A brief update

Most people can definitively trace at least one or two traits directly back to one of their parents. In my case I can definitely lay the blame for two at the feet of my father:

1. I know the rules of cricket inside out;


2. Walking right across town doesn't faze me in the slightest.

The first isn't really important right now (unless you need to know the specifics of the leg before wicket rule STAT), while the second is the result of a father who likes to walk. A lot. In fact many of my childhood holidays consisted of a series of walks across various British cities, often culled from the pages of an impressively large (and impressively modular) Reader's Digest walkers guide... to British cities.

Thus, for the past two days I eschewed the use of my rental car and went wandering. Yesterday (that's Sunday) I wandered around Mountain View itself and today I took a train to San Francisco and did the same thing there. I want to tell you about it. I plan to tell you about it. SOme of it is actually worth telling you about. But I want to throw some of the pictures I took into the mix, and right now I don't have a good way of doing that. The Google provided free WiFi which covers the entire of Mountain View is very useful indeed, but it's not super fast and thus not ideal for uploading a bunch of pictures.

Tomorrow I'm heading into the office for day one of my Google training (I'm told there's some awesome Kool-Aid, so I'm looking forward to trying that) and I think I may have access to a slightly better connection there (just a hunch), so I'll see what I can do.

Fourteen Days in the Valley

I can see the mountains, but I suppose that's only to be expected. I am in Mountain View, after all.

As of today, I'm in Silicon Valley for my "noogler training," something which most companies would just refer to as an induction. At Google, though, there's a bit more too it than that. There are a lot of tools and technologies to to learn, because so much of what we use is built in house, and there is a lot of culture to adapt to, because most companies don't function the way google functions. Hence, all new hires get shipped over to the mothership, partly to centralise all of this learning, and partly (I suspect) because the Googleplex is really, really cool. I've been told I must try all of the cafes and slides.

The flight over was truly awful. It felt like crossing the Atlantic in the jet plane equivalent of a council tower block. My entertainment system was broken, so I had to relay on what I had with me. Fortunately, I had prepared for this eventuality and loaded my iPad up with some films and TV shows, and the iPad has a much nicer screen, anyway. What I wasn't prepared for, though, was how shit the cabin crew were going to be. I must have pushed the call button thirty times during the flight and they did not respond once. I always had to flag someone down or walk to the galley. Before you ask: it did occur to me that maybe my call button was malfunctioning, but no the crew confirmed that it was working. Perhaps, then, they were busy? Some of the time yes, I'm sure, but I also watched them standing around chatting as I pushed the button. Not cool, British Airways, not cool.

Speaking of happier things, I arrived in San Francisco and proceeded to the hire car stan to be greeted with a huge queue. I don't want to oversell how long the queue was, but some of these people had tents. A moment realisation dawned, though: since I work for Google I automatically have Hertz #1 Gold status, so I walked straight passed that queue to the garage... and proceeded to wait in a shorter queue. Still, I call that a win.

As of right now I'm sitting in my very pleasant hotel room trying to decide what to do for a couple of hours before I can legitimately go to sleep. Aside from getting dinner, of course. That's the next problem. I'm probably a little strung out right now, so if this post reads a little incoherent, let's just go ahead and assume that's the reason why, m'kay?

Tomorrow I'm going to go for a bit of an explore. I'll let you know if I find anything exciting. Stay classy.

What's the Downside?

I'm reading a Peter F Hamilton book right now. His work isn't perfect, but I like it. He achieves a fairly staggering level of scale, whilst corralling a considerable number of characters who are worth your time* and develop naturally, if exceptionally. His books are, however, frikkin' gigantic. This one is 725 pages long, and is shorter than a lot of his other work. It's not ideal for reading on journeys, and you wouldn't want to pack more than one of them for a long trip. It's also not like PFH is the only long winded author I read. See also Robyn Hobb, Neal Stephenson and Brandon Sanderson. I don't only read huge Sci-Fi/Fantasy epics, but I do often read them.

Additionally, I have stacks and stacks of books, even taking into account that I divested myself of a lot before leaving Edinburgh. When I move into my new flat**, I'm not sure I'm going to have space for them. If I could stop that collection growing too much, that would be ideal, but I have no plans to stop reading or buying new reading material.

On the surface, to me at least, the ideal solution to this would be a kindle (or, I suppose, some other eBook reader). All of a sudden, Pandora's Star is now the same Size as Cat's Cradle. Crytonomicon is the same size as Memoirs of a Geisha. Plus, it doesn't matter how far I'm traveling or how little space I have, i can basically pack as many books as I'd like. Likewise, the book collections would not (physically) expand in size.

But what about the books I have already? Do I just keep them, rammed onto the shelf space I have? Do I instead charity shop*** them? Do I replace / duplicate some or all of them with the eBook version? There's no ideal solution here.

The publisher is never going to give you the eBook just because because you own the paper copy, and likewise I suspect the majority of people of aren't going to want to pay full price for an eBook they already own. Plus, books are not quite so easy to format shift as CDs.

So, here's what I propose: you take your book to a shop and pay them a nominal fee (say £1). They then give you the eBook version of your book, in the format of your choice. The book itself gets recycled. The shop and the publisher then split both the cash and the revenue from the recycling. You've format shifted your book, with only a small outlay. The publisher has benefited from this transaction. No new copies of the book have been magicked into existence (also good for the publisher). Lastly, raw material for recycled paper has been obtained. What's the downside?

* Well, he  does now, anyway. Much as I loved the Night's Dawn trilogy, Joshua was way more interesting than either the sum or the product of the rest of the characters.

** Which is in Clapham, for those of you who are playing at home. The Richmond flat was gorgeous, but size / price ratio was just too small.

*** I see no reason not to use that as a verb.

Relocation Relocation Relocation

As part of my pretty sweet relocation package from Google, I have the help of a "flat search consultant". If you've ever watched Location Location Location or A Place in the Sun, you'll more or less know what this is. If not: why not?

I have a couple of friends in the Kingston area (and several others in South London as a whole), and now work in Victoria, so my plan was quite scientific: throw darts at a map.

Not really. I basically drew a line between between these two areas and declared that I wanted to live somewhere along it. Furthermore, this place should neither be shit, not overlay expensive. In particular I thought Richmond looked like a very cool place to live, and seemed to be in reach of many of the places I wanted to go. That said, it has the potential to be a bit of a slog into the centre, and unfortunately it's quite expensive. Thus, my flat search consultant wanted me to look at a couple of other places.

We started in Richmond and straight away viewed a really nice flat, which set the bar a little high. It already had offers, and thus I would have make a decision fast if I was interested. This is generally the case with rentals in London at the moment, though this one had a particularly short fuse. I came very close to putting in an offer, but n the end came to the conclusion that it was too small.

Next we went and had a look at the outside of a flat the agent wasn't able to show us, to get an idea of the area. I'll come back to this one. We also viewed a flat in a quite cool art deco development, which was a bit crap on the inside. Single glazing and on a main road? I think not...

After this we checked out a slightly dingy  flat which was essentially in the landlord's basement. I don't, quite frankly, want to feel quite that much like a tenant. This was the last spot in Richmond, so it was on to Clapham, via a fairly spectacular drive through Richmond Park.

The first flat in Clapham was amazing. Really big, nicely finished and in a decent area, if a little ways off the main drag. This was probably my favourite from the entire day. I'm not sure how I feel about the location. Transport wise it's very cool, and you can get just about anywhere from it, but... I don't know. You know?

Next we viewed a couple of really nice new builds in an utterly unspectacular area of Battersea. Nice price (for London!), nice size, nice big garden (in one case), nice finish (aside from the one wonky switch in one of the kitchens, so that flat was out). But... right on a busy main road, in part of Battersea which seems to mostly be a place people pass through when going to other places? No. Well... probably not.

Lastly was had a look at a mansion flat in a gorgeous building... but that's about all it had going for it. If you gutted it, it could become something spectacular, but work would be required.

On the whole, non of the flats I saw were utterly terrible, and all of them will get rented. This is definitely a seller's market. We're going to go back to the Richmond flat we couldn't see today, because the pictures look great, then it'll be a straight choice between it and the Clapham flat. Perhaps there'll also be a couple more viewings. We'll see. Tomorrow, a choice must be made, otherwise I have nowhere to live after I get back from Mountain View. No pressure!

In other news, I stopped by the office to finish of a last bit of admin, and then attend my first ever Google meeting, which also included participants from Mountain View and Dublin. I'm starting to understanding things more, which is good, because I have an absolute ton of stuff to learn. I also briefly petted a very cute West Island terrier, which either belongs to one of my colleagues, or IS one of my colleagues.

Day One

This is going to be short. Suffice to say: almost everything you've heard about working for Google is true. That being the case, there is no slide in my office. I'm told they have them in Mountain View and Zurich, however, and I'll apparently be visiting both this year (Mountain View next week!).

The food / restaurants / kitchens are awesome in a "we've thought of everything you need" kind of way. The people are really nice, but also intimidatingly smart. For a tech firm, a lot of them are girls as well, which makes for a more balanced working environment.

On the whole it was a good first day, though mostly consisting of administration. I'm itching to get into the code!

s/@seebyte\.com/@google\.com/g

Yes. That's right. I did it. I used a sed expression as post title.

I've been very quiet as of late, though in my defence I've been very busy for a few months. In the middle of that I had a potentially life changing decision to make, and then I was dealing with the ramifications of the choice I made.

As you may have gathered from the post title (even if it mostly looks like crazy speak to you), the choice was whether I should accept a job at Google or not. Believe it or not, it was a choice, and a fairly hard one. There are various reasons for this. I'm not going to go into all of them, though I will go into some, but let's start with a little bit of background.

It started with the receipt of a LinkedIn message with the subject "Hello from Google." and ended with me standing in a car park being offered a very good job. Regarding what happened in between: the Google interview process is lengthy and pretty hardcore. Reputedly the most hardcore in the entire of the tech industry. But having a gruelling four and a half hour viva a little over a week before your main interview can make it seem like a walk in the park, albeit a mentally tiring one.

So then I was left with a choice. I could stay at my good job at a small but growing company with a lot of potential, at which I knew I had some prospects. I'd still be working in an industry which I know, and which to some extent knows me. I'd stay in a city I love (and have loved since the moment I set eyes upon it ten years ago), surrounded by a wonderful group of friends.

Alternatively I could accept an incredible opportunity to work at one of the most exciting companies in the world, which is famous for treating it's employees incredibly well, and has projects which excite me more than I can adequately express in words. But I'd be changing industries and I good portion of my existing knowledge might be useless (or more useless, as the case may be). I'd have to move to London, a city I like but don't know that well, and feel slightly intimidated by. As luck would have it, though, I do have a group of close friends living in London, who are also awesome.

It was a very hard choice, and it came down to a couple of things:

• A former colleague put it to me that if I turned this offer down I'd hate myself for it every time I had a bad day (or spent a year putting my life on hold for a field trip which was consistently two weeks away from happening);


• Another colleague suggested that I would be swallowed up by Google. A tiny cog in a huge machine. Which is potentially true... and a little scary. But... the other analogy people use here is "small fish in a big pond." There's a distinction to be made: fish grow, cogs don't. Unless you put yourself in a bigger pond, you'll never find out if you have the potential to get any bigger.


• It would be nice to not work for the oil companies and the military. Not necessarily because either party is evil, but because of the shear amount of red tape involved.


• I'd been feeling as though I'd been stuck in a rut for a while, and really wanted to shake things up somehow.


• It's frickin' GOOGLE!

So. Here I am. In London. Staying in wicked temporary accommodation. Tomorrow is my first day at my shiny new Google job, and right now I should really go to bed!

PS More updates coming soon I swear, though it may be a month before I can get back to my Clockwork Aphid project, for logistical reasons.