Google: Week 4

If you are visiting looking for information on Jaymie Darrow please see my previous entry:
A Loss — RIP Jaymie Darrow

Lately I have been writing my Google updates on Sunday, unfortunately after hearing of Jaymie’s death, I didn’t feel like writing about my week, and it still feels inappropriate to do so, but life must go on. The following is very ranty, I apologize.

Last week I finally started making progress on my project. The group I’m working for wishes to have a set of tests to run when kernels are updated to see how the performance of various kernel aspects have changed overtime. Fortunately there is this testing environment called autotest which is open source, and from what I can tell started as a Google project. Anyway, last week I familiarized myself with the parts of autotest necessary to complete my project. I even somewhat inherited a side project which is assisting with some beta testing of autotest from our local branch.

I used the Google showers for the first time after some pre-lunch volleyball. I attended a talk on why women should not donate their eggs for money. Basically the lady was saying all the risks are currently unknown and some women develop Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome. Though she had no numbers to support her claim, she connected many women with cancer following egg donation, some resulting in death. Additionally she mentioned the website Hands Off Our Ovaries a few times.

Wednesday morning I coined a new term, albeit a fairly dumb term. Nonetheless the term is qiki, pronounced quickie. As all words in the English language containing a ‘q’ have a ‘u’ immediately after, I decided that the ‘u’ is simply implied. Anyways qiki means to quickly wiki something, and should be used in the cases where someone quickly wikis something so that they seem as if it were already something they knew. This came about when I was chatting with a friend and she mistakenly wrote “did you just qiki that” rather than “did you just wiki that.” Anyway feel free to now uses phrases such as:

“Did you qiki that?”
“No, however I just qikied your mom.”
“Qiki this!”
“I accuse you of qikiing, you qikier.”

Tuesday evening I made my second wikipedia edit after watching some Star Trek in which they the Next Generation crew visited DS9. Along those lines I am now on the final season of The Next Generation. Wednesday evening I went out with Victor and Art in Palo Alto, and Thursday evening I went to Los Gatos to celebrate Alaina’s birthday. Both nights were fun, and I’m glad I was able to spend Alaina’s birthday with her. Saturday I joined Eric and Art in San Francisco for a night in the City. I enjoyed my first San Francisco bus ride. We got pretty toasty, spent upwards of $60 each and crashed at another friend’s house who had just returned from a flight; she’s a flight attendant.

Saturday I came to the realization that I hadn’t backed up my computer in nearly a year so started doing that. Not wanting to burn my backups to DVDs, I signed up for Amazon’s S3 storage service and am working on a few scripts to move my files to the remote backup. The one thing I didn’t like about their storage service is there is not an out of the box way to upload files to the service. One either needs a third party’s software or be a developer themselves. Fortunately the latter applies to me. I quickly found an existing python library called awspylib and while testing I found a minor bug and contacted the source owner. He made me an owner of the project and I then submitted my changes to the svn repository. Additionally after a few emails he offered me the possibility of a summer internship for next year at the company he works for, Isilon Systems. It seems that it would actually be relevant to my research, so I’ll have to keep that in mind nine months from now.

Well, again I apologize to anyone that read though this poorly written post. I of course want people to read what I write, but on the other side much of this content is for my own archiving purposes, and for my future children to read. This actually reminds me of two things. I need to backup my site, and that I have wanted to write a blog entry to my future children describing my current thoughts on parenthood. That one will be interesting, especially when I read it twenty or so years from now.