ma vie

this is going to be a long post. haha, every time i say that i usually have to take it back sometime later due to my highly reliable attention span giving out. :) this is going to be the post in which i tell you about what i have been doing with my summer--as if you care. i will label each section of this post with a relevant heading so you can pick which parts to skip.


introduction.
so, dear friend, i will begin by describing the superficial circumstances of my life. as you may recall from from episode the previous, i have been living in sunny southern california toiling away in the document mines by day and biting the necks of unsuspecting victims by night. this is only on weekdays, of course. on weekends i lead a normal socal existence, usually spending my saturdays going to the beach and then out to dinner with some of the other interns and my sundays hanging around and doing nothing. sometimes on saturdays i'll go for a really long run down to and along venice beach.


the fascinating climate of santa monica.
santa monica is truly paradise on earth--it never rains and the temperature along the coast hovers around a balmy 70-80 degrees. apparently we enjoy this good weather here because of something called the marine layer. (i had never heard of such a thing before moving out here, but it is a layer of cool air formed from cool ocean water that seals in the comfortable weather.) one day i asked john, a guy on my team, why it had been cold that week and he explained that everywhere else in LA it was actually quite hot--in the valley it is often in the 90's. california weather is quite fascinating.


google santa monica, most beautiful google on earth.
i would not have said this a week ago, but this past week we move to our new office on the corner of 2nd st. and santa monica ave. (Click here to see where it is on the map.) it is a triangular-shaped building with tiered balconies 2 blocks from the ocean. google has the 3rd and 4th floors, so from the balconies/windows we get an unobstructed, amazing ocean view. if i look to my right from my 4th floor desk through a layer of plexiglass and then the glass of the balcony door i see something like the following inspiration poster--except it is real:



the great part is that the balcony actually has a hammock on it. :) i am certainly not complaining.


i got a haircut.
i don't have a good picture of me with this haircut yet, but aliza suggest i get my hair cut like jean seberg in a bout de souffle (breathless).


my experiences as a code monkey.
besides enjoying the good weather, i have really been enjoying my work this summer. it is the first time i've really had good coding standards (in terms of readability/efficiency) enforced upon me. for instance, before i hadn't really paid attention to things like passing in a pointer to a string to set the value instead of returning it to avoid the copy, appropriate use of "const," etc. etc. etc. i have learned to develop a tolerant appreciation of C++ as a language good for developing fast code on a large scale (in terms of number of developers). of course, for personal endeavors i still prefer C because it is much more conducive to being a speed demon, and when you are writing stuff on a smaller scale much of the objected oriented style is quite unnecessary.

i probably can't say much more about what i've been working on and that kind of thing, but i will say that they treat us quite well. i have 2 24" monitors, a pretty nice keyboard and mouse, and pretty good headphones. i will miss all of this greatly when i return to my 19" monitors and crappy mouse/keyboard/antiheadphones at school.