Posts from — July 2007

Ways to get in touch with me, vaguely ordered from best to worst:
- In person - Typically the most effective type of communication, unless I’m busy with work.
- By phone - For time-critical things or some casual conversation during off hours, this works well.
- Gmail - My @gmail and @google addresses are checked most hours I’m awake on most days, plus I can easily ignore it if I’m in the middle of something.
- GTalk/Jabber - Messaging me through gmail to either of those addresses works well for simple stuff.
- AIM - I go on AIM from home typically, though I tend not to talk on it as much as I used to. I’m not ideologically opposed to it, though.
- Email (@lehigh.edu) - I check this less often, and I haven’t set up SMTP (outgoing mail) on some computers, so this is not a good method.
- Facebook Message or Wall Post - If you have a comment about my facebook profile, pictures, etc., post it on my wall. Otherwise just email me. Facebook messages are the worst ways to get in touch with me by almost every measure. Also, when I write replies using their web site, I just get mad at how limiting it is, so my reply will be less friendly. Actually, I think I’ll make a point of replying by email whenever possible.

Professional pictures from the party in South Carolina

My favorites:

They put grass down for the floor of this room:

Billy from Entourage (I didn’t get to meet him):

http://www.google.com/search?q=number+of+horns+on+a+unicorn

I didn’t do any work all weekend. I checked my email a couple times, but I didn’t write anything. It was really relaxing, and I accomplished a lot today.

I was sick last week after the trip, so I avoided doing things over the weekend in order to ensure that I was better for this week.

More posting later, I need some sleep since I have to be in “early” tomorrow. I guess I can’t complain, since I scheduled the meeting…

I saw the Simpsons movie last night. It had some funny parts, but it didn’t leave me wanting more (and at times I just wanted it to end), plus I thought the slapstick was excessive. If you’re Simpsons fan, you’ll like it, if not, skip it.

A classic, for the kids:

A lot of my time on the trip was spent with googlers and youtubers, not surprisingly. I met a lot of people with whom I had only exchanged email or talked on the phone. The majority of them didn’t work in Mountain View, too.

Sometimes it’s hard for engineers (myself included) to see why non-engineers have challenging jobs. It can look like some jobs just involve sitting in meetings and sending email, both of which are pretty easy. This is similar to people thinking that programming is a fancy kind of typing. I talked with the events coordinator who organized a lot of the events for the day, and the more I learned, the more I understood how challenging it is. The Google press party (after the debate) was an amazing event, and it was meticulously planned (in PowerPoint, I later learned). I’ve included some pictures below, neither of which do it justice. There was a professional photographer there, so hopefully I’ll be able to get some of those pictures.

The event took place in an old bus station. Here’s what it looked like the night before:

Another thing I learned was that I really enjoy doing demos and introducing products to people. I did demos of Google Earth and Google Maps (probably the two flashiest google products to demo), and got a chance to talk with a bunch of people about how they did things, features they did and didn’t like, etc. Maybe I’ll have a chance to do this again if I go to Florida for the Republican debate.

Going into Monday’s CNN/YouTube Democratic Presidential Debate, I was worried that it would seem gimmicky. To some (though nobody I’ve talked to), it did, but I was actually quite impressed with the event.

It’s not going to revolutionize democracy, it’s not even really democratic (CNN picks the questions), but it was more engaging, interesting, and entertaining than the debates I’ve seen in the past. Calling any of these debates is a bit of a stretch- it’s really more like 8-person recitations of semi-prepared remarks at times, but I’ll let that go (it’s nothing new).

Some notes on the format, for those who didn’t see it:
- 39 questions were asked, each of them was a short video from youtube from a public submission. The questions were selected by CNN.
- Anderson Cooper moderated, directing which candidates should answer which questions and doing followups on behalf of the question-asker (some of whom were there, but not most).
- Each candidate was asked to submit one “youtube-style” video to be played at some point during the night.

The questions were generally good. They were visually interesting and a refreshing change from the typical sterile questions asked at debates. The questions were displayed on a big screen, which was great for those in the audience, but for reasons I don’t understand, TV viewers had to watch live video of the screen, instead of the youtube clip being played directly to TV. Hopefully they’ll fix that in the future.

The advantage of having questions recorded by people ahead of time and not asked by the moderator became apparent when Anderson said to a candidate who was flustered by a question “It’s not my question”. Now, since CNN is picking the questions, things are a bit more complicated than that, but I do think that the difference is non-trivial. Moderators have a symbiotic business relationship with candidates, and that relationship limits what they can ask. YouTube isn’t a solution to this, but I think it did help.

You can see all the questions and responses here.

Some of the candidate videos were quite good, others just submitted ads they had already made. It seems that the production value of the video was inversely proportional to how appropriate it was for the debate. My favorite was from John Edwards:

It’s funny, insightful, simple and true.

Some people asked me who I thought won the debate. I don’t really think about it that way in general, but I don’t think anyone stood out as far better or worse than they did before the debate. So, I guess that’s a win for Hillary, but whatever.

Slate has a good recap of the debate, with many of the same conclusions I had.

If you saw the debate on TV, I’m curious to hear what you thought of it.

I got back from my trip to South Carolina yesterday. It was a great trip, though I’m still quite tired from it. I won’t write a big mega-post with a play-by-play of the trip, but I will write some posts about things that interested me.

Two more people who I’ve met and have wikipedia articles:

• Steve Chen - YouTube co-founder
• Richard Schiff - Toby from West Wing

Some proof of the latter:

Kinda a weird picture, but that’s ok.

I saw Richard in the debate hall before the debate began. At first, it made sense that Toby (communications director for the white house) would be there, until I realized West Wing wasn’t real. Unfortunately.

My 20% project got mentioned in the Wall Street Journal today. I haven’t seen the article in paper, but my project was mentioned at the end of a page 1 story. The online version is behind a paywall, so I won’t bother linking to it.

Anyway, here’s the relevant part… my project is at the very end:

Some other Google initiatives are less explicitly geared toward currying favor with policy makers and powerful constituents, but could help further those ends just as well. At the state level, Google executives met earlier this week with several secretaries of state at a conference as part of an exploratory effort to make voting information such as locations of polling sites more easily accessed online.

Katie Jacobs Stanton, the product manager for Google’s financial news and information service, says she was disappointed that the company didn’t provide more services to voters during the 2004 presidential election. Ms. Stanton, who spent a year working at the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in the 1990s, has helped pull together about 15 colleagues to work on services for next year’s election. The employees are using the 20% of their work time Google allows them to spend on individual projects.

One fruit of their efforts is a tool to be released in the near future that individuals will be able to use to annotate video of the presidential debates. Other people could then play back the video and see running commentary such as fact-checking analyses of the candidates’ statements.

I was kinda hoping to get my name in the article, since it is my project (just the part in the last paragraph- Katie is running the elections effort in general). Maybe I should have spiced things up with controversial quotes like “George Bush doesn’t care about software engineers” or something..