Interesting Stuff

I realize it’s old news at this point, but President Bush is still out of touch with the world.

This evening after work, Dustin, Josh, Caitlin, Dave, Dominic, Nick, Nick’s boyfriend whose name I never caught, and I went out to dinner at Houston’s. We then walked around the Third Street Promenade for a bit, looked at the Puzzle Zoo (a game store), got some gelato, and went back to Google. Why would we go back to work at 9:00 in the evening on a Friday, you ask? On the second floor, we have a lounge complete with pool table, ping-pong, foosball, 2 XBox 360’s, a GameCube, a PS2, an Atari, and probably some other video game systems (I should point out that the video game systems are all owned by individual Googlers who have permanently lent their stuff to the lounge; I don’t think even Google would buy that stuff for its employees). This is enough entertainment to keep all of us, along with several other people who stopped in, busy for the whole night. I left work around 1:15 AM, and there were still 4 people playing foosball when I left. I still can’t believe how lucky I am to be working at such a great company, with such fantastic benefits and perqs.

One of the coolest parts of the evening was how nerdy everyone was, but at the same time how intelligent and comfortable they were with their nerdiness.

• The Puzzle Zoo had a display of PixelBlocks in the window, and the first comment anyone had about them was that they’re really voxels, not pixels! This continued into a discussion of various games adapted to unusual numbers of dimensions: 3-D Minesweeper, 1-D Tetris (which really is as easy as it sounds), 4-D Rubik’s Cubes, 3-player versions of Nim, etc.
• At dinner we had a surprisingly long conversation about minor characters from various different Star Trek shows, and their interactions with the scriptwriters. Jeffrey would have loved it. I knew next to nothing about the subject, but it was amazing to see how everyone could talk about it in a manner similar to how I imagine “normal” people discuss previous seasons of American Idol. Everyone seemed to know at least some of the minor characters, their backstories, and the actors who played them. For instance, did you know that in Season 1 of TNG there was a woman named Natasha Yar who slept with Data? The character was killed off because the actress wasn’t satisfied with the size of her part and threatened to quit, but the same actress came back in later seasons to play the sister of the original character.
• We discussed how this year is the first year you can really buy LED Christmas lights, and this year is the only one where they’ll be really neat, since by next year everyone will have them. I look forward to the days when LEDs will light our buildings, but it was pointed out that we’ll need better smoothing circuits in the rectifiers than the ones in the Christmas lights on Third Street, or else all the lights will flicker like flourescent tubes, and annoy everyone after a while.
• Dave reminisced about the olden days, when a good form of data storage was to send your data over your modem and record the sounds it emitted on your cassette player, which I thought was a pretty clever idea.

It was a really cool evening.