Wednesday which I went in late to work following listening to Christo’s practice talk for a presentation he is giving Tomorrow morning at the SIGCOMM workshop, WOSN, for our paper Can Social Networks Improve e-Commerce: a Study on Social Marketplaces. I was a tad disappointed with myself as I have yet to be helpful when critiquing a talk. My advisor went on for over five minutes pointing out problems that I hadn’t a clue about. Hopefully with practice and more confidence I should have no problems developing that skill.

I left work early on Wednesday to go to an Oakland Athletics game, which was the first baseball game I had been to since I went to a Padres game shortly after Petco Park opened up, in the summer of 2004. I got a ride up the Bart station with Molly’s friend Julie. I love meeting new people, especially when I get the opportunity to talk one on one with them, so the drive and Bart ride were quite enjoyable. Upon arrival at the park we met up with Molly and a few other Gaucho alums who I didn’t know terribly well. Nonetheless in UCSB Gaucho style we shot gunned some beers and then headed into the game.

Then something crazy happened! While we were walking to our seats I saw a familiar face, but one I hadn’t seen in over three years. My high school friend Brit who went to Berkeley happened to also be at the game. We caught up a bit, exchanged numbers, made plans to hang out another time and went our separate ways. It’s just crazy the places you meet up with old friends. Anyway Oakland lost the game to the Rays, but it was $1 hotdog night so I was satisfied after having ate five. One of the guys with us caught a foul bowl, so he was stoked, and then we all headed home.

Thursday morning I headed to the bank, pulled out some cash and went to pickup my car that I had named Verena on Wednesday morning. I also refer to her as the Green Machine. I chose Verena because it is a German female name and because the Spanish for green is verde and thus one can see the connection between verde and Verena. After picking up the car I swung by the DMV but decided it wasn’t worth waiting in lines after spending five minutes to get through the parking lot, with no parking success.

Not much else happened on Thursday though I have been continuing to make solid progress on my project. Friday was an enjoyable work day as I made more progress and attended a usability tour. The tour was of a Usability Study Lab in which we do eye tracking studies of people’s web browsing behavior. It was really interesting to watch the replay of the volunteer’s eye movements as she completed the few tasks. I was surprised to learn that we pay on average $75/hour for usability participants. If you are interested in participating please let me know and I can provide you with the details for signing up, though I can’t guarantee your selection.

As usual, on Friday there was a TGIF, which compared to the last one was many times better. They started with a segment from Wednesday’s CNBC Mad Money with our CEO Eric Schmidt as the guest, which I thought was quite good. Naturally TGIF also had free beer and wine. Following TGIF a few of us played Rockband and then headed home. Friday night I went out out to say goodbye to Ann who was leaving for grad school in Texas. We went to the Rose and Crown Pub in Palo Alto and it was actually a ton of fun. They had an amazing beer selection including an English Cider which was awesome. I played Cricket with a fellow Googler, David, and discussed the situation of print newspapers with Ann’s housemate Shannon who is a journalist that has been affected by the situation. Nikhil, another awesome Googler intern, was also there and we all had a fun time.

Saturday I tested out the Thule roof mounted rack system on my car by affixing the bike carrier along with my bike to ensure it would work properly, which it did. Additionally I tested the 6 disc CD changer in Verena and after a few problems managed to get it working. I currently have 5 discs in there, the first three are a set of Electro House compilations, the fourth is a Classic Rock creation I made in high school dubbed “Kick Ass Classic Rock” and the fifth is Radiohead’s OK Computer album. Finally I put on my UCSB Santa Barbara license plate frame, which was given to me by Cheri over four years ago. I then spoke to Molly who asked if I was interested in seeing The Dark Knight, which I absolutely was. I looked up show times at the San Francisco Metreon and found one at 7:45, which I believed to be an IMAX showing, though we later discovered that I was wrong.

I broke in my car on the fifty minute drive up to San Francisco by listening to OK Computer. I noticed I drive slower in Verena than I did in the Porsche. Despite Verena being German, she’s still not a Porsche thus her handling isn’t quite as good as the 944 and therefore I don’t yet feel quite as safe at speeds over 70 mph. My average speed in the Porsche was probably 80 mph, and I felt very safe at speeds up to 120 mph the few times I drove that fast. Another factor contributing to the slower driving was that the 944 did just over 80 mph at 3000 rpm whereas Verena only does 70 mph at 3000 rpm. I guess I’m less likely to get a ticket now, though I think the Green Machine stands out a bit more.

Anyway Molly informed me we’d have a 10 year old, Jenaya, for company at the movie, so when I arrived the three of us took a little walk and then rode the J to Market Street. I wasn’t initially thrilled about taking Jenaya, as I figured she was probably a bit young for the movie, but it ended up being quite fun. I am fascinated by the way children think and so long as they aren’t shy they can be quite fun to talk to. Molly and I told Jenaya that the movie would probably be a little scary but she insisted that she was only scared of shark movies. Upon arriving at the theater we discovered that our show time was not an IMAX showing, which was a bit disappointing, nonetheless it didn’t deter us from watching. After the two plus hours of the movie I came to the conclusion that The Dark Knight is probably the best movie I’d ever seen! The production quality was incredible and different emotions were evoked throughout which made for one of the greatest movie going experiences ever. I am definitely getting a Blue Ray player and this on Blue Ray when it comes out.

Finally after heading back to drop Jenaya off, Molly and I went to a nearby bar and chatted about various things. I think this was the first time I had hung out with Molly solo as we’re usually with a few other friends. Needless to say I enjoyed the the time we had. Following the bar, we split a doughnut from a doughnut shop that was open at 1AM, and after getting Molly back to her place I headed home.

Today I’m basically being lazy, though I am writing this and doing laundry. I watched some Olympic female volleyball, and have already watched three episodes of Star Trek. If I’m lucky maybe something will come up for this evening, otherwise it’s more Olympics and Star Trek. Next Saturday a bunch of Santa Barbara people are coming up and I’m finally going on an Alcatraz tour with a friend from High School, Mohammad. Week 9 should be another exciting week!

I was shown this blog Cake Wrecks earlier this week and some of the things on it are just absurd!

• Wedding Cake, of yourself — WTF? Someone is a closet cannibal
• Literal Transcriptions — The next cake I have ordered I’m going to try my hardest to confuse the hell out of the cake people so that I can possibly get it for free.

You can check the site out for yourself. Besides the screw ups on the writing, which I find hilarious, the WTF really goes out to some of the strange cakes that people request. I really can’t imagine my reaction to someone handing me a cake and saying, “this is part of right breast, enjoy!”

Last week wasn’t too shabby if you ignore the worrisome Wednesday. Not too much really happened, however I played volleyball on Thursday and that evening there was a booze cruise for the interns and, their hosts. As seemingly common with Googler only events, beer and wine were free. A few hours of Rock Band followed the bus ride back to Mountain View so we could sober up from the few drinks consumed on the 2000 person yacht.

Friday we had a TGIF which we followed by playing a little Rock Band. This weekend I was pretty lazy. as I watched a few movies, some Star Trek and finally a ton of Olympics. In addition I finally went through three years of papers I needed to file. Since I recently stopped receiving paper statements it was less filing and more shredding as I decided the majority of the stuff could be trashed. Thus I rid myself of approximately 4.5kg of paper. By the way on a side note I feel strongly that we need to switch to the metric system. So I’m going to attempt to use the metric system in all my writing.

I also finally backed up my pictures to Amazon’s S3 service. Currently I’m using s3fs along with rsync to handle this backup. This worked well for my pictures, however there were complications for some of the video files I have which are over 200MB. The next step is to backup all my College work and various projects, however the rsync method is less desirable for this as there are many small files, and I’m better off packaging them up into a larger compressed file.

I ended Sunday night by looking at a ton of cars and listing my car on craigslist. Having driven a Porsche for the last 6 years I have become accustomed to cars with exceptional handling. Thus I’m currently looking at Volkswagen Golfs and Audi A4s. I’m really open to anything, but we’ll see. I drove a 2003 Golf this afternoon which I really like. As one should be though, I’m concerned with what potential future issues the car will have. Fortunately I’m fairly frugal and with working at Google (perhaps I should surname my next car McDougal?) I’m not terribly worried about paying for future car repairs, but I would still prefer to avoid it as best as possible.

Well I think that’s all for last week. Hopefully I’ll have a car to write about next week. I’m open for unique car names as I never named my 944 and I think I should start off my next car properly.

Today was probably one of the worst Wednesdays I’ve had. First, I started the day off worried about my dad, which I wont go into details about. Let’s just say I didn’t sleep too well, however I spoke to him this morning and everything seems to be okay.

Second, while I was driving to work I heard a pop sound while shifting from first to second gear and then began to feel intense vibrations in my car which grew worse as the RPMs increased. Knowing that I have neglected to change my timing belt on my car I was worried that was the problem and that my engine would be ruined. However as it still seemed perfectly drivable I figured that chances of that were much less. I spent a good deal of this morning trying to figure out what was wrong and determining how much it would cost to fix. As it turns out it very likely was my balance shaft belt that broke, which is usually replaced at the same time as a timing belt, thus it means my timing belt is likely to break soon as well. Parts and labor to change them both will be approximately $500, which isn’t too bad, but I have been pondering upgrading to a newer car for quite sometime. I learned that I can get approximately $700 for junking my car, thus I think I’m going to try to sell it for slightly more on craigslist. If I don’t get a legitimate offer in a week then I’ll probably fix it.

Finally I was informed that Daniel put one of our dogs, Belle, down this afternoon as she had been having hip and eating problems. I never was really attached to Belle, nonetheless she is the first pet I had that lived out a lifetime. Before now I never really realized how short a dog’s lifespan is.

Anyways it really isn’t all that bad, as I also made some solid progress today at work, as well as enjoyed my evening catching up on the TV show Weeds. Nonetheless wtf kind of coincidence is it that all these things happened today?

Finally to provide a proper Wednesday WTF, I’m stealing one from thedailywtf:
The Dream Customer – A lady calls in customer support, for her computer I presume, because she cannot access the wireless internet. All in all it turns out she was paying for internet for two years, but had never connected her modem and was stealing the internet from a neighbor. This just goes to show you it’s not only the tech savvy one must protect their wireless internet from. It’s easy to think “wtf, how can one be so naive?” However I don’t really feel this meets the wtf category as technology can be hard to understand. For this lady, she turned her laptop on, and simply connected to the internet, but the process was too simple that she didn’t realize she had done it improperly. After all, why fix something that isn’t broke?