The notable event of the 6th week was a intern cohort luncheon on Friday.   Our cohort leader, who is also my recruiter, reserved some tables at Charlie’s (the biggest cafe on campus)  for us.    In her e-mail, she put “Book Table @ Charlie’s” in the message subject, and lo and behold, when we finally arrived, we thought all the tables were reserved for some book club.   It was pretty fun chatting with Alice, as she had a lot of interesting anecdotes to share.

Week 7 was a pretty good week, as it involved hot pot on Wednesday and laser tag on Thursday.    Google actually has an Asian themed cafeteria that serves hot pot every Wednesday.   Mike Xing organized a large group (12+ people from his office) and I just tagged along.   Even with reservations, the lines were ridiculously long, although we didn’t have to wait to be seated once we got to the front of the line.    Unfortunately, even though the pots were split pots, the two sides were for meat and vegetarian, not spicy and plain.   The spicy sauce that they did provide was tasty, but a far cry from the fiery Szechuan variety that I’m used to.   Mike works with quite a few attractive gals, which prompted me to wonder why he hasn’t gone after any of them.   Unfortunately for Mike, all of them are already taken, in fact, two of them have been going steady with their boyfriends for 8 years.

Laser tag gave me an excuse to stop working early on Thursday.   Although 30 people were on the invite list, only about 12 people ended up going, so we had to split into teams of 6 and 7 (including Alice, our cohort leader and organizer).   The last time I did laser tag was back in high school at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, and I did terribly.   This time, I was out for blood, and I went in armed with everything I learned from FPS games and Black Hawk Down.   In the end, I came in third overall, with a total score of 382.   My K/D ratio (or points for hitting and getting hit) ended up being something like 7:1, so I’d say I redeemed myself.

Week 9 was probably the highlight as I had my birthday on Tuesday, and went to Great America on Thursday.   I actually got some work done in the morning before I left for Great America, so I could say I was being productive even though I was gone for most of the day.   Since the last time I had gone, Great America lost its sponsorship from Paramount.   It’s now called California’s Great America instead.   So instead of Bugs Bunny and Batman, we got Sponge Bob and Snoopy.   Top Gun became Flight Deck, and Drop Zone became Drop Tower (no idea why for this one).   They also added a full fledged water park too.   We arrived at about 11am, and the lines were fairly short.   We actually were able to get on pretty much every single major roller coaster by about 5pm or so.   I finally rode on Invertigo and Grizzly, which I didn’t really want to go on before.   However, I still couldn’t really get myself to go on the Drop Zone/Tower.   I guess I’ll leave that last challenge for next time.    All the roller coasters were still a lot of fun, but the water rides seemed a lot less exciting than from what I remembered.   Especially Rip Roaring Rapids, which I remembered to be one of my favorite rides at Great America, turned out to be pretty lame this time around.

In terms of work, things were going fairly smoothly until Friday, when some other group’s tests crashed on a portion of code that I had modified.  Of course, they didn’t exactly know on what files the crash occurred, because they didn’t run in debug mode, so I was tasked to run my own tests to figure it out.   Unfortunately, because of the number of files required, (talking about terabytes of files here), I had to offload the job to a cluster machine, and just getting that to set up took an entire day.   I set the tests up over the weekend hoping for them to finish when I got back on Monday, but when I returned and looked at the results, it turned out the logs didn’t save, so I had to start over.    Even worse, because I didn’t have very high priorities (intern and all), my jobs kept on getting preempted by other people’s jobs.   In the end, I asked the guy who reported the bug originally to run it again with debug to figure out which file caused the error, and he ended up being unable to reproduce the bug.   Basically two and a half days wasted.

Week 10 was fairly uneventful after that, as I finally was able to get back on track to my project, which seemed to just kept on getting stretched out as unexpected things kept on popping up left and right.   It seems like most of the surprised have been dealt with though, so hopefully week 11 will be the final week and I can move onto something else.

I spent the rest of the night putting together my second DETOLF and setting up the lighting for it.   It took close to 2 hours from start to finish, which is pretty fast considering it took me 3 hours just to set up my first DETOLF, not including the lights.     I had originally planned to get some BlazBlue time in, but since I had work the next morning and haven’t gotten much sleep lately, I opted against it.   I also wanted to  get started on making a mouse figurine as a present for my cousin’s birthday, but that didn’t work out either.   I wanted to try using a new material I saw on an line tutorial.    The item I wanted to get was Apoxie, but I ended up getting Epoxy instead.   There’s quite a difference, as one is a clay, and the other is just glue.   The Epoxy is basically unworkable and I ended up getting it everywhere and was left with only a really disgusting looping piece of goop.   Good learning experience though.

Most of my friends have work on the weekdays too, so we’re not getting together until Saturday.   Definitely looking forward to the gaming session that we’re going to do.

I was actually quite surprised that Nobuo Uematsu was actually there to greet us.   Everyone pretty much went wild as soon as he appeared, giving him a  thunderous round of applause.   He didn’t say anything, but gave us all a welcoming smile and bow.    The concert started with The Bombing Run from Final Fantasy VII. There was a larger projector screen hanging above the symphony, where they showed custom music videos to accompany the pieces.    Everyone erupted in laughter as we saw the super deformed Cloud jump off of the train at the beginning of game.    The music videos were fairly well made, showcasing a lot of the best parts from each game.

All of the pieces were wonderfully performed, but my favorite out of the bunch were Dancing Mad from Final Fantasy VI and Jenova from Final Fantasy VII.    For Dancing Mad, they actually used a 30 foot organ embedded in the back wall of the chamber, which I had initially thought was just some kind of decoration.   It also ran to the full 10 minute plus glory.    The Jenova they played was a completely new rendition, and sounded far more badass than the original.    Overall, it was well worth the $98 tickets (we sat about 2 rows from the orchestra section).

What was really surprising was that during the intermission, we turned around and discovered a whole bunch of people from our high school sat behind us.   David was there in a full tux, and Ray was there too.   We had previously thought Ray might have been dead, since we lost contact with him for about two weeks.   Later he filled us in on how his computer broke and what not.   He came all the way up from Irvine just to attend this concert.   It was pretty fun catching up with some people I haven’t talked to since high school ended.   Afterwards, Wayne and Mike went directly home, but David and Ray crashed at my place for a bit and we played some Super Street Fighter 4 before calling a night.

I actually made it back in time on the 4th for a friend’s Independence Day BBQ.  It was supposed to be a family thing, but he invited some of his friends too (one of which is me, in case you couldn’t guess).   I understood why as soon as I got there, as had we not come, he’d have been stuck with three female cousins.   In other circumstances, that would be a pretty ideal male to female ratio.   After the usual rounds of red meat, we played some ping pong to pass the time until the fireworks.   When it came time, we decided to drive to higher up in the hills to catch a better glimpse of the fireworks coming from San Francisco.   Fireworks are illegal in pretty much all of the East Bay.   Unfortunately, no matter how awesome the fireworks are, they end up being pretty lame when viewed from 50 miles away.

For the two days I had off, I ended up working on my Android app with my group.  We wanted to release the new version on Monday, and spend time on our other side projects on Tuesday, but we ended up not releasing it until later that Saturday.   So my 4 day weekend ended up being a work weekend, but I still enjoyed it.   The best thing about it though, was that I only had a three day work week.   I have to admit I was still in vacation mode, so I was slacking off Wednesday and Thursday.   On Friday, two of my friends who were visiting home for a few weeks came to visit, and after we had lunch, we fooled around in the Google Arcades playing Area 51 and Gauntlet (the original, not Legends).   To top it off, I decided to take an early day and hitched a ride back.   I’m such a bad worker.

We officially released V2.0 of CloudList on the weekend, although as soon as we released, reports of a force close bug started coming in.   Despite the bug, we still had favorable reception, as it seemed to be a rare occurrence.  However, it meant that we had our work for the next week cut out for us.   As Sunday came to a close, I was somewhat apprehensive of the upcoming work week.   I wasn’t sure I could handle a full on work week after the previous week, especially since I had to start integrating code with other people’s code.   However, as the week came around, I found my fears to be unnecessary, and I was able to handle the new challenges fairly well.   As the 6th week came to an end, I could actually see the end of the project in sight.   This gives me hope that I’ll have a good chance at full time conversion.

Last Wednesday we also had a major intern event, which involved trampolines and dodgeball.    The event was held at Sky High, which is a trampoline park chain, apparently.    Google rented out the whole place, as to not let the geekiness of the Google interns contaminate the rest of the population.    When we arrived, we signed up for teams for the dodgeball tournament.   We had some time to practice getting used to the trampolines before the tournament started, as well as practice for the game itself in the dodgeball court.    The trampolines were a bit more underwhelming than I had hoped.  I thought we’d be jumping 20 feet into the air, but most of us can’t really manage more than 3 to 4.

My team was the first team to compete in the tournament.    Unfortunately for us, we got eliminated pretty quickly.   In fact, I was the first person out.   I tried to catch a ball but it bounced off my thumb and my teammates didn’t catch it either.   In hindsight, I should have just stayed behind and played defensively.   After the loss, we just sat around and talked for the next hour or so.   It was pretty interesting hearing everyone talking about the strategies we should have employed.   I guess theorycrafting is what Geeks do when they can’t do the actual thing.    In the end, a team consisting of really short and petite girls won the tournament, which really makes one wonder.

Last weekend was pretty much my first weekend off.   My parents went off to fix our new houses without me, and I was finally able to sleep in… until 9:00 am.    I guess my normal work hours have pretty much fixed my sleeping schedule in place.   I tried going on an 8 mile ride with the mountain bike in our house, and realized why I stopped riding it in the first place.   The bike seat was shaped in a way that made it really painful to sit on for a prolonged period of time.   The seat and handlebar heights were also fixated in a way that made it really tiring no matter how I saw, and forced me to arch my back in an uncomfortable position.   So yeah, I’m definitely getting a new bike.

On this past Wednesday, my team had a team dinner at a Thai restaurant to celebrate…something.  I’m not too sure exactly what we were celebrating, but free food is always good.   Getting to know my co-workers outside of a work setting is always good, and even better when I don’t have to pay any money for food.   I was surprised at how many of them are married, and one of them was even asking around about school districts and housing, since his kids are getting to the high school age.    He asked about high schools around Mountaview/Cupertino/Palo Alto, so of course I had to interject and elaborate on the superiority of Mission San Jose.

Overall, I think my work so far has been fairly productive despite the delays caused by the constant design changes.    I’ve got quite a bit of coding done so far, and once they are approved they’ll be residing in the Google code base.   Hopefully next week I’ll be able to get far enough to affect some clients.

On Wednesday, all the team members got together to grab lunch, as a way to celebrate me joining the team.   There were a lot more people than I expected, as I normally only interacted with the six or seven people I thought was the ‘team’.    We also have weekly team meetings on Wednesdays, where team members can give presentations, and everyone will give their progress on whatever project so far, and their plans for the rest of the week.    Having this meeting in the middle of the week is a much better idea than having it on Monday or Friday.   Monday isn’t a particularly good idea as people are just getting back into the work mentality after the weekend, and Friday is just as bad as people are going into weekend mode.

On Friday, an intern event was held just for us Nooglers.   It involved ice cream and inflatable rocking climbing, obstacle courses, and human foosball.   Human foosball was basically soccer, except each player is tied to a series of metal poles running across the playing field, simulating the foosball players.     I ended up on the attacking side along with my cubicle pal Eric.   He scores three goals and I scored two to win us the game 5 to 3.    The game was pretty fun, although the poles drooped, so I had to hold it up the entire game.   I also learned that kicking with my left foot gave pathetically bad results.

Cookie sporting my Noogler hat.

I got a cat.    Or rather, it was more like my cat got me.   This past weekend my parents dragged me over to our new house in Tracy.   We got it from a short sale, bought for the purpose of renting out.   The house needed a lot of work, including needing a new layer of paint for most of the interior rooms.   Waking up at 7:00 am to paint houses until 8:00 pm is not my idea of a relaxing weekend.

On Sunday, after we finished our painting for the day, we went to the back yard to clean the paint off of the tools.    Out of nowhere, this kitten suddenly appears and starts acting abnormally friendly.   It’d follow us whenever we went, and didn’t mind us petting him.  When I went inside to put away some of the tools, he dashed in as soon as I opened the screen door.    He didn’t mind being prodded or picked up, so we had a lot of fun with him.   When it came time to leave, we didn’t want to leave him in the backyard, as the pool posed a credible danger.   We decided to bring him around to some of the neighbors to see if they knew who the owners were.

Unfortunately, none of them knew anything about him, and also were not interested in taking in another cat.  By this time it was pretty clear the cat might be a stray, as he was extremely thin under his fur, and had a few patches around his legs that looked like they were wound that recently healed.   In the end we decided to drop him off on street behind our house, as that’s where we thought he originally came from.

We took him in the car to get around the block, and when we arrived, I dropped him on the lawn of one of the houses.   When I got back into the car, he immediately dashed under the car.    This worried me, as I saw him dash under our car earlier, and was hanging around the wheels, so I got out to check on him.   As soon as he saw me, he dashed and jumped into the opened door, with his paws desperately trying pull himself into the car.   After that, my mom wouldn’t let my dad leave without taking the cat with us.   My dad, who has always been adamant about not keeping pets, relented surprisingly easily.

On the drive back, we threw around name ideas.   The first and best idea I had was to call him 福尔猫斯, the Chinese translation of Sherlock Holmes, except with one of the words changed to the word for cat (摩 ‘mo’ ->猫 ‘mao’), making it a very funny pun.    Unfortunately, later our neighbors convinced us that the name was too long and unwieldy.   In the end, we settled on Cookie, as one of our neighbor’s cat who had similar colorings was named Oreo.

So far, Cookie has behaved well beyond expectations.   He poops in the kitty litter, and doesn’t scratch furniture.   He offers very little resistance even when we bathe him.   His only fault is that he’s a ravenous eater, which is a habit we need to train him out of.    So far this year has been full of surprises, from my Google Internship to getting a kitten out of nowhere.     I guess this being the ‘Year of the Tiger’ really makes it my year.   Knock on wood.   Some more pictures:

Cookie meeting the neighbors.

Meeting more neighbors.

Cookie stealing our dinner.

ZzzzZzzzzZzzzz.

Surveying his new domain.

Meeting my stuffed animals.

What's he doing to my lobster??!

Playing with my dad, or the other way around.

Morning exercises!

Tickle tickle!

Finally some sleep time.

]]> http://www.xionsphere.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=153 0 http://www.xionsphere.com/blog/?p=148 http://www.xionsphere.com/blog/?p=148#comments Wed, 16 Jun 2010 05:29:15 +0000 Esclair http://www.xionsphere.com/blog/?p=148 Noticed the spiffy new blog graphic?   One thing that made me hesitant to update my blog in a more timely manner was the fact that my current layout requires a picture thumbnail no matter what.   This is great for art updates, and for when I have photos available, but most of the time, I’ll just be updating with whatever is on my mind, and I won’t have a picture available on hand.

So I officially started my Google internship last Tuesday, June 8th.   I actually had to move out of my apartment in Los Angeles two days before, and spend all of Monday unpacking and cleaning my parents’ house here in Fremont (they rarely clean when I’m not here).   Graduate housing at UCLA was limited to a two year term, with every few exceptions given.   Regardless, even if it wasn’t up, I probably didn’t want to pay rent for somewhere I’m not using.   So the first day at Google consisted of a day long orientation, starting at 8:00 am.   This meant that I had to get up at 6:30 am, as the drive was around 40 minutes without traffic.   I didn’t have a car here, so my dad drove me for the first day.   I’m currently using the shuttle service that Google provides to get to and from work.   The shuttle has wifi, so I can get some work (or just general browsing) during commute.

The orientation consisted of a tour of the main campus, along with a string of presentations about the internship program at Google, as well as a bunch of information I’m not allowed to reveal.    Interspersed between the talks were of course the trade mark Google food.     At the end of the day I finally met with my mentor, and he showed me to my office, or rather, cubicle, followed up by a quick run through of the project I am to be joining.   The rest of the week consisted of training sessions and talks to help the new interns get into how Google does things, along with getting us familiar with the tools we would be using.     So far, I’m completely loving the internship, even though I wake up at 7:15 am in the morning and come back home at 8:00 pm in the evening.   However, I’ve noticed that not having a lot of free time left in a day really motivates me to make the most out of it, so I’ve been spending less time slacking off and more time working on my side projects.

I actually made this piece a while back.  If you look at the date, this was done just a few days into March.   Again, I was being completely lazy about updating the blog during that period of time.   The contest was the quarterly contest for spring at PolykarbonBBS, an art forum that I normally frequent.   The idea was to have each participant submit one ore more really old drawings into the lot.   The older and the more embarrassing, the better.   After the deadline for submission passed, everyone was randomly assigned someone else’s old drawings to ‘pimp’.    I was given a few of Muzz‘s old pictures, and I decided to combine these two into one.

The end result didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped.   The lineart didn’t fit too well with the background I threw together, and overall the color choices didn’t fit.   Lighting seems a bit all over the place, especially on the mech.   However, I did enjoy painting the background though.   It was nice not being constrained by the lineart, and being able to redo stuff that didn’t seem to work.   With coloring lineart, I always felt a bit constrained as to what can be changed.   I’m currently working on another piece, except this time it’s full on 100% digitally painted, except for a pencil sketch that outlined the general design.   I was making pretty good progress during the last two weeks of school, but with the start of my internship, it’s been stalled for a bit.  Hopefully I can find some time to finish it soon.    Finally, here’s the lineart for the piece:

Let me continue from where I left off in my last blog post.   I ended up presenting two papers, Graph Cut Textures, and Steering Behaviors for Autonomous Characters.   I really enjoyed the paper on graph cuts, as it gave me a very tangible example of how to effectively use graph cuts.     For CS269 I ended up implementing a simple version of Intelligent Scissors for my term project, and for CS275, I wanted to expand upon the concepts touched upon in the Steering Behaviors paper.    Due to how late I finalized my proposals for my projects, I wasn’t able to even start before finals week.  Luckily, my professor (who taught both classes) was fine with people taking incompletes for the class  so they could turn in their projects later.

My original plan was to finish Intelligent scissors during spring break, and start the CS275 project before the spring quarter started.   However, my Google interview ended up being scheduled during spring break, and I had to cram for that for most of the spring break.   I also got a fever during the week I came back to school, knocking me out of commission for another week.   I ended up turning it in about 3 weeks into the spring quarter.    I’m also still working on the CS275 project, as I didn’t have enough time to finish it during the last quarter, but my professor was nice enough to give me an additional extension.

Speaking of spring quarter, I ended up getting assigned to teach assist CS33: Computer Organization, which is a class that teaches assembly.   Unfortunately for me, I’ve never taken an assembly class before.   I didn’t sign up for this in the first place, so I’m not sure how I got stuck with it.    In order to make sure I didn’t completely doom my students to failure, I had to learn everything before they needed to learn it.   It didn’t help that the assignments were incredibly difficult.   In the end, I think I did a pretty job helping them through the class, and I learned quite a lot about assembly,gdb, buffer overflows, optimization, blocking, and CUDA myself.    There were some pretty hilarious stories in there, but that’s for another time.

Now on to the real subject of this blog post, my internship at Google.    I submitted my resume to Google, Microsoft, and Cisco, along with a few other fairly small companies.    The only company that even replied back to me was Google, and they gave me an interview offer too.   I suspect it might have something to do with the fact that I was able to attach a cover letter to the resume submission.   I think the letter itself was unique enough to get me noticed, as I later heard that online applications were mostly hopeless.   It didn’t help that I didn’t submit my resume until fairly late in the internship calender.

Regarding my interviews, I had two technical ones over the phone, 45 minutes each, scheduled one right after the other.   I didn’t think I did too well on either of them, as I fumbled on some basic questions.    Not hearing back from Google for close to two weeks seemed to confirm my early suspicions.    However, two weeks later I got an e-mail from an recruiter stating that I had in fact passed my technical interviews, and that I was placed into the internship queue.   Due to how late I was in applying, they might not have a group lined up that would be able to take me, but I’d be automatically placed into next year’s queue if I didn’t get an internship this summer.   Luckily, a spot in the search UI team was open, and I was scheduled for a host interview later in the week, to see if I was a good match for the project.   Again, I felt I did poorly on the interview, fumbling some more basic questions.   I was content to try again next summer, but a few hours after the interview ended I received an e-mail from my recruiter telling me that I was accepted into the group, and thus the internship program.

I still can’t quite figure out exactly how I was able to get this internship.   I completely lacked interviewing experience (this being my first and all), which was quite apparent in my performance at the actual interviews.     I can really only attribute part of it to blind luck, like me winning the lottery.    Well, I can’t complain about that.   I’m definitely going to make the most of it though.    Since the post seems to have gone on for long enough, I’ll leave the juicy details (the non-confidential ones) about my life at Google for later.