Last weekend, I pretty much stayed in the apartment on Saturday. On Sunday, however, I drove down 101 to Gilroy for the Gilroy Garlic Festival. A number of people around here had said that they would like to go, but I think I was the only one who actually went (which is a little disappointing…).
I didn’t really know what to expect, which kind of made it more fun. When I finally got to Gilroy (it was a little further down the express way than I realized), I soon discovered that my travels were only half over. I kept seeing signs for Garlic Festival Parking every few feet, so I constantly expected to be entering a parking lot in the next five minutes, but instead this continued for about half an hour. At least it gave me time to hear Ohio State’s very own “Hang On Sloopy” on the radio… in Spanish. I never even knew they did that. In any case, the Festival is incredibly far from the expressway. On the other hand, I don’t know whwere else they could have held it. There were probably 10,000 cars in that field. Who knew so many people loved garlic?
Once we parked, they had busses running that actually took us to the festival (probably a 15 minute walk in the sun otherwise). Inside, I saw lots of garlic related food. Garlic icecream, garlic chocolate, etc. The garlic icecream was free, but I didn’t get any because the line was so long for just one little bite. (Side note: I’ve been spending too much time with computers. I just spelled that “byte” and had to correct myself.) Probably the coolest part of the festival was the cooking show. I’ve never been in the audience for a cooking show, and what I’ve learned is that it’s very much like on TV. They even have mirrors situated at a 45 degree angle over the food so that the audience can look directly down into the pans and stuff. It’s really pretty neat. It’s even better than on TV, though, because in a live cooking show, you can smell the food. Since this was outdoors and at a garlic festival, we couldn’t smell that much, but whenever I caught a whiff, it was delicious.
That was pretty much my adventure for Sunday. Driving to and from Gilroy probably took and hour and a half each way, so I didn’t have much time for anything else. Since Sunday, I’ve had a decent week at work. Maybe not quite the best, but Matt and I ran a very good meeting yesterday for some of the managers and the CTO, so I am proud of that.
Yesterday I also took my car to get repaired and visited Google. The stuff with my car took a lot longer than it should have. I budgetted an hour and a half thinking that I was being cautious (since they had to pop a new part into place), but I was there for two hours! At least I got to make some phone calls and catch up with people. That’s always nice.
As I mentioned before, I also visited Google last night. One of the wonderful things about being in this area for the summer is that there are so many big companies in my field located here. Google had an event for interns in the bay area last night, where they tried to convince us that Google would be a great place to work. I can’t say I disagree. They give you free food (we had a great buffet, which I appreciated since I had to miss lunch because the car took so long), the people seem very smart, and the environment just feels fun in general. While I was eating, Michael Bolin, a full-time Google employee working on Google Calendar came over to my table and sat down. Funny enough, I recognized him because he was a TA for 6.170 when I took it. I think I learned a lot about life at Google and jobs in general while I was talking with him.
After dinner, there were three and a half formal speeches given by various employees of Google. The first to speak, with only half a speech was Alan Eustace, the VP of Engineering. He mainly said that Google is a great place to work. Yay, Google! Next was Peter Norvig, the author of AI: A Modern Approach. This was actually my textbook for 9.66. He’s a really smart AI researcher, and he talked about different approaches to AI and how they fit into the “AI In the Middle” philosophy at Google. What he meant by that is that Google is not trying to necessarily create a human-level AI that can create wonderful content. All they need to do is use AI and other techniques to connect the author of certain content to the people who wish to consume that content. As a side topic, he also talked a bit about the power of data and used the Google Language Tools (a translator) as an example. Amazingly, they’ve been able to make this great translator without the help of any human translators who know different pairs of languages; instead, they use statistical methods on pairs of equivilent text to identify probabilistic models for language translation.
The next speaker was Amit Singhal, one the the engineers in Search Quality and Ranking. He had a really great talk about the core Google product. He demonstrated example of Spam pages that pop up and the constant battle between the search engines and the spammers. It’s hard to summarize main points from his speech, but it was a lot of fun.
Finally, the last speaker was Bret Taylor, the product manager for Google Maps. Although he’s a product manager, he’s an incredibly technical guy, so I just figured he was an engineer. His speech was more focused on what it means to be an AJAX developer: a PhD in browser quirks. To do this, he used specific examples of creative hacks that the Google Maps team needed to develop in order to get their product working intuitively on nearly all browsers. I’ve been thinking more about this stuff recently, so I found this talk extremely interesting. I was particularly impressed by the vPages technique that they invented (textboxes and iFrames hidden from the use).
Anyway, it’s getting late now. Tomorrow’s Friday, so I need to get to bed so I can get up and get out of work in time to do stuff this weekend. Until next time!
