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. Some very nerdy examples →

Today’s nerdtacular tip is brought to you by the letter π and the number e: if you telnet into port 80 of a webserver, you can write your HTTP requests by hand. I haven’t quite figured out how to use this to my advantage yet, but I’m pretty sure it’s there somewhere… I can now fill in my own custom values when submitting forms, without bothering to download and edit the source for the page with the form on it, if nothing else (though I’d still need to look at the source to see what parameters the form contains).
A quick example →

Today is Rachel’s birthday, and everyone is here for it! Her family drove in from Texas, and Robert, Amanda, and John came to visit too. Last night we all (12 of us) went to Buca’s to celebrate, and it was wonderful. That place has such a fun atmosphere. And the food! We had a large enough group that we could order a bunch of things, and everyone could have a little of everything. We were all stuffed by the end. Then, we went back to Case, and talked and stuff. Then, Rachel had cookie-cakes for us to eat (I don’t know what they’re really called). It was a cookie that was the size of a large pizza. We each got a slice, and some ice cream. Things were pretty great. We played some pool, and I got to show off my mad jumping skillz (ok, they’re not mad, and barely skillful, but I can consistently jump the ball now! Aiming is another problem altogether, though…).

For the record, I did get one screen window up before Robert arrived. He was quite pleased with it, and I think it’s really nice. Rachel’s sister is sleeping over in Rachel’s room, so Robert slept in here. We know that I like the room warmer than him, but wow! The AC was blowing the entire night, and I was freezing. So today I made the chance discovery that the thermostat that we’ve been playing with only controls half of the AC in the library, including the air vent by my bed, but not the one by Robert. This explains why he thinks it’s so hot while I’m shivering. We’ll use the other thermostat today, and see if things improve.

Well, I’m slowly but surely moving my stuff out of Kenny’s room and into mine. I’ve gotten all of the important stuff out, and I’m going through the unimportant bits now. It’ll be done by the time summer is over (at least it better be – Kenny wouldn’t like moving in and finding my stuff all over).