Driss-A-Blog

I'm staying in an ExecuStay in Mountain View, about a ten minute drive to campus. I have one of the bedrooms, so I feel right at home. There's a cable modem that's wickedly fast, and a Google beanbag chair in the corner of the living room. I'm pretty settled in, because I'm going to be here for a month, then a week respite back in NYC, and then here for another month. Some of that time is for training, but the rest of it is mostly to bond with the Mac team since they're mostly here in CA, and Google doesn't want me to be lonely when I go back to NY.

What's it like at Google? It's still incredibly surreal. “Oh, I work at a small dot-com.” With pervasive WiFi across dozens of buildings. Or ice cream bars in the cafeteria. (Or Vernors, which apparently is imported from Michigan as a specialty drink.) Basically, take almost any stereotype of what a dot-com has for its employees, and you'd be sure to find it.

And they slather attention on their engineers. If I asked for an elephant, and I could give a halfway-decent answer as to why I wanted one, I'd bet they would have one in my cube by the next morning. Actually, I know they would. Which is a bit scary.

The people are great. Alex and I are already teasing each other, and Maf and I are commiserating about how three letter email addresses @google.com get massively spammed. I've met people during training whose project I can't join (there's only one of me to go around) but with whom I'm keeping in touch just because they're going to be working on projects (or starting them (Hi M!)) that are just so incredibly cool.

And the technology? There's so much in here that just stuns me. Really amazing stuff that maybe someday will make it to the outside world.

Meanwhile, I'm running my oven through self-cleaning mode. Hopefully now I can make some hot food...