Like a kid in a candy store. I didn't sleep for a couple nights waiting for this to come in. Here are a few relevant pictures of my latest baby. I've left some out (like the new bike shoes I also got). My Bianchi Pista aside this is my first foray into cycling (anyone who knows me knows I come from a mountain biking background).

Unpacking the bike:















Kid in a candy store:









The beast:







The components aren't anything out of this world but nothing to be ashamed of; I clearly went all out on the frame and a little treat that you'll see at the end of the post:















Cycling clipless pedals are strange things. I'm going to have to get used to walking with the funky things on my shoes. Mountain biking shoes have the cleats completely sunken into the sole so you can get off and walk around. I also decided to go with the Speedplay pedals because my fix wheel has been giving my knees some trouble. I have been riding that one with my mountain bike Time ATAC XS pedals.








Finally the piece de resistance. After the frame this is where I put the bulk of the money on this spending spree:








Keep drooling ;)

Musings

I'm just sitting here waiting for a compile to finish... Yes it's 12:30 on a Monday night and I'm doing work. It almost feels like I'm at school except it doesn't. Hitting feature complete will actually make a significant difference for the company (this isn't just some silly assignment) and I'm definitely full of creative fervour whereas school usually kills every last ounce of creativity in me. Usually by this time in the term I'm beaten down to a pulp of a monotonous drone not sharing heartfelt laughs with co-workers because we're completely exhausted and the architectural diagrams we're drawing on white boards make an odd amount of sense but are littered with silly mistakes. By this time in the term I'm definitely never pondering the future of computer science and what breakthroughs we need to make to improve productivity by yet another order of magnitude just to turn around and discuss the notion of rationality with one of my friends and it's philosophical implications (he's an anthro major with surprisingly little background in communication). University out-right stifles my creativity and I get terrified at this point in every term that I've actually lost it (both my creativity and sanity). Of course shortly after the term ends and I get a little rest my mind slowly begins to wander and soon enough... BAM! a flood of new creative ideas.

Maybe it's just Waterloo taking it's toll on me. For as long as I can remember I've longed for a taste of a more liberal arts view of education; pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. I was still young and naive when I was shaped by movies like The Dead Poets Society. Oddly as discouraged as I am with how little Waterloo has brought me what I was looking for in a university education I feel compelled to make the best of my last 9 months there; to try and leave some sort of lasting impression and maybe improve the situation a little. That's one of those situations where I feel like I can't completely change things but I can do my part. I've also started reconsidering a masters for the first time in about a year. I may also just drop in on classes that I find interesting instead; even masters are starting to become mainstream now-a-days. Of course hoping to find liberal arts in an institution is at least slightly oxymoronic. This is especially true of trying to find that fulfilment in a more engineering oriented field; I'm able to find that fulfilment but through my own personal experience and my mind's meandering not through the structure of a school. I was always a loner and I suppose being an artsy engineer means I continue to be one in some ways even though I'm able to talk with so many people about so many different things.

Where is all this coming from? I just watched Art School Confidential with Alex and Tony. If anything it made me realize how much of an artsy guy I can be. I've watched lots of very different and just messed up films but this one I found to be quite normal. This was after Alex made a mention about how strange the movie was. I found it odd at first but then thought it made perfect sense for an engineer. For me though it resonated perfectly; the issues are those that I deal with every day. How do I lay out this code so the glyphs of type ebb and flow with meaning and visual grace? How do I word functions and variables so they have an economy of style worthy of E. B. White? How do I lay out, name, and refactor the methods so that any one reads with the grace of a Shakespearean sonnet? How do I make the components and modules come together echoing the minimalist yet passionate architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright or Norman Jaffe. Clearly I'm no ordinary software engineer.

The movie brought back an emotion I had felt while at a play at the Perimeter Institute (Picaso at the Lapin a Gilles played as part of the Einstein festival). The play would have meant much less had it not been for another talk I heard earlier that week as part of the same festival comparing the similarities between Einstein and Picaso and their quest to invent the 20th century. In some ways I feel like I'm at that point right now... I'm poised to invent the 21st century. I'm not saying that in a pompous or pretentious way. If anything I'm setting myself up for failure and in the grand scheme of things it won't matter and 100 years from now no one will even know. But I'm going to try!

So I guess that begs the question... what is my greatest fear? I suppose it's not having enough time to do everything that I feel I need to do; not having enough time to explore all the ideas I get. I am coming to the realization that unless I can figure out how to improve the speed of programming by an order of magnitude I may never be a great enough hacker to get around to trying everything I would like to try. I may just have to enlist the help of a code monkey :p

Quickly GIR ride the pig

I've now been up for 51 straight hours. It's 1:00AM and despite me being a morning person I'm somehow barely tired. This has me both worried and excited.

The first 38 of those 51 hours were spent coding and getting ready for the hard code freeze of the project I've been working on for 9 months now at VMware. We are finally getting ready to ship a Friends and Family preview release (or F&F as we affectionately call it internally) of the Intel Mac version of our virtualization platform.

I'm technically still an intern but I've worked for 4 of the 9 months on this project as a contractor while at school, I've conducted interviews and played a role in growing the core team working on the project, and have had the chance to tackle implementing an application framework, on which Cocoa apps can be built, that abstracts many of the rich features of VMware's virtualization platform. Not bad for some 22 year old guy still working away at a bachelor's degree.

OK so I suppose I'm boasting a little but in all honesty I probably don't boast enough some times. Sure, the application framework is built on the shoulders of giants; many of the rich featured and well engineered libraries available as part of the VMware platform and inspired by design patterns in Cocoa and software engineering tactics I've picked up in class and through self interest.

VMware's been an awesome place for me to really grow in all sorts of directions with just enough of a safety net to make me feel comfortable (many probably wouldn't think there is a safety net at all).

The engineers are first class and all amazingly bright yet not socially challenged (and I don't mean that as an insult). I've been able to make challenging steps in spotting new talent with positive feedback. Last winter I pointed out to my manager that there was someone in the company that wold make a great addition to the team; Ben joined us shortly after and has been an invaluable asset to the project and to my development as a L33t hax0r. Later this summer I happened to be around to an interview of a prospective candidate and although the comments were positive all around it was nice to see that others with much more experience shared my opinion; Vinay has completely blown me away in his first week of work and could definitely have sold himself even more during his interview.

I've also had the unique chance to quench my dual personalities and play the role of both designer and engineer. There are very few companies where this is even possible. At some time during the day I can be sketching on a pad of paper, arguing the interaction design and cognitive model of a potential user and a few hours later I can be looking at tuning OpenGL code (though with a bitter sweet sentiment I must say that Ben has been hacking away at that part of the code lately). You get the point though.

This product is going to absolutely rock! And, knock on wood, it will be the first product I've ever worked on that will actually ship.

So as Régis would say: "This pig must fly!"
Not that our software is bloated or anything like that :)

Joining in on the lifestyle

So I just got back from supper with Antonio, one of my house mates who graduated from waterloo this summer. We had taken 789 together this summer and he is now working full time on the same team I will be working with. He had referred my resumé and long story short here I am. I arrived at the house late afternoon and connected to the net to find an email from him wondering when I would be in, I told him I had just arrived and he told me he'd show me around a little and we could go grab supper when he got home from work.

We ended up waking around downtown Palo Alto a little a went for supper at this small vegan restaurant. As we were finishing up eating I sat back and sipped on this black bean drink I wanted to try (think of a warm drink that tastes a little like chi-latté with black bean purée in it) and we were discussing the future of some tech companies in the area and speculating on the future of technology. I thought to myself wow, I'm actually in Silicon Valley. It was just one of those moments that seems so stereo-typically Californian.

Crazy Highway patrol

The highway patrol is decidedly crazier around these parts. Just as I was leaving the airport going peacefully along 101 (I've been told only people from San Francisco call it THE 101 and that other people call it 101) coming on the opposite side of the highway was a patrol car. What really struck me was that this patrol car was pacing traffic (very successfully I might add) by slaloming across the 4 lanes. And I'm not talking about your sunday slalom across a four lane highway, oh no, this patrol car was probably doing close to 60 and going from side to side in about 3 seconds.

Leaving on a jet plane

So this is the wonderful winter wonderland that I get to leave behind for 4 months. After much effort and deliberation I have finally decided what comes with me and what I must part with for 4 months. It's too bad that I lost some of my pictures because I had a few shots of my grandmother's basement taken over by everything I brought back from Waterloo.

The plane ride was actually much smoother than the entire check in experience. Air Canada has apparently put in place a new policy that all passengers must now take part in their electronic check in system (a.k.a. infuriating check in systems of mental death). Bill likes to say that hell for a user interface designer would be to use an ATM for eternity. I think I now disagree. It used to be that you had the option to use the automated systems (oh so attractive and nicely arranged in little clusters in front of the checkin lines) or go directly to a clerk at one of the check in counters. In what must be a cost cutting move they have reduced the number of clerks and force you to check in electronically before you can go through the maze to get the the counters.

So I can't figure out how to use this thing for the life of me. The sessions time out on you before you have time to dig out the information that the system needs. To make matters worse VMware had booked my travel so the ticket was in my name but not the payment confirmation. There is also only 1 person to help the 50 or so people trying to figure out what to do with these machines, which I'm convinced can't be understood. Rather if you get these things to work it's because you touched the screen in just the right random sequence for that session.

I tried explaining to to the person that was helping everyone that I hadn't purchase the ticket. He didn't seem to understand... no matter he says if the system can't find your ticket by name just put in a credit card where the last name matches the last name on the plane ticket. HUH?!? If the system can't find the ticket by confirmation number, first name or last name how on earth is it going to find my ticket using a credit card number that it has no idea exists. Oh and I should mention that when you choose the enter other number feature you can only enter 8 characters. Now look at your credit card. The guy had already walked away helping all of the other helpless people. For some reason that is beyond me I still tried with my credit card... first eight digits, last eight, last five. OK I give up let's try to get to a real person. I get to the entry of the maze (read: gauntlet) to find an Air Canada employee standing there hands on waist. Her job... not to provide extra help to people needing assistance with the system, NO, to prevent people from entering the maze and getting to a real person if they don't have a receipt of their electronic checkin, which by the way the checkin clerk uses to bring up your itinerary and print out and actual ticket. ARG!

OK, enough venting about Air Canada. I finally made it through and after paying a hefting overweight charge I was crossing customs without a problem. I think I'll leave out most of the story about the 2 parents and their 2 brats for boys on the plane. The parents had no control what soever (the dad even less) I think the climax was about when one of the boys, no older than 5, started hitting the dad in the face for some reason or another to which the dad responded with an "ow could you not do that please" and the kid just continued. That about just had me break out laughing. I can only imagine if I had tried something similar with my parents.

Blit or get off the frame buffer

So it's been a week and a few days since I got to sunny California. I've kept pretty busy exploring my new surroundings, my first week of work, and I've been to the city twice so far (That's San Francisco for all you non local folk). I figured it was about time I update this blog with my adventures so far.

Unfortunately I don't have that many pictures. I had taken a few good ones back home leaving home packing and getting ready to leave and when I arrived but I lost those (read over-wrote the few pictures I had in iPhoto when I migrated my user account back to my old laptop). Leave it to the computer science student!

So the next few posts will cover the last week of adventures without to many pictures but I promise more pictures will be coming in later posts. I'm also not going to use proper blog form and set the date of this post in the past since I want the new entries to appear on top but I also want them to have proper dates since this provides a nice reference for me later on. This post actually went up on Jan 13th

Pre departure check

Well my flight is tomorrow morning and I'm all packed (well for the most part). I have my blog set up, this being the first post, and my flikr account set up, awaiting some pictures.

I'll try to keep this updated frequently and I've made a promise to myself to add a new posting at least once a week. All the pictures posted in this blog will be linked from flikr so anyone can leave comments on the blog entries and also view te pictures within flikr and tag and or comment on the individual shots; somewhat of a social software experiment at the same time.

This blog has an RSS feed to keep everyone updated. I know that at least a few people that will be following this blog won't have a clue what RSS is (even though I've explained it to a few people already *cough* mom *cough*) so click on the link and become techno-linguistically literate. Safari and Firefox will automatically allow you to track RSS feeds and if you are still using internet explorer then shame on you and go get Firefox . If you are on OS X and want to follow several RSS feeds I strongly suggest NetNewsWire.


enjoy,

shawn