MPD

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!

Today was an interesting day at work. Matt and I spent some time talking to Rob in the morning – bringing him up to date on our progress, etc. Apparently, he had a meeting at 1:00 to discuss the possible requirements for the Q1 news program. After our talk, though, Rob decided that it would probably be best just to have Matt and me there.

The meeting turned out to be a conference call with a guy in Eagan, which is really strange. I don’t particularly like conference calls, since I like being able to draw diagrams and see the people with whom I am talking. I actually left feeling like the meeting went very poorly, especially for me, since I didn’t know what to say; everyone had completely different ideas about the project and I didn’t know what everyone was trying to get out of the conference. Matt seemed to do ok, though, and afterward he typed up a document clearly explaining our position and opinions and sent it to everyone who was at the discussion. I think that I could learn from his example in this case, because taking the initiative to write this document has really cemented our ideas as the company’s vision for the project.

That was about it for the exciting part of work. The rest of the day, Matt and I worked on implementing adding tf-idf to our vector space catagorizer. Sadly, after we spent all that effort on it, tf-idf actually ended up hurting our performance, so we’ve decided not to use it. At least we’ve learned that much.

Finally, after work, I was really excited to visit with Nicola again. She is back in town visiting her family this week because her uncle is also here from the Phillipines. She and I met down at Santana Row at about 6:20. There was a live Salsa/Meringue band playing from 6-9, which is why we thought it would be fun to meet there. She and I ate dinner at Pasta Pomodoro – not too expensive and really good food, so it was a great deal. After dinner (about 8:00), we met up with a friend of hers from high school back by the band.

I enjoyed meeting Nicola’s friend; I feel that I understand better where Nicola comes from, plus I just like hanging out with new, fun people in general. We listened and talked for an hour, when the band was done for the night, then we went to a French pastry shop and ate dessert outside while talking for another hour and a half. Our conversation covered everything from religion (Nicola and her friend went to a Roman Catholic, all-girl high school) to bananas (apparently there’s a guy at UC San Diego that has never eaten one in his life). This was a great change of pace from constantly thinking about work.

Moreover, the weather was absolutely perfect at about 10:00; The air had cooled down to 75 or so, and the sky was very clear. I really enjoy that type of atmosphere; it just makes me feel happy and relaxed. All in all, I had a great night, and I hope Nicola and her friend did, too.

All summer, I’ve been on an MIT email list for interns in the bay area this summer. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to do anything with them, because the first few weekends were moving in, the next four I had visitors, and then I was out of town for a while last week. Thankfully, though, I had my first event to go to a bay area intern event yesterday.

After the British Open, I headed down to San Jose State to pick up some people and take them up to Dolores Park for the San Francisco Symphony concert. We were planning on having a picnic lunch while escaping the
heat here in San Jose (at one point this weekend, my car thermometer read 117). San Francisco, as usual, was nice and chilly – only 96 in the park.

Linda and her parents brought most of the food, which we ate while all trying to huddle underneath one small tree for shade. Linda, Dmitry, Helen, and Roshni sat on a blanket. Aston and Aaron sat on the cooler. I was lucky enough to be sitting in a folding chair that I had in my trunk.

After we had been there for about an hour and a half, the concert started. They played a Tchiakovsky Piano Concerto, the Candide overture and suite by Bernstein, the 1812 Overture, and one other piece of which I can’t remember the name. I’ve heard the 1812 Overture too many times, so my favorite had to be the piano concerto.

After the concert, we drove back to San Jose, grabbed dinner at a nearby taqueria, then went to Redwood City to go gokart racing. I hadn’t ever been gokart racing with gokarts that powerful before, so it was kind of fun. Sadly, my knees were a little too long, so they kept hitting the sides of the car and getting in the way of my steering. I ended up only doing ten laps before calling it quits. While there, we also played bumperboats. Not as fun as you might imagine, since they were very slow…

By the time I arrived back at the apartment last night, it was nearly 1:00. Needless to say, I was exhausted at work all day; I think Matt was probably laughing at me because I was so out of it.

I had a good time in Minnesota this week. It was really nice of Thomson (and Ken) to fly us out there to meet all the new MIT interns and learn about opportunities from the VPs and managers.

Tuesday morning, Matt and I caught our plane at the San Jose airport. It was good that the airport is so much closer than San Francisco, but we still estimated that it would only take us half as long to get there as it actually did. Well, we arrived at the airport entrance exactly on time, but we had no idea that the long-term parking would be another 10-15 minute drive down a seemingly never-ending driveway. Plus, after we parked, we needed to catch the bus back, which was just as long.

Anyway, we made it there with plenty of time, so we were ok. We had a 1.5 hour flight to Pheonix, an hour layover, and a 3.5 hour flight to Minneapolis, so we arrived at the hotel at 6:00 Central Time. This was the exact time that Todd was supposed to pick us up for dinner, so we were a little late.

On Tuesday, we had dinner at the Bonfire Grill with Todd, Neil (VP of Content), Michelle (another intern from last year who is working in DC this summer), and Rachel (F/ASIP Coordinator from MIT). I had walleye and steak.

Afterwards, Todd took us back to the hotel where we tried to get to sleep so that we would be able to get up in the morning. Getting up at 7:00 is like 5:00 here, so it was tough. Michelle had to call me at 7:40 so I could get out of bed.

Once we got to Thomson on Wednesday, my day was packed. The three of us first met with Bill, an intern who is considering an internship at another Thomson location next summer. Bill is going into his sophomore year at MIT, and he’s originally from the Twin Cities area.

Next, I met with the VP of CRM/eCommerce, Elizabeth. She and I talked about what I’m working on this summer and how it’s possible to move between areas in Thomson and to keep getting exciting, challenging projects. She herself has worked at many companies, but has spent more time at Thomson West than anywhere else because it’s constantly engaging.

After Elizabeth, I met with Cary, VP of Applications Technology. We talked a lot about the tech industry in general and he told me about how Thomson recognizes people who excel and work hard, which is how he became the youngest VP in Thomson history. Another thing I thought was interesting about Cary is that even though he hasn’t written code for the company in almost ten years, he still does little projects in his spare time to keep abreast of new developments and just because he enjoys it so much.

Cary’s office is right next to where I worked last summer, so I took a few minutes to visit some of my previous coworkers. They said that my code is still there and has been a foundation for more work, which makes me feel good. They also told me about a reorganization that’s going on right now, so some of the team leads and managers that I worked under last summer now have slightly different jobs.

Next was lunch with Michelle and Matt, and I had the chance to catch up with Kevin, one of the guys that I went running with during lunch last year. He says he hasn’t kept it up as much, but Brian and Kurt are still going strong.

In the afternoon, Matt and I had a meeting with the VP of FindLaw that we set up. He was really friendly, and I appreciated that he made time for us in his schedule at the last minute. We were able to ask him about what he would like to see from our project and what the benefit to the company would be. This was a very enlightening half hour.

Finally, I met with Ken. We talked about Silicon Valley for a while – he lived here, so he had all sorts of suggestions of things that I should check out before I go back to school. There were a lot, so I don’t know if I’ll get to all of them, but I’m going to try. Also, this is the meeting in which we talked more specifically about possibly working for Thomson next year, but since I haven’t made up my mind yet, I don’t think I can write about it on this blog. I will say that I’m definitely considering it, since they’ve shown that they’re willing to work hard to help me find a job that I can be really excited about.

Finally, I went back to Todd’s office and met Sam, another intern at Thomson this year. Todd, Sam, Bill and I talked about a lot of stuff, from photography (Todd and Sam are really into it and have taken some beautiful photos) to DDR and AJAX. We also picked up our tickets for Valley Fair from Todd before Matt finished his meeting with Ken.

Bill drove Matt and I back to our hotel to get ready for the amusement park, then all four of us – Bill, Sam, Matt, and I – hopped in Bill’s car and took off. We ended up getting a little lost on the way, but that was alright, since it was sprinkling and we all had a good time talking with each other. By the time we found our way there, it had stopped raining, but absolutely no one was left in the park. So, as it turned out, we could go on any ride we wanted without ever waiting in line. We did everything in the park at least once, and many of them two or three times. I’ve never felt sick after an amusement park before, but I was feeling a little queasy on the ride home after so many rides in quick succession. It was a great night.

Thursday morning, we met with Rachel again to tell her about how our summers were going and our impressions of Thomson as a place for MIT students to intern. This meeting went well, and I hope she got a lot out of it. After that, I talked to a friend of mine who started full time last summer and worked with me a lot while I was interning there. Joe has been there a year now, so I wanted to see how everything was going. He’s been working hard and doing really well, so I think that’s a good sign that Thomson recognizes that drive even in first year employees. Also, outside of work, he bought a house, so we talked about his experiences with home ownership for a while as well.

Thursday afternoon, Thomson took all the MIT interns and many of the managers to see a Twins game from their box. I’m not such a big baseball fan, so I spent most of it talking to people. I met Taja, Jose, and Jordan (the other three MIT interns that weren’t at Valley Fair), and I spent some more time talking to Elizabeth and other older people. I enjoyed myself (and I enjoyed the food…).

Finally, Ken drove us back to his country club for one last dinner in Minnesota. Just like last year, the food and service were wonderful. The conversation, too, was really interesting, and I was impressed at how well I could follow what people were saying around the whole table. Sometimes with ten people, the table ends up splitting into multiple sections that each can only follow their own conversation.

We flew back to San Jose on Friday and discovered that it was Hot. Of course, the first thing Matt and I did was run out to the pool for a swim. This was the first time I had gone swimming in my pool (I’ve been swimming this summer, just not in the pool here), and it felt really nice. Next we went out for dinner at a Thai restaurant. The calamari was the best I’ve ever had; it was so tender that it almost tasted like lightly fried white fish instead of calamari. For dinner, I decided to go with the traditional Pad Thai, since I haven’t had it for a while. It was good, but I think now that I’ve had my fill, I’ll get something with peanut sauce next time.

After dinner, Matt and I were both pretty tired, so we just came back to the apartment. He went right to sleep (to get up early this morning for the British Open, of course), and I worked on the computer for a little while. I uploaded a few more photos and added some features to my summer map, so check it out if you wish.

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…