Skiing on Thanksgiving

Me jumping a small rock under Jersey Cream. Thanks to Chris Hacking for the amazing photo.

Short of having a fantastic Thanksgiving dinner, there's nothing better than skiing on Thanksgiving day. This year, I was fortunate enough to have both. What a wonderful opportunity, to be able to go to Whistler on Thanksgiving day, to rent a condo, to buy tickets, and ski on opening day of Blackcomb mountain then to come home and have a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with my mom. I am a very lucky little girl.

This thanksgiving, I have many things to be thankful for. Firstly, I'm thankful for my mother. It is thanks to my mom that I am alive, thanks to her that I have friends, and thanks to her that I was able to spend this Thanksgiving in Whistler, and a have a great Thanksgiving dinner. Secondly, I'm thankful for my father. It is thanks to my father that I am alive, thanks to him that I am able to enjoy any part of the mountain (whether by hiking, climbing or skiing), and thanks to him that I am privileged enough to be in a fantastic department at such a strong university. Finally, I'm thankful for the snow, rocks, gondolas, lifts, lifties and ski patrollers that all make it possible for me to enjoy the mountains.

If not for all of the things I mentioned above and much more, I would not be able to enjoy Blackcomb on Thanksgiving, and Whistler the next day. I would not be able to hike Jersey Cream bowl on Blackcomb and ski down, or hit the terrain park in Whistler (it was better than the one in Blackcomb, more jumps, more jibs, more fun).



This has not been an easy quarter for me at all. It has been incredibly busy, and very intellectually demanding. Were the short two days worth 7 weeks of suffering? I don't think that this comparison should be made. I think if you like something, you should do it, and not work on something you don't enjoy simply so that you can spend a little time doing stuff you love. Hopefully, I will be able to combine my love of programming and my love of skiing so that I can do both and get tired of neither. I haven't figured out a way how yet, but maybe someday I will. If you have any ideas, please let me know.

Biking

My friend Dmitry asked me whether biking in France was any different than biking in America. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes I would look around and think to myself “I could be on the Burke-Gilman trail right now and not even know the difference”. The same trees, rivers and people were in France as were in America. However, sometimes biking in France was quite different. Some days we would bike between little villages along vineyards and fields, things I’ve never witnessed in America. Scenes such as the spire of a church poking through the hills, a small pin telling me that yet another little village was just beyond that hill, dot my memory, and I don’t think I would have found those in America. So yes, biking in Europe is special.

With my comfort bike of brick, I may not have biked a long distance, but I did bike for a long time. Biking is a very peaceful exercise. My ex-boyfriend Ben explained why biking is peaceful well to me: it’s because of the cadence. The constant up-down of the pedals is so hypnotizing. I was constantly flowing in and out of a biking zen throughout the trip: half awake, half dreaming about nothing in particular. And always there was the up-down of my pedals.

Biking of course didn’t come without its pains. My butt hurt every time I got on the bike, and after the third day my thighs were always aching. But these were all bearable pains, pleasant in fact. Even the burn I got on my thighs after forgetting to put on sunscreen for one day weren’t all that bad. Whenever I have pain like this I always remind myself that this is all temporary. If you just push through the pain a little bit, soon it will go away, and everything will be better. I suppose emotional pain is like this too. But it seems like those wounds take longer to heal.

Getting Lost

Which way?

The directions we had gotten from the tour company were terrible. They were incomplete, were overly complicated, and with the abundance of pre-marked trails in this area, completely unnecessary. Maybe it was because they were transferred from German. As such, we had the pleasant experience oPublish Postf getting lost on the first day of our trip. After a wrong turn, about a half hour of confusion and a visit to the wrong town, my mom and I finally found our way back. Who would have thought that we were supposed to make a left on a “no left turn” crossing?

From that moment on we were pretty skeptical of the directions. In fact, my mom didn’t even follow them. Instead of putting instructions on the little placards we had on our bikes, she just stuck a map there, and followed her gut, as well as the signposts for various trails. And you know what? That worked out better than following directions. Not only was she able to actually look around more (as opposed to reading the instructions), but she also had a sense of where we were on the map, which is often more valuable than even the best directions.

So, what did I learn? Don’t book a tour and hope others will do stuff for you. Instead, get a map and do it yourself. It is much better to be well-oriented than to have a good guide.

Chateaus

I juggled in front of every Chateau we visited.

I saw too many Chateaus. By the end I was beginning to take these marvels for granted, as if the sweat, dirt, drama, and life that happened within those walls didn’t matter. Each chateau we visited was unique, but in some way they were all the same. For one, all the chateaus were cold. Also, each one had a history, its own story older than that of the United States, and beautiful bouquets of fresh flowers decorating its interior. And of course every chateau was stuffed with paintings, mostly either portraits of people or of Jesus or the Virgin Mary. It was as if Jesus was the Brad Pitt of the 15^th century.

But, this isn’t to say that the chateaus were all the same. Not at all. Each one had its own personality, its own feel to it. My two favorite chateaus were Villandry and Sache. Villandry wasn’t so much of a chateaux as it was an elaborate garden. As I noted in my journal “it was as if someone was painting with a paintbrush of hedges and flowers on a dirt canvas”. The sheer size and the precision with which each plant was trimmed made the garden look like less of a garden and more like a geometric painting. Chateau Sache was the complete opposite of Villandry. It was by far the smallest Chateau we visited. I liked it because it was peaceful. The morning we visited the chateau was so quiet, I could hear the leaves rustling in the trees as we walked through the mansion. I liked the simplicity of this brick mansion. It reminded me of a cabin, one that I would want to own someday. But it would have to be in the mountains, of course.

Overall, I’m very glad that my mom and I visited all of these Chateaus and remembered (if but for a moment) the exciting, happy, dull , and tormented lives of the people that lived in them. I doubt that many of the houses built today are durable enough to last 5 centuries as these have. Let’s hope we have something else to show people of the future instead.

J'aime aller à vélo en France

The last supper (lunch) at Google

Act III of my college experience ended with a bang: a lavish lunch filled with sushi and sashimi, and a bucket. A few hugs later, I left Google. Well, for now anyway. Then it was time for a little intermission. This time, it was a bike trip to France with my mother with a stop in Paris to top everything off.

I’m not going to detail everything that we did or that happened in a narrative. It’s not very interesting anyway. Instead, let me give you a digest of my thoughts and experiences, and maybe I’ll recount a story or two in the few posts that follow. I will only include one photo per post, so if you're interesting in seeing a more complete collection check out my picasa album.

Geozette on Google Code Blog!

About a year ago, I had an idea: what if we could display news on a map? I even blogged about it. I'd been mulling this idea over for a while, and this Spring I finally got the chance to implement it with my two friends David Belatero and Daniel Otero. The fruit of our efforts was an interesting little RSS reader, Geozette.

Coincidentally, this course was sponsored by Google in an effort to introduce MapReduce to the undergraduate world. Apparently, this was interesting enough to make it onto the Google Code Blog. And the site that my friends and I created is linked to from this blog!

I know this isn't a big deal, but for me it illustrates the power of having an idea, sticking to it and actually making it happen. The site is only a prototype, but I plan to make it have current news and better location extraction, and maybe a few more goodies as well.

I want to thank David, Daniel, Christophe, Sierra, Jack and Aaron for making Geozette happen. And please check out the site soon, because it will actually work!

Life of a Google Intern

Above: My name tag. I was promoted to Intern 1 after washing my host's car.

What's it like to be an Intern at Google? In one sentence: Being at Google is like going on a cruise with a desktop computer and two 24-inch monitors that for some silly reason you can't take your eyes off of.

Why is working at Google like going on a cruise? Well, because at Google, you have easy access to all of life's necessities, just like on a cruise. I was within a minutes walk from free ice cream, sushi, salads, breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks, an espresso machine, ping pong and foosball tables, bathrooms, and even couches and beanbags to sleep on (although I never used these). Working at Google is also fun. For example, I played ping-pong, juggled, and even played board games with my fellow co-workers, and could freely joke around with my team. I even managed to wash my mentor's car (just for fun, of course). But what's surprising is that despite all of these comforts, I still spent most of my time in front of my computer at work.

Google did an exceptional job of providing me with plenty of comforts so that I could focus completely on the problems that I was solving. And because these problems were very interesting, I spent most of my time at work trying to solve them. I did not work an 8 hour work day. Usually I worked at least nine hours a day, and oftentimes more than that. I remember days when I came in at 9:30 am and left at midnight. But nobody forced me to stay this late. I wanted to keep working, because I was interested. In fact, almost every day I or others had to force myself (me) to go home, knowing that this was best for me.

I will not lie, working at Google is hard. But so is skiing, and juggling. And I love both. Similarly, I loved working at Google this summer. Yes, now it is the end of the summer and I am completely exhausted. But, my summer at Google will be an experience I never forget. I completed two projects, learned to make a good mocha, started another juggling group, and made some new friends. I am honored to have had such a privlege.

Firefox Keywords: A Keyboard Shortcut Paradise

Ever since I started really getting into computers, I've been really interested in finding the quickest way to do just about anything. Unless you're editing photos or browsing maps, the fastest way to do something is using keyboard shortcuts.

I find this to be especially true with browsing the internet. If I want to select the address bar and type "www.gmail.com" 100 times a day, and I spend 5 seconds doing this task, that's almost 10 minutes I lose a day. In a year, that's ~ 3600 minutes, or 60 hours, which is about 2 and a half days that I lose of my life just by clicking on the address bar!

In addition, using a touch pad or trackpad on a laptop to point and click is very unhealthy, so the more I can use the keyboard, and the less keystrokes it takes for me to do something, the better.

At work, we have a really cool system where you can go to your email simply by opening a browser and typing "m". Calendar is "c", and so on. Wouldn't it be great to have something like this at home? Well, firefox has it, and it's called "bookmark keywords".

Bookmark keywords are just keyboard shortcuts to your bookmarks. So, instead of going to your bookmarks and clicking on them, you just type the keyboard shortcut for that bookmark in your browser, and hit enter.

For example, if I wanted to make http://mail.google.com map to "m", I would go to http://mail.google.com, then bookmark the page. Then, I would open Bookmark manager (Bookmarks -> Organize Bookmarks...), right click on the Gmail bookmark, go to Properties, and in the keyword box type the letter "m". Then, any time I typed "m in the browser, I'd go straight to my email!

This site has more suggestions for how you can use keywords in awesome ways.

I've always been amused by how the smallest things in user interface design make the biggest difference. This is a perfect example of a small feature that means the world to me. Or almost, anyway.

One Year Later

It has been almost one year since I've written in this blog. In many cases, one year means nothing. Even for people, one year is often not long enough to change a person much once they get past the age of 10. But this year meant a lot to me.

This last year has been the most influential year of my life. I look back at myself 12 months ago, and see a distinctly different person with a different way of approaching life. Many things happened this year that changed me significantly. I...

Took on a research project, and got fired.
Fell in love.
Had my heart broken.
Spent more time skiing in Whistler than in school.
Dropped my physics major.
Helped write a website, Geozette that I'd been dreaming of doing for a while.
Got an internship at Google.
Won a prestigious national scholarship, and had my name plastered over the University of Washington.
Taught an introductory Computer Science class for two quarters.
Went to places like Colorado, and New York on my own.
Slept in cars, houses that were not mine, and hospital rooms.
Lost my father.

Somehow, many of the experiences that people often consider significantly impacted their lives happened all at once for me. Suddenly I became very aware of the different worlds people live in, and the many hardships they experience. Things that seemed very important to me before (mostly grades, and taking many classes) didn't seem to matter any more. I became much more patient, and much less shy. I learned that in this world there are some things we cannot change, and we need to accept that. Most importantly though, I learned about the importance of friendship. A lonely person is not a happy person, regardless of how much fame and success they have. There is no better feeling in the world than to feel loved and cared for.

I hope that in the past year I have been a good friend. And I hope that I will stay a good friend until I die. That would make me happiest.