Damn I’m late again! I never make my personal Sunday midnight deadline. If it’s any consolation I wrote most of this Sunday night, started editing Monday night, and finally finished it just now.
Yes the end of week 6 signifies that my summer internship is half way complete, thus meaning I have another six awesome weeks at Google. Before I tell about my epic tales which were last week I need to add that in week 4 I attended a Google talk with Henry Kissinger. It seems the video of the event will at some point be posted here, but it currently is not. While I don’t remember the specific details of the chat at this point, I’m glad I attended.
Last week was probably one of my best weeks at Google after the Google effect subsided, and from this point on they should all be awesome. Tuesday I played doubles volleyball for lunch, and I was quite surprised that I now have enough endurance to play four consecutive games. Tuesday evening I saw WALL-E with Ann. The movie was awesome but I have one issue I have to get off my chest:
__Spoiler Alert__: Skip this paragraph if you haven’t seen the movie. I realize it’s a kids movie but nonetheless I still have one issue. The circuit board that was replaced in WALL-E at the end seemingly replaced his memory, thus one could conclude that his memory was contained on the swapped board. I draw this conclusion because of how the previously recorded audio didn’t play when EVE hit the play button on WALL-E. Yet through some magic WALL-E was able to regain all past knowledge. Most people watching the movie are probably accepting of this, but I am not, so I came up with an acceptable solution. Assume WALL-E’s memory is stored elsewhere, and is not part of the swapped board. Additionally assume the board is essentially a cache for the larger memory. Thus when replaced WALL-E had to go through a period of time to rebuild the cache before the main memory can be accessed. One could also think of this not as a cache but rather an index to the items stored in the main memory. Regardless this brings up questions of poor design on the WALL-E creators behalf, such as why they would design him to function without full memory operation. Experience has shown me that designers do dumb things, so this question is better off left unpondered. Other than that, I don’t recall having any issues with the movie.
Wednesday evening I played board games with some Googlers, each of which were games I had never played before. We started out playing Burn Rate followed by a game of Nuclear War. I then played Pandemic which is unique because all the players work together to fight off outbreaks of disease; everyone wins or everyone loses. We unfortunately lost. Finally we ended the night with a three hour game of PowerGrid which was awesome. I ended up taking second place in the game. I made the mistake of thinking I had it won on my last turn, thus neglecting to deprive the eventual winner from their game winning power plant card. Oh well.
Thursday I again played doubles volleyball, and then had my midterm review, which went well. I actually hoped for more criticism about my performance, but I did not receive any. Later that day I finally met with the Autotest team which I have been working with via IRC. We soon discovered we had a thing for drinking in common and thus we made a trip to BevMo to pick up much booze, which we followed by drinking and playing Rock Band well into the evening.
The annual Google picnic was held on Friday in which there was lots more booze, and a cart building / racing competition. I organized a team of Platforms Interns which we dubbed “The Platties”. We had one hour to build a working push cart out of some 2x4s and plywood. I spent the majority of the time working on the front pivoting wheel, which ended up being the only part that survived after the back axles broke. Following that some of us headed back to our building to drink more and play Rock Band until we sobered up.
Saturday I participated in a beer pong tournament hosted by members of the Google AdWords team. Entry fees, less beer and pizza, were donated to the Northern California Youth Leadership Seminar. My teammate Steve and I won our first round, however we lost in the second. After experiencing defeat we took on a new challenge thus starting the first of many epic rounds of flip cup. Following the tournament we headed back to Steve’s place and played Rock Band. Later we went to this Italian place with awesome Focaccia sandwiches, and at this point decided to see Kevin Nealon at a comedy club just down the street. That was my first comedy show and it was quite awesome, though I was extremely tired and considerably drunk at this point.
Fortunately my second wind kicked in as we were leaving. We headed to a bar for some pool and foosball and later met up with my friend Molly and Yaz who eventually came back to Steve’s for some late night Rock Band action, minus the drums. After seeing Molly and Yaz to a cab I headed back to play Jeopardy with Steve’s roommates, which involved watching recorded episodes and keeping points for correctly shouted out answers.
Sunday morning I had an adventure catching a bus to the San Francisco Caltrain station, but it was quite enjoyable as walking around San Francisco is pleasant. Finally Sunday afternoon I went to the Winchester Mystery House with Ann taking the two guided tours offered. Besides the crazy architecture of the house, it was remarkable how the heating system and gas lighting system worked. I’m sure not many people had these amenities in the early 1900s, nonetheless it was an ingenious system that allowed for automatic gas lighting of rooms without worrying about gas leaks.
Well that’s all for last week. As one can see the common theme for last week was Rock Band. I had played once last Thanksgiving and wasn’t very intrigued by it, but that definitely changed last week. Anyway, I think Adam, Scott, and I will be purchasing it when we get back to Santa Barbara - woo!
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