Posts from — June 2007

Through a bunch of events, my 20% project (part-time side project at google) has become one that could best be described as project management. It’s a really weird world to which I wasn’t previously exposed. Additionally, project management is difficult for reasons that are hard for me to describe.

The most jarring thing coming from the engineering side is the way in which decisions are made. Decisions in engineering are typically consensus-oriented. If I disagree with another engineer at a meeting, even someone who’s been there for several years, my idea can win out if I can support it (often there are empirical ways to decide these things). The management end is much less empirical, so it’s often impossible to decide things this way. This breeds politics, which means that you need to be careful about what you say. Luckily I have smart people supporting me in my work.

My Dad would always tell me that “no matter what job you’re working, you’re always working in sales”, which is true, but there are significantly different types of sales at work here. I can sell things to engineers with facts and figures, but for non-engineers I seem to need to rely on vision and potential benefit.

Perhaps this stuff is all obvious, but I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately.

If my project is successful, I’ll be able to write about it in about a month.

From this post:

In September 2006, a group of African American high school students in Jena, Louisiana, asked the school for permission to sit beneath a “whites only” shade tree. There was an unwritten rule that blacks couldn’t sit beneath the tree. The school said they didn’t care where students sat. The next day, students arrived at school to see three nooses (in school colors) hanging from the tree.

The boys who hung the nooses were suspended from school for a few days. The school administration chalked it up as a harmless prank, but Jena’s black population didn’t take it so lightly. Fights and unrest started breaking out at school. The District Attorney, Reed Walters, was called in to directly address black students at the school and told them all he could “end their life with a stroke of the pen.”

(my emphasis)

Someone at Google computed that with the current growth of the hiring rate, everyone on Earth will be a Google employee by 2021 or so.

This weekend, I participated in a puzzle hunt at google. It started at 8AM Saturday and ended at 5PM Sunday. We had a team of 12, most of whom hadn’t done this before.

I had a great time.. our team did OK (middle/lower end of the pack), which is good for people who haven’t played before. The quality of the puzzles was excellent: there were layers upon layers of puzzles, a variety of tasks, and witty hints and answers.

Here’s the first puzzle from the hunt (it’s printed on the back of the event tshirt):

OPENING ROOT INITIAL GENESIS INCEPTION NATIVITY

REBOOT DOPPELGANGER REAPPEAR LOOK-ALIKE FISSION SHANGHAIINGS DITTO REECHO

INDICT FOURTEEN PSALM SUBTLE JEOPARDY PRACTICALLY DOSSIER WEDNESDAY ISLAND

FIE GAVE ROTUND REAL TAX PROTOZOA ASPIRIN

ANESTHESIA THEOLOGY PROMETHEUS PHOTOSYNTHETIC SYNTHEHOL PRITHEE THERAPEUTIC AUTHENTICATE

BISON SUSANNA PREPARED LASHES CAMINO COLI

IGOR YOUTUBE ELBOW AUTEUR JEEPERS WILD

GRAVY IRED PINKO AMBLER PLUME NUMBER TRUST

ERE RACECAR CIVIC DID LEVEL PEP SOROS

HAIRSTYLE GESTURE TUVALU MCDERMOTT HIJINKS SYNOPSIS

VARIES NEATEN EVOLUTIONARY WORDPLAY BONY AWFUL INDICATE QUALITY LAVISH

The answer to this puzzle is a single word.

Hint if you’re having trouble getting started: Each word set is going to reduce to another word, and all of those words will then reduce to the answer. The first couple sets are easier than most because the meanings of the words are hints at what to do with them.

Hint if you’re having trouble finishing: You don’t need to know all of the parts to get the output word… you can probably figure it out with half of them. It’s easier with all of them, of course.

Remember to surround spoilers with <font color=”white”> and </font> if you comment.

OK, so I was going to go to bed, but this meme from michelle was too good to pass up.  The AFI’s most recent list of the top 100 movies, with ones I’ve seen in bold:

1. “Citizen Kane,” 1941. (only seen part of it.. it was that exciting)
2. “The Godfather,” 1972.
3. “Casablanca,” 1942.
4. “Raging Bull,” 1980.
5. “Singin’ in the Rain,” 1952.
6. “Gone With the Wind,” 1939.
7. “Lawrence of Arabia,” 1962.
8. “Schindler’s List,” 1993.
9. “Vertigo,” 1958.
10. “The Wizard of Oz,” 1939.
11. “City Lights,” 1931.
12. “The Searchers,” 1956.
13. “Star Wars,” 1977.
14. “Psycho,” 1960.
15. “2001: A Space Odyssey,” 1968.
16. “Sunset Blvd.”, 1950.
17. “The Graduate,” 1967.
18. “The General,” 1927.
19. “On the Waterfront,” 1954.
20. “It’s a Wonderful Life,” 1946.
21. “Chinatown,” 1974.
22. “Some Like It Hot,” 1959.
23. “The Grapes of Wrath,” 1940.
24. “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” 1982.
25. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” 1962.
26. “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” 1939.
27. “High Noon,” 1952.
28. “All About Eve,” 1950.
29. “Double Indemnity,” 1944.
30. “Apocalypse Now,” 1979.
31. “The Maltese Falcon,” 1941.
32. “The Godfather Part II,” 1974.
33. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” 1975.
34. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” 1937.
35. “Annie Hall,” 1977.
36. “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” 1957.
37. “The Best Years of Our Lives,” 1946.
38. “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” 1948.
39. “Dr. Strangelove,” 1964.
40. “The Sound of Music,” 1965.
41. “King Kong,” 1933.
42. “Bonnie and Clyde,” 1967.
43. “Midnight Cowboy,” 1969.
44. “The Philadelphia Story,” 1940.
45. “Shane,” 1953.
46. “It Happened One Night,” 1934.
47. “A Streetcar Named Desire,” 1951.
48. “Rear Window,” 1954.
49. “Intolerance,” 1916.
50. “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” 2001.
51. “West Side Story,” 1961.
52. “Taxi Driver,” 1976.
53. “The Deer Hunter,” 1978.
54. “M-A-S-H,” 1970.
55. “North by Northwest,” 1959.
56. “Jaws,” 1975.
57. “Rocky,” 1976.
58. “The Gold Rush,” 1925.
59. “Nashville,” 1975.
60. “Duck Soup,” 1933.
61. “Sullivan’s Travels,” 1941.
62. “American Graffiti,” 1973.
63. “Cabaret,” 1972.
64. “Network,” 1976.
65. “The African Queen,” 1951.
66. “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” 1981.
67. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, 1966.
68. “Unforgiven,” 1992.
69. “Tootsie,” 1982.
70. “A Clockwork Orange,” 1971.
71. “Saving Private Ryan,” 1998.
72. “The Shawshank Redemption,” 1994.
73. “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” 1969.
74. “The Silence of the Lambs,” 1991.
75. “In the Heat of the Night,” 1967.
76. “Forrest Gump,” 1994.
77. “All the President’s Men,” 1976.
78. “Modern Times,” 1936.
79. “The Wild Bunch,” 1969.
80. “The Apartment, 1960.
81. “Spartacus,” 1960.
82. “Sunrise,” 1927.
83. “Titanic,” 1997. (saw the beginning, but that was enough)
84. “Easy Rider,” 1969.
85. “A Night at the Opera,” 1935.
86. “Platoon,” 1986.
87. “12 Angry Men,” 1957.
88. “Bringing Up Baby,” 1938.
89. “The Sixth Sense,” 1999.
90. “Swing Time,” 1936.
91. “Sophie’s Choice,” 1982.
92. “Goodfellas,” 1990.
93. “The French Connection,” 1971.
94. “Pulp Fiction,” 1994.
95. “The Last Picture Show,” 1971.
96. “Do the Right Thing,” 1989.
97. “Blade Runner,” 1982.
98. “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” 1942.
99. “Toy Story,” 1995.
100. “Ben-Hur,” 1959.

I’m in no way advocating that these are the top 100 movies…

I saw Sicko (Michael Moore’s new film about the US healthcare system) yesterday. It was excellent.. it seemed to take the best parts of his previous films, without a lot of the stuff that bothered me. There were some parts that I wish included some sort of opposing view, but the core of the argument is still very compelling. Definitely go see it.

I’ll write more about this at a later date.

There’s been a lot of environmental stuff at Google, and I’m not really sure how much of the news gets out to “normal” people, so here’s a rundown…

This a pretty cool page describing the power collected by Google’s solar panels. It only has a couple of days of data, so keep that in mind (it was just launched this week).

There’s also a project from google.org for plug-in hybrid vehicles. This is a modified hybrid car that has an additional battery and can be charge by (you guessed it!) plugging it in. I got to ride in one for a while on a trip a couple of months ago, and it worked pretty seamlessly. See RechargeIt.org for more information about the cars and environmental impact.

Google will be carbon-neutral by 2007. Yahoo already finished doing this, too. Quite a feat considering how much energy these companies use.

I have some more pictures to post from the last couple of weeks, but I’ll wait until tomorrow. I need to get some sleep… I’ve been on an earlier schedule lately (at work in time for breakfast), and it’s been pretty good.

Want to watch democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel stare at you for a minute, throw a rock into a pond, then walk away?

Now you can:

There are giant snakes on the loose in Pennsylvania. It’s a nocturnal black snake, so make sure not to sleep at night. The snake’s diet includes cats for now, but it only gets more hungry, the more it eats. It’s sorta like the game ‘nibbles’ where the snake gets bigger and bigger. Soon it will be feasting on deer and eventually slow humans. Since it’s nocturnal, I recommend not sleeping at night and ensuring that there are no places in your living area a snake could hide. If you have cats, just forget about it. You could try to hide your cats in cages to keep them safe, but then other snakes could just get in there, too, so that’s no good. I recommend keeping them away from the house, as they just lure snakes in anyway.

The article advises: “It is legal to have exotic pythons in homes, but experts warn they can squeeze people to death, especially small children. The snakes also carry salmonella bacteria.”

So, be careful not to lick the snake if you encounter it.

My favorite infomercial of all time: THE MAGIC BULLET

Infomercial Hell has a good play-by-play describing the plot and some nuances you may have missed in your first (or 10th) viewing.

The also have some “highlight reels” for some characters..

“Hazel” the cigarette-smoking hag (of “chopped garlic” fame):

“Berman” the drunk (of “Yuck! I hate broccoli!” fame):

Or, watch the whole thing:

I still haven’t worked up the nerve to get someone this as a wedding gift, but I’m getting closer. You’ve been warned.