I'm feeling very balanced at the moment. Not "balanced" the sense that I'm mentally at ease and in command of my day to day existence. No, more "balanced" in that this week has seen an equal share of very good and very bad events ( Read more... )

This evening, I'm reminded of the immortal words of Kelsey Grammer in "Down Periscope" when he said, "My fish are in the water" (i.e. his torpedos are already streaking their way towards Norfolk in a simulated sub battle; it's amazing that this movie never caught fire with the viewing public). With the exception of the MIT application (where the ( Read more... )

I went to MIT. I played Dungeons & Dragons. In my twenties. I know roughly 5 times as many programming languages as I do human languages. I've debated who would win in a fight between Spiderman and Wolverine. I can recite large portions of Monty Python dialog on demand. I'm astronomer and my day job is working for possibly the geekiest ( Read more... )

I've been vaguely aware of the road trip that Oprah took this summer and has been showing in bits on her show recently. "Vaguely aware" in that I've seen promos for it and I saw something online about her pumping her own gas for the first time in 20-odd years during the trip. In one of those delightful coincidences that pop up from time to time, ( Read more... )

It was nip and tuck, but I managed to get out of Pittsburgh last Sunday, just hours before I would have spent a full month in town without any sort of trip. This time, it was back to California again, although just barely. Specifically, it was Lake Tahoe for the COSMO 06 conference. Given that I'm being paid solely by Google these days, it's not ( Read more... )

Well, it's now three weeks into the Google experiment proper and I think I've turned out to be not very good at this whole corporate whore thing. The whole point of selling out is that you're supposed to be making a clean and clear transaction: you put in a certain fraction of the precious time that you exist on this planet and the company gives ( Read more... )

I realize now that I can write off any late-in-life career change to become a secret agent. I've been exposed to a tiny, tiny fraction of the company's innards and I can't tell you how difficult it is not to talk about all the cool new stuff I've found out. This is particularly true given how being a scientist basically means regressing back to ( Read more... )

Karma is a bitch. Or, in my case, a two year old child. Let me back up. When I was told that I'd be getting a laptop from the folks at GWHQ, I figured it would be something that I'd be able to fit into my bag and take back to the local office without any problem. Turns out that, at Google, when they give you a laptop, they also throw in all ( Read more... )

The nan at the cafeteria is a little too stiff and crunchy. It's the end of Day 2 here at MTV and right now that's the biggest complaint I've got (and that may well be driven by the fact that I might not really know what nan is supposed to be like). True, I didn't feel quite this way at this time last night, but today was a pretty remarkable ( Read more... )

Via Cosmic Variance and the BBC, we learn that noted legal scholar Florentino Floro has lost his appeal and is now officially removed from the Filipino bench. I note this partially because it's fun to laugh at the idea of a judge consulting three mystic dwarves to help him perform psychic healings during downtime in the courtroom. It's also ( Read more... )