A Strange Confluence
This evening, I had dinner with 5 other Googlers at a wonderful Indian restaurant. We all work on separate projects, have no directly work-related interaction, and each of us met at least 2 of the others just this evening. However, we had a surprising amount in common:
- 3 work at the Irvine office (the other 3 work in Santa Monica)
- 3 were born in the eastern hemisphere
- 3 have cooked in a tandoori oven (only one of which can claim any semblance of Indian heritage/past)
- 3 have lived in Boulder, Colorado
- 3 have bumped into the same Romanian dude up in the Mountain View office (1000+ employees), even though none of us have been there for more than a week at a time
- 3 were Mudders (classes of ’85, ’99, and ’06, respectively)
All of this came up in normal conversation, without purposely trying to find weird stuff we have in common. How cool is that!?
Another interesting tidbit from tonight: “tikka masala” means “spiced patty,” and is typically a vegetarian dish. The chicken variety, despite its popularity, is unlike any traditional tikka masala, and was invented less than 50 years ago.
And the other three guys? Yeah, they’ve never done anything fun. :-D
(Insert pondering query about social networks…)
OCaml: writing an Othello player, which I’m about to start training using Temporal Difference Learning. Class project, and seemed like an excuse to pick up more ocaml syntax and whatnot. Turned out pretty well; there are some weird syntactic quirks for making it behave like an imperative language, but all in all, pretty nice. Objects, etc. all work as expected, and it’s pretty fast, too. (Not quite as fast as C, but I haven’t done any profiling whatsoever just yet, so we’ll see if I can catch up)
I wonder if any of the others have a livejournal?
That was a fun dinner, though. We should make a road trip down to Irvine sometime and do it again, on their turf!