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so this weekend we went rock climbing (second time this term). lots of fun, but my arms are still sore. bouldering really stresses out the forearms.
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so, it's been a while. mostly i didn't post because i didn't have a computer at home and i didn't really feel like doing it from work. but now, that has changed. i am now the proud owner of a new 12" powerbook. well, quasi-proud. mac os doesn't seem to be all that i thought it was, although it definitely has some really nice features. but i'll save that rave/rant for a later time.
to catch up on what i've been doing.. um.. stuff. mountain view itself is kind of empty and boring, but having 11 other softies within shouting distance is really nice. so far, we've gone to san francisco and vegas. the other guys also went to L.A., but that was before i got here.
hm.. i feel like there's more i should be writing about, but i haven't written an entry in a while so i'm rusty. i suppose i'll rebuild the habit slowly.. :)
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ok, so it's been a while since i posted. mostly i was india for my sister's wedding and other relative-visiting activities. i'll post a separate restricted-viewing post on that (probably right after this).
also, i've been kind of sick since i got here to mountain view, so it's put a damper on things generally. other than that, things are going well. orientation at google was long and slightly boring, but informative and useful (giving me time to adjust to the environment). i also met my boss, who's pretty cool, and got my term OKRs (objectives and key results - everybody at google's supposed to have 'em) written.
google seems really really paranoid about security (in terms of inside information leaking out) so i can't really talk about anything work-work-related, but i can talk about work-environment-related stuff. like how there's free food EVERYWHERE. each building has a truckload of mini-kitchens with snacks and fruit and cereal. free breakfast, lunch, and dinner. with really good food, too. i haven't been taking full advantage of it because i wasn't feeling too well, but i will once i get better.. mm.. food.
the distribution of google t-shirts seems more restricted than i imagined. there's a t-shirt cabinet that gets refilled randomly and is emptied by googlers in about 10 minutes after that. there's a webcam on the cabinet, but i have yet to locate the address that the webcam is at (the IP address on the webcam tag doesn't seem to work). still, i hope to get a bunch of t-shirts by the end of the term. (i wonder if i should make that one of my OKRs?)
mountain view in general seems pretty nice. there's like a half-dozen technology companies on every block on the way to work. i walked there the first day (it's about 45 minutes away on foot), and was constantly seeing names of tech firms, some of which i recognized. now i take the (free) caltrain shuttle to/from work, which is like a 10 minute walk to the caltrain station and then a 10-15 shuttle ride to google.
more later..
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so it's been a while since i've been in new delhi. man, it's polluted. visibility was never more than 100 meters due to smog. at least people claim it's smog. i think the fog component was negligible.
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so my flight was delayed for 2.5 hours. here i am, at the airport. waiting. argh. at least i got rid of $2 of small change on 10 minutes of internet. 2 minutes left.
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cracked me up.
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so, another term comes to an end. i think that 3B was the worst school term we've had so far. it seems like each term just gets worse and worse. anyway..
CS448 (Databases) - this course gets the award for worst-managed-course-in-the-history-of-the-universe. having two profs for a course who don't talk to each other is really annoying. nobody could understand the prof for the first half of the course, and the second-half prof refused to teach us anything that was actually used in the real world. ridiculous. combine that with assignments that only covered the first half of the material, and round it off with a super-hard midterm and final. need i say more?
SE 463 (Specs n' Reqs): this course gets the award for the most-BS-ever-packed-into-a-course. a 120 page document that cost us many sleepless nights and overall health deterioration. not cool. i think the only saving grace of this course was i learnt how to do all sorts of funky stuff in LaTeX. i hope that comes in handy sometime.
ECE 354 (OS): the other time-consuming course (the main one was SE 463). at least it was fun. writing an OS was cool, although it still didn't live up to my expectations. i think it was mostly because we were writing it for a coldfire board that we can't really use to do any neat stuff. if the OS had been for an x86-based machine, and we could run it on our home machines, it would have been much cooler. (i believe real-time uses x86 - just another reason to look forward to it). anyway, a pretty good course overall, even though i didn't learn too much non-obvious or new stuff.
ECON 101 (Microeconomics): typical larry smith course. lots of fun, very entertaining. however, since i'd done microeconomics in high school, a lot of the material was not new. but still, larry smith makes it good :)
GER 101 (German): of all the courses this term, i probably learnt the most in this one, probably because i started it off with zero knowledge of german. there were some technical issues with the online system that the course used, but other than it wasn't too bad. although the next time i take a language course, it won't be by distance ed - actually interacting with other people improves learning immensely.
SCI 206 (Physics of how things work): ah, the bird course of the term. i took this course purely out of interest (doesn't count towards my average or any of my electives), and it was cool. the course required zero work, and i skipped a few lectures too. however, a lot of the demos that the prof did in class (e.g. making icecream using liquid nitrogen and then letting us eat some) were fun. i didn't learn much, but it was pretty entertaining as far as courses go.
overall, i think the term was low on actually learning stuff, and very high on pointless, time-consuming donkeywork. i'm glad it's over, and can't wait to get started at google next term :)
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.. i hope. since the middle of november, my sleep schedule has been totally warped. i think the constant getup-work-sleep that has been this term actually succeeded in breaking my brain enough that i couldn't sleep properly.. or at all, even if i was tired and trying to sleep. numerous other people in my class were also (and still are) affected by this pseudo-insomnia/narcolepsy, so i know it's not just me. anyway, the last two nights i've actually managed to get a decent amount of sleep each night, so hopefully my internal clock has fixed itself.
in other news, i have a final exam in less than two hours that i haven't started studying for. i suppose i should at least do something, but really.. it's The Physics of How Things Work. the midterm was a joke, and it's not like the course counts for anything for me. :)
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i finally got around to fixing the timestamps on this site. instead of storing the timestamps in server-local time on the server, they are now stored in UTC time, and adjusted on display to the user's local time. if you have an account, your timezone setting is stored there, otherwise it's stored in a per-session cookie. you can adjust your timezone setting using the drop-down in the nav pane on the left. it's set to UTC -05:00 by default (although the two people with accounts who are on the west coast have been updated to UTC -08:00).
this was a fairly massive change, so let me know if you see anything break, or if you see any timestamps that are off (for comments or entries or such). as a point of reference, this post is being made at Dec 9, 17:51 (UTC -05:00).
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i was working on adding some new stuff to this site, when i finally figured out something that has been bugging me for a while.. apparently the default install of PHP comes with the magic_quotes_gpc enabled. this means that quotes in any form data submitted to PHP is automagically escaped with backslashes. as i didn't know this before, i had been randomly adding stripslashes() to variables whenever i noticed the extra slashes. armed with this new information, however, i was able to go through my code and fix it up so that everything is consistent and i only call stripslashes() where i need to.
the problem is that a lot of the data in the mysql database also needed to stripslash'd, and i had to do that manually (running the SQL query for each table), which is error-prone.. so, if anybody sees any extra backslashes (\) floating around on the website that shouldn't be there, let me know so that i can fix it.
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