Last Thursday was the first complete day that we dumped the news feed to disk. Turns out, we receive about 28,000 unique files per day. We were a little surprised at the sheer quantity of the data, and we had to figure out how to start analyzing it. The first step, of course, was just to start opening files to get an idea of what the files contained. At first we were pretty confused, but by now we have a fairly good idea. News arrives as an XML document with special newsedge specific tags that contain metadata, unique identifiers, etc, all wrapped around standard nitf documents. Therefore, for the first stage of the project, we decided to focus on analyzing only the newsedge information, since that represents the value added by the special feed that we are subscribed to (over just subscriping to the AP and other providers individually).

Our other project for the day was to get some simple JavaScript scripts written and running on Chris’s machine that would analyze the news data. The reason Chris recommended JavaScript is that new versions of Rhino (a Java-based JS engine) support a new addition to the standard that treats XML as a native object. This makes validating, constructing, and extracting information from XML documents much simpler. Plus, I think he just likes E4X. Thankfully, it wasn’t too hard to get started, especially since Chris gave us a book on JavaScript to read, and we were able to learn most of core JavaScript pretty quickly (the core being the only part that we need to use).

I’ve actually discovered that JavaScript is a pretty fun language. I haven’t used it much before, and I was really happy to learn that it’s very Scheme-like in that functions are treated as first class objects. This means we can assign functions to variables and use them to construct new functions. You wouldn’t believe how much time and energy this one feature has ended up saving us over the last two weeks. There are a few subtleties to the scoping rules that I don’t quite have completely in my head yet, but I think I understand JavaScript really well. I would certainly be comfortable putting it on my resume even after only the last two weeks.

After work on Thursday, Matt and I just came home to eat. I had some leftover Chinese food from eating out with Chen that I still hadn’t had an opportunity to finish because Matt’s mom kept making us fresh meals. I decided to get rid of it one way or another Thursday night. Five days, though, is way too long to keep Chinese food in the refrigerator… After a few bites of the meal, I decided I couldn’t take any more. Matt offered me some of his enchiladas, which were way better…

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I’m going to end here because after I saved part of this entry, our router at home stopped working and I haven’t updated for a long time (it’s working again now).

My first few days of work went really well. On Monday, Matt and I were supposed to be there at 8:30 for orientation, so we left around 7:50, not really knowing how long it would take. When we pulled in the parking lot at 8:10, we knew we were a little early. Almost no one else was there. We staying in the car until 8:20 or so, then we went inside and sat in the lobby. Eventually some more people arrived, and we were able to sign in and get temporary badges. Jo came downstairs, met us at the front desk, and took us up to the office.

Jo very bubbly and friendly, so she was happy to see us starting work. She’s pretty short (5-2 or so?), about 27-28, and Phillipino. Jo’s job is to make things run smoothly at the office, and ensure that everyone is having a good time. Most recently, that involved creating the Findlaw Fun Committee and organizing a ping-pong tournament. We all received 100 Findlaw Fun Dollers to bet on the outcome. Now, I’m not exactly sure why we would bet with fake money (maybe there’s a prize for the person with the best bets), but at least we’re all having fun.

Our office is on the top floor of the building. Sounds exciting, until you realize that there are only two floors. Actually, it’s really nice. We have a lot of windows through which the sun can shine, and there’s so much space that they even have empy cubicles. Matt and I have cubes right next to each other in the middle of the far side of the office (there are meeting rooms and manager’s offices between the two sides). When I enter the office every day, I turn left, put my lunch in the refrigerator (I have to squeeze it in between the free drinks), maybe pick up a granola bar and glass of water, turn right around the corner and walk past one set of cubicles before I get to where I work.

Anyway, back to our first day. Jo was supposed to help us get set up with our accounts so we could report hours, etc., but we ended up not being in the system yet, so we had to give up for the day. This left Matt and me some time to get set up on our computers and check out the building. I wrote an email to Michelle (another friend of mine who interned at Thomson West last year, but now is working at a subsidiary of theirs in Washington D.C.). Michelle took Chinese II this semester, so she and I regularly exchange emails in untoned pinyin. We probably have terrible grammar, but at least it’s a good review.

Eventually, Matt and I were able to meet with Rob, Chris, and Kuba to talk about our project for the summer. We had three choices for what to work on: one project involved analyzing and potentially catagorizing news feeds that FindLaw buys from another company to editorialize and resell, a second project was helping to rewrite some legacy code to provide a consistant interface across the organization, and the third option would be to create a tool that would help people create relationships between different taxonomies. Matt and I talked over our options and both agreed that project number one sounded like it was both the most interesting problem and the one with the greatest possibility for our input to shape the output of the project. In the afternoon, we met with Kuba again and told him our decision.

Actually, I just realized I haven’t explained who these people are. Kuba is Wlodek Kubalowski (I think/hope this is right), the CTO of FindLaw. Kuba is probably in his late 40s to 50s, and moved to America from Poland around 1990. Rob works under Kuba, and his title is Director of Technology. I haven’t worked with him a whole lot, so I don’t know much more than that. Chris Wensel is the Chief Architect and my direct supervisor this summer.

Chris is quite a character. He grew up in Texas, went to school in Texas, and finally was able to move out here in 2000/2001, a few months before the big crash. He’s also the least Texan person you can imagine – vegetarian, liberal, long hair, etc. Chris is a great guy, though. He’s very intelligent and knows a lot about the software business (having payed his way through college by starting a software company). I think I have much to learn from him this summer.

My first day, I went out to eat at a Japanese restaurant with Chris and two other coworkers of mine: Gloria Lau and Jarred. Gloria moved to the US from Hong Kong to go to school. Now she has her doctorate; this was actually her first day back after presenting at a conference in Scotland . Jarred grew up in the Bay Area, went to school in Chicago, and moved back after the company that he was working at in Chicago was bought by Thomson/Findlaw. I’m not 100% sure what Gloria and Jarred work on at Findlaw. Pretty much the first thing that anyone said at lunch was when Chris declared that Matt and I had better stop wearing khakis and getting dressed up for work. Pretty much everyone at FindLaw wears jeans every day. Sometimes they even just wear jeans and a t-shirt. It’s a lot more relaxed than last year, and I like it this way.

When we got back to the apartment after our first day of work, Matt’s mom was waiting with homemade enchiladas for us. That was really nice. Dinners were a lot tastier when she was staying here…

Tuesday started out kind of slow. Matt and I weren’t able to meet with Chris to go over the project until the afternoon, so we spent the morning looking up academic articles online about automatically classifying text corpuses and news feeds. At lunch, we went to downtown Sunnyvale again, but this time we ate at Roundtable Pizza.

After lunch, we had a meeting with Chris, Gloria, and another coworker, Tompa. Chris gave us more details about how news articles were currently being handled and where they came from, but mainly he said it was our job to figure out the specifics of how this process worked. Our first step was talking to Tompa, who would help us install some software that he wrote to start dumping news articles to disk.

Tompa is another older Polish man, but he’s not as high in the company as Kuba. His accent is also much stronger… He’s very friendly and talkative, but we can only understand about half of what he says. One day Matt and I were working late, so almost everyone else was gone. Tompa saw us at the water fountain and stopped to talk for a while. Matt and I both heard Tompa ask, “Are you… running?” Neither one of us, however, really knew how to answer the question. At first I (and apparently Matt, too) thought he was asking if we were at work late because we were running a script that was taking a long time to finish, so we said, “No, we’re just working on some stuff.” Then it was his turn to look confused and repeat his previous question. I looked at Matt, he looked at me, and I ventured a guess that he had actually asked if we were renting, so I said “Yes, down in Cupertino.” Luckily I was right, but unfortunately Matt hadn’t caught up yet, so he was utterly lost. Later in the conversation, Tompa was telling us about something we should do, maybe something about Yosemite park, but we had to be careful because of something else… I talked to Matt afterward to see if he knew what we had been talking about, but apparently he had no idea either. I wish I could tell you that we eventually found out, but I don’t think that’s ever going to happen.

Anyway, Tompa had some java servlets that he had been running in Tomcat to subscribe to the Dialog feed. This meant that to completely emulate his work, Matt and I had to first install a Java IDE, then get it working with Tomcat, and finally start everything running. Nothing ever wants to work right the first time with this sort of setup, so this ended up taking us the rest of the day.

Wednesday, we finally thought we understood everything that Tompa’s code was doing, when Chris came by to see if we had it all set up on his linux box yet. Well, we didn’t realize that was where he wanted us to save the feed, so we had set it up on our Windows boxes. So we told him that and explained how setting up Tomcat and everything had taken up all our time. Chris seemed shocked that we even used Tomcat, and he told us that it would probably be better for us to rewrite it from scratch so it could just run as a Java proces… So, we started over. Thankfully, it wasn’t really that bad to rewrite now that we knew what all the different parts did, and we started dumping files to disk at 4:40 on Wednesday afternoon.

Wednesday night, Matt’s mom flew back home to Michigan. Matt drove her to the San Francisco airport, so I had the apartment to myself for a while. I still hadn’t quite gotten used to the time change yet, though, so I fell asleep pretty soon.

I think this is probably a long enough post for most of my readers, so I’ll stop here. In the next update, you can look forward to our first meeting with a very persistant Scientologist, the Cupertino library, hanging out with Apple interns, driving to Vallejo, and clothes shopping. Sounds like fun, right?

I should really get going on this blog stuff, because I’m way behind right now… I suppose this post will start where the last one left off and go until Sunday night.

Friday night after we arrived at Lee and Liz’s house, Dad and I were both pretty tired. Not only had we barely slept over the last two days, but we’d also gone through three time zones, so it felt like it was three hours later than everyone else thought it was. So, pretty much the first thing we did was sit down on the couch. There wasn’t much room, though, because their floors are being redone, so all the furniture was in one room. This didn’t stop their dogs from coming over to jump on us, though. Molly is a one year old basset hound, Dusty is an old chiuaua, Peanut is a six month old chiuaua, and we didn’t see much of the two cats (Sam and Brollie) .

For dinner, we ate some reheated fried chicken from Popeye’s. They offered to go out to eat with us, but no one was really that hungry. After we visited and ate, Dad and I got showers (it felt really good to be clean again), then fell asleep. I had to sleep on an air mattress in the extra room, but believe me, I slept well that night..

When I woke up, it was about 5:30 or 6:00. Dad and Liz were already up. I understood Dad being up, but I felt bad for Liz, because she said she was just up to make us breakfast. Still, I was grateful when I smelled the food. Liz was cooking “Breakfast Fried Rice,” which is basically fried rice with every breakfast you can think of in it. Sausage, bacon, onions, garlic, hot dogs, eggs, and more. I can’t even remember everything. It smelled really good, and tasted even better. Matt and Lee woke up in time for everyone to eat together, which was nice.

After breakfast, though, Dad and I were pretty much ready to go. I was anxious to move in and see how the apartment turned out (it’s kind of nerve-racking trying to find an apartment without being able to look at any of them…). We packed up what little we had gotten out for the night, said goodbye, and headed off. I was a little surprised at how far my apartment ended up being from Vallejo. I didn’t realize that it would be close to an hour and a half trip – not that it was long comparatively, it was just surprising.

We arrived in Cupertino about 9:00 on Saturday morning. Matt agreed to move his car out of the one reserved parking spot so that we wouldn’t have to carry the luggage very far. The apartment is just off the on ramp to 280 East, so we didn’t end up driving through much of the city before we saw the apartment.

Matt and I definitely made a good choice with this place – I was very happy to discover that everything about the apartment has met or exceeded my expectations. The parking spot is covered (not that it ever rains here) and immediately behind the apartment. From there, we walk around the building into a grassy area with some sidewalks and rows of apartments on either side. Every building is two stories high, and all the apartment entrances are from the outside. This makes it a lot more inviting than if we had to go inside and walk down a hallway to the apartment. Our apartment is on the first floor.

On the inside, we have a fairly small kitchen, a living room, a space off the living room for the kitchen table, a shared bathroom, two bedrooms, and a balcony. One bedroom is about 30-40% larger than the other. By the time Dad and I arrived, all the furniture that we rented for the summer had been moved in. Again, this turned out as good as I could have hoped. Out of three furniture rental places, we chose the one that was half the price of either of the other two, so I was afraid we’d have something horrendous, but the couches and beds are really nice (especially the queen-sized beds; how I wish we had these at MIT), and the dressers and tables aren’t bad at all. The only thing I can complain about with regards to the apartment is the shower. It’s incredibly short. The shower head is only halfway up my arm, which means I practically have to bend over double to wash my hair. Yesterday morning I hit my head pretty hard getting out of the shower. Not a good way to start the day.

Anyway, Matt’s mom was going to stay here until Wednesday to help us move in and get settled, which was really nice. She’s very talkative, but in a good way (like Matt). They can tell stories all day, trying to outdo each other. After five days with the two of them, I feel like I know the whole family – Becky, Andy, and Mick included.

Most of the day Saturday was spent arranging stuff in the apartment, shopping for things that I couldn’t bring with me, and getting to know the area. Dad and I probably put another 30 miles on the car just in the Cupertino/Sunnyvale area driving in circles. However, I was really looking forward to Saturday night.

Chen lives in Seaside, CA (near Monterey), and she was at home the first week after school, but she had to fly back to Boston on Saturday night around 10:00. Luckily for me, Cupertino is on the way from her house to the airport, so we were able to get together for dinner on Saturday night. Chen recommended a good Chinese restaurant called House of Sichuan. Ordering there was pretty easy – we just got a family style meal for three people. I actually liked the food a lot. I was a little worried, because I know that Sichuan food is typically pretty spicy, but they also ended up having Hong Kong/Cantonese food which is more sweet. I enjoyed seeing Chen again, especially back in California. She seemed very relaxed and happy.

When we’d eaten all that we could eat, Dad got up to use the bathroom. Chen sneakily took this opportunity to snag the bill and pay it before I knew what was happening. I tried pretty hard to get her not to pay, but she insisted. The best I could do was make her promise to visit Ohio sometime, and I’d buy her dinner (Chen, if you’re reading this, I’m not going to forget!) . After dinner, Chen’s parents came to pick her up (they visited friends in the area while we ate). I only had a chance to shake their hands, but they seem like very nice people. Soon, Chen was back on her way, and Dad and I headed back to the apartment.

We both tried to get to sleep pretty soon, since we were still getting used to the time (and I think Dad was trying not to get used to the time). This meant that we were up at 5:30 again on Sunday morning, which is a perfect time to go out driving if you want to avoid the Sunday traffic… The streets were empty, so Dad and I drove down to San Jose on Steven’s Creek, then we went north to see Mission Santa Clara and drive West on El Camino Real. By now, we were both getting a little hungry, so we tried to find a restaurant that was open for breakfast. It’s tougher than it sounds, so we ended up at an “All-American” restaurant and bar with $8 breakfasts. They were good, though… I had a pecan waffle with bacon and eggs. The waffle was incredibly delicious and was so large that I could barely finish the eggs.

After breakfast, we drove around some more, up to Palo Alto and Stanford University, then back again. Our last stop before coming back was at a grocery store to finish getting stuff for the apartment. We were back by 10:00 and had already had a full day. From this time, we pretty much just sat around and talked with Matt and his mom, who were going into San Francisco for the day. At 1:00, we made sure Dad had everything in his suitcase, and I drove him to the San Jose airport. The San Jose airport is a lot closer to my apartment than San Francisco airport (10 vs. 40 minutes), plus it’s on the way to my next stop – Nicola’s house.

Nicola is spending this summer in Houston, but her home is in Milpitas, so I thought it would be fun to stop by her place and see her before she left. She invited me over for a cookout that her family was hosting Sunday afternoon. Since I just drove over after dropping Dad off, though, I was a little early. Nicola’s house is really nice, and it’s just about the last house in Milpitas before the hills/mountains start that surround Silicon Valley. In fact, we were able to walk about halfway up one of them and see the incredible view. You can see all the way to the mountains on the other side of the valley, which is probably 40-50 miles away. In between, you can see downtown San Jose, the highways, the bay, etc. It’s really great. I took a few pictures, but they aren’t online yet. Nicola is probably used to this, though, and must think I’m nuts.

Before her relatives came over, we decided to drive around a bit. She first took me to Fry’s, a giant electronics store/general hangout. I haven’t ever really seen anything like it before. It’s not like a Best Buy or CompUSA because it actually looks really nice on the inside. The shelves are wood, like an old-fashioned university library. The sales staff seems pretty knowledgeable, and they have just about everything you could ever want. I needed to buy a router anyway, so I just picked one up when we visited. Next, we drove to downtown San Jose to check it out; I saw the Tech Museum, the art museum, Nicola’s high school. It looks pretty good, but I guess they just built a new building. We also stopped to get some egg rolls and wontons at a little fast-food Asian place. I wish I could remember where it was or what it was called, because it was pretty tasty.

We saved the food for when we got back to her house, though. When we got there, we went into the back to eat. First thing I do is spill some sweet and sour sauce on my pants and a bit on her tablecloth. I felt really bad about this, but since it wasn’t too much, Nicola said it would be ok and after we wiped it up, we went back to eating. A few minutes later, the wind picked up, flipped my plate over, and dumped the whole container of sauce all over the tablecloth. What a klutz… Needless to say, after that we gave up and went back inside to play pool and ping-pong until the relatives came over.

Everyone in Nicola’s family is very friendly, but I didn’t talk to most of them that much. I did feel a little bad about this, because I thought maybe I was keeping Nicola from visiting with her relatives before she had to leave for Houston.

Finally, I went back to the apartment about 6:00 (I think). Matt and his mom were still out, so I had the place to myself for a while to relax. When they got back, his mom made broccoli-cheese soup and chicken. I only had a little because I was still full from eating with Nicola. By this time, I was getting pretty tired again, so I decided it wouldn’t be worth it to stay up, and I just went to bed, figuring that at least I wouldn’t be late to work…

It’s been a long time since I updated this blog, so I have a lot to write (especially since some big things have happened in that time). Unfortunately, Matt and I had some trouble getting our cable internet set up and had to wait until Saturday for a technician to come out and fix it. Anyway, I suppose I’ll start with last Thursday and see how far I get in this post.

Thursday at 3:50AM was the real start of my summer adventure. Dad and I were planning to wake up at four and hit the road, but apparently I was so anxious that I woke up ten minutes early even without an alarm clock. I had packed almost everything in the car the night before, but we still didn’t end up leaving until about 4:30. Of course, our first stop was at the gas station down the street to fill up the tank before getting on the expressway.

Dad drove first, while I slept in the passenger seat. When I woke up again at about 6:40, we were 30 miles from Indiana. Outside, it was still a little dark. It was also a little rainy, though it stopped pretty soon. I think those sprinkles are the last rain I’ve seen.

By 7:06, we were in Indiana. Dad kept driving, and we passed into Illinois at 9:07. This was our first time change. We hit a little traffic going past Chicago, but really not as much as I expected. Again, Dad drove on while I sat in the passenger seat. By this time we were a few CDs into “Zorro,” a book on CD that we took out from the library before we left. With 15 CDs altogether, we were hoping it would last us for a good part of the trip.

We passed into Iowa around 10:31 Central Time (seven hours into the trip). This would be Dad’s last state before I started driving. Iowa’s pretty wide, though, so we didn’t enter Nebraska until 2:24. Finally, at the next gas station, Dad let me take over. He’d been driving non stop for at least 15 hours now.

Speaking of gas stations, we were driving a Mazda 6, which has a 16 gallon tank and, which we discovered, gets almost exactly 30mpg while driving at 80mph, so we were able to go about 400 miles pretty comfortably between gas stations. This was really nice, especially compared to last time we drove across the country, when we were in a conversion van that only got 11 miles per gallon.

Nebraska was the longest state that we had to cross, and I drove almost all of it. We had to fill up the gas tank again near the end of Nebraska, and we decided that we would only drive until Cheyenne before stopping for dinner, so Dad took over until then. We crossed into Wyoming at 7:27 PM.

In Cheyenne, we got off the expressway looking for gas and food. We discovered that they were painting lines on the roads right at that time, though, so we were a little worried that the car would end up with white spots (and road paint is nearly impossible to remove). Nevertheless, we ended up eating at a Village Inn – I had an ok-but-not-the-best Reuben sandwich, and Dad had a hamburger (I think – this was over a week ago). I was driving again when we left Cheyenne. On the way out we saw a big Union-Pacific train station, but unfortunately we weren’t able to get a picture.

By now it was after 9:00 central time, which meant we had been on our trip for almost 18 hours. I was starting to get tired, and Dad was sound asleep next to me. Also, it was pretty dark already and over the next hour and a half or so (I don’t remember exactly how long I drove), I encountered a lot of construction and way more traffic than I expected at that time of night in Wyoming. As you might guess, a lot of the traffic was comprised of big semi-trucks making their way through the night. Eventually I knew I was too tired to keep it up, but Dad had woken up, so I pulled off at the next exit and he prepared to take over again. While we were switching places, we got a chance to look up at the stars for a little while. Without a cloud in the sky, and without any of the lights that we have in Boston or Stow, it really was a magnificent sight. If I wasn’t so tired and cold (it was pretty chilly that late), it would have been nice to stay for a little while looking at them.

But we had to keep moving. I knew Dad was probably exhausted by this time; nevertheless, he wanted to see how far we could go. Once I was in the passenger seat, I didn’t care; I was sound asleep. I guess the night did get to Dad, though. Sometime around midnight he drove into one of the parking lots that they have on the side of the expressway for sleeping truckers and we both slept for a while.

Three hours later, we were up again. We stopped for gas (and coffee this time) at the next gas station, but after that we decided not to stop until Reno. At 5:29AM, we entered Utah. Dad was driving at this point, since he was rested and had the coffee to sip on. The drive into Salt Lake City is pretty exciting on Route 80. Basically, you’re just rolling down the mountain, trying not to go too fast, and watching out for all the big trucks careening down along side of you. It could have been more nerve-racking, but we were in a good car that handled it well. Plus, we were able to get way more than 30mpg for that part of the trip.

I took over the driving again after getting gas in Salt Lake City. This meant I could drive the easiest part of the trip – the salt flats. Dad fell asleep again, and I drove along at 80-85 mph, barely moving the steering wheel at all for three hours. We entered Nevada at 8:05 Pacific Time. Immediately afterward, we stopped for gas; the first exit had gas stations in both Nevada and Utah, so we could compare them to find the cheapest. As it turned out, Nevada was about 30 cents per gallon more expensive than Utah, so we ended up with gas costing 2.949 per gallon after driving about a mile down the road.

Nevada’s another pretty long state, so we didn’t reach Reno until 12:25 or so. We were planning on getting a really nice, inexpensive meal, since the casinos offer those to get people inside. To our dismay, however, we discovered that most of the really good deals didn’t start until 5:00. We walked around for a while and eventually decided to eat at the Circus Circus buffet. The food was not actually that great. They had an Asian section with wontons and egg rolls taht didn’t taste too terribly Asian; they had pasta salad and fried chicken, etc. Maybe my view was tempered by the fact that I started to get a bit of a stomach ache while I was eating. Dad didn’t eat very much, either; we decided that it was probably because we’d basically only been nibbling on food for the last day and a half, so our stomachs weren’t ready to eat so much yet.

We got back on Route 80 around 1:44 and entered California at 1:56. At this point, we were in the mountains again, and the scenery was quite amazing. We had about 160 miles left before we would arrive at my uncle’s house in Vallejo. Halfway there, we remembered that the Jelly Belly factory is an exit or two before his exit, so we thought we could stop there and pick up some Jelly Belly jellybeans for people back home.

Dad and I couldn’t quite remember exactly where it was, though, so we got off at a place that looked very familiar and drove around for about ten minutes. We couldn’t find it anywhere, so we gave up and got back on the expressway. Before the next exit, we saw a big sign for the factory, and our hopes went back up. We had just gotten off too early, so we could still make it before they closed – it was only 4:45. At that moment, however, the animated sign changed and the hours appeared. The factory was open until 4:30. Alas, we had just missed it.

We were going to be at Uncle Lee’s house soon, though, so missing the factory couldn’t get our spirits down. Within 20 minutes, we got off the expressway at Columbus Parkway, drove up the street and pulled in his driveway. We had made the trip that Google Maps said should take 40 hours in 39, even with the stops. That’s pretty good.

Well, that brings my blog up to last Friday, which is good enough for now. I’ll write more later about moving in and my first week of work. Until then!