Working

Well, I've had my first few days at Google, and it's every bit as fun and exciting as hoped. And they feed us a lot. But there's a lot to learn. I haven't really had time to go out and do New Yorky things, but I was excited to find a NYSC open till 11 near my hotel. It's sort of strange that 24-hour gyms are common in the otherwise non-24-hour San Diego, but not in the very-much-always-open New York.

Speaking of hotels, I'm fairly annoyed with hotels.com. I had deliberately chosen them thinking I would have more flexibility than with Hotwire. But in the fine print they mention no "early checkouts." This has the rather peculiar result that once you check in on a reservation, you're bound for the duration, even though you have up to the time of the reservation to cancel with some penalty. This might possibly make sense if they cut some deal based on the duration of the stay, but they usually lay out the pricing as the sum of the prices of the individual days stayed (there are some duration discounts). Very stupid. I might as well have booked 7 individual reservations. Their customer support was quite rude. I do not recommend them.

I'm in the middle of reading The Wisdom of Crowds, which is a much more reasoned approach to the idea of emergent intelligence than other things I've read. Before that, I was in the middle of Six Degrees before I had to return it to the library, and it was actually very complementary to Wisdom. I think Six Degrees does a good job emphasizing the science, compared to Linked, although the explanation of percolation is kind of poor and the story of his rivalry with Barbasi comes off akwardly.

Alive!

Egad. Between server hackery and momentous life events, it's been a long time since I've written anything! But I'm alive again, having had in the interim far more adventures (the Cape, Maine (pictures TK), the 4th, Barth's The End of the Road, Spiderman 2....) than I will ever manage to recount. I am also, for anybody who doesn't know, momentarily unemployed. I've left IBM to work at Google in New York, which was a really, really hard decision, since I really loved the people and the work at CUE. But, working at Google seems like it will be a fun adventure. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

Speaking of search, I ran across this. My dream of clustering Slashdot is finally coming true! ;-)

Slackin' off

Is the weekend over already? I did go canoeing (difficult when windy!), see Eternal Sunshine (beautiful!), start reading Jennifer Government (totally captivating, and my second advertising-driven dystopia book after reading Pattern Recognition), eat Indian food, and see Jordi and Horn and Rox, but somehow it still felt lazy and unproductive. Thought about renting a bike or seeing the Sox, but didn't.

Ow

I'm still recovering from getting my wisdom teeth out Friday. Ow ow ow. I look like a chipmunk. In other news, I finally saw The Graduate. It was much weirder than I had expected.

Stuff I've been up to

I've had two good meals lately which have left me wondering why I haven't done a better job of restaurant scavenging before. The mushroom tower at The Asgard was tasty, if too spicy. And Audubon Circle is close by and has $4 beer, great atmosphere, and good veggie burgers.

Also exciting was a trip to see Swan Lake at the Wang Center. Ballet turned out to be much more entertaining than I remember from seeing Nutcracker years ago.

Hmm

The Stanford Prison Experiment actually has an interesting slide show walking you through what happened, which seems to be slightly more subtle than the way the magazines have been referencing it....

Pictures!

I installed Gallery (with Richard's help). Voila!. These pictures join the ones from Fernanda, Scott, and Yuri. ;-)