Friday, August 31, 2012

The Gang's All Here

Not even a dozen posts into this thing and I'm already falling behind. I was on a pretty good schedule of posting by Sunday night every week, but as you know (if you've been reading), life keeps getting busier... in a good way.

Andrew is now here, so things at the apartment are in full swing. I did another big furniture trip with him last weekend, similar to Calvin the week before. I don't think I'll ever spend too much time in IKEA; I think I may have been an interior decorator in another life. I have no taste for style/color schemes, but I like just thinking about the layout of stuff and how everything will fit. I think I said this at least once already, but it really is like life-size LEGOs. After getting my drill and saw, I've also been slowly making adjustments to things that make me feel like I'm at the expert level of not following the instructions.

To give you an idea of how things look, here are a couple more pictures of our ever-in-shambles apartment:

Living Room
Andrew's room
Things have improve a lot since I took those pictures, but I think I'll wait until everything is finally setup before I take more. At least know you'll be able to appreciate how far the place will have come since we moved in.

Work has been extremely satisfying. I'm constantly working on cool and important things, as well as learning and meeting all sorts of smart and interesting people. Things sometimes seem a little overwhelming, but I somehow manage to figure things out in the end (with a LOT of help from the people I work with).

Calvin has been cooking dinner consistently, which means my diet has vastly improved. We have the luxury of being able to just walk downstairs to the grocery store every night and choose what we want to have for dinner (although Calvin and Andrew usually do most of the choosing). I actually managed to cook sausage tonight, and by "cook" I mean "put on the stove and heat the precooked sausage", but I ate it nonetheless. There are nights when Calvin doesn't cook and I'm left to fend for myself.

I also think I forgot to talk about my time at the gym I have access to. It feels like a small town just inside the building. There are restaurants and cafes which someone people go to regardless of the fact that there's also workout facilities. There are 3 different rooms for cardio, each with a different amount of light depending on your personal preference. Apparently the "dark room" is good if you don't want anyone else to see you work out. There are squash and tennis courts, swimming pools, saunas, spas, and more.

One of the cool things was I got a free personal training session as a new member. The guy was pretty cool, and I got along with him well. We talked a lot about soccer since he's a big Sounders fan. He showed me some cool exercises, but more importantly made me realize how out of shape I really am. I still haven't exactly figured out when I'll be going to the gym, and I've contemplated sticking with a trainer just so I'm practically forced to do it. It's a bit expensive, though, so I'll definitely try to do it on my own first.

3-day weekend coming up, and apparently Calvin's family is having a potluck BBQ on Labor Day so we'll be doing that in addition to finalizing furniture. I also look forward to getting lots of sleep and enjoying the awesome weather. I do have a post planned to (literally) walk you through my day at work, but not sure when I'll get around to that.

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Murphy's Law

This week, Seattle really started to feel like home. Calvin has been here since Tuesday, so it's been nice to come home every day and have the place not be empty. Work has been feeling like a normal routine as well since I'm getting really good at knowing where things are and even getting to do some real work. I'm having meetings with really cool people, and even made my first submission into the code base. Basically what that means is that hidden somewhere in the depths of all the code that makes up Microsoft Word for Mac is a small change that I made. It wasn't a very important change, and not even a "customer-facing" one (meaning nobody will really see the effects of it by using the product), but it means that every version of Word for Mac from this point on will have something that I did in it. That's something that I find pretty profound, and am very happy I have the opportunity to accomplish.

One of the best things about having Calvin here is that I no longer am just eating pasta with tomato sauce for dinner every night. The first night he cooked, we have sausage-stuffed peppers with garlic bread. In all, there was not a single part of that meal that I'm capable of doing, except for toasting the bread. We also now have a bunch of real food and cooking utensils, including real (i.e. not plastic) silverware. I'm constantly surprised how much it's the little things like those that can make a huge difference in how the place feels.

Saturday was a pretty eventful day for us. The plan was to do a bunch of furniture shopping, although we were mostly just browsing options so we can decide what we wanted to do for the living and dining rooms. Calvin had a big agenda though, since the only furniture he had up until that point was a mattress. We found a bunch of furniture stores and went around to see what they had. We're waiting on our third and final roommates to make final decisions, but we came out with a lot of good ideas. Towards the end of the day, we picked up a U-Haul and went to spend the afternoon at IKEA. We didn't have to return the van until Sunday, so we got to take our time and peruse. For a bit, I felt like I was doing something straight out of (500) Days of Summer:


I think we spent about 3 hours there altogether, including the time it took us to actually load the van with all our stuff. In all, we got 3 bookshelves, a DVD rack, a nice TV stand, Calvin's bed frame, a bunch of shelves, as well as some other small stuff. It was a lot, to say the least. That night the only thing we put together was the bed frame because we were entirely too exhausted after that to do anything else. We both slept well that night, except that I keep waking up earlier than I want in the morning. It seems that the later I go to sleep, the earlier I wake up. I don't really feel tired during the day, so I'm not really sure what the deal is.

Today (Sunday) was a productive day, but also a perfect example of Murphy's Law at work. Nothing that bad really happened, it was just one thing after another that made what we wanted to accomplish a littler more difficult.

We started off with putting together the TV stand. For some reason, it seemed like it was missing certain screws, although they didn't seem terribly necessary to the integrity of the thing. So despite my OCD, I decided to let it go and move on to one of my bookshelves. That setup went well for the most part, aside from accidentally stripping a small bit of the wood on one of the selves. The real trouble started went I went to put it again the wall. The bottom of the piece has a cut-out so that it can fit against the wall even with the molding on the bottom. Unfortunately, the molding in our apartment is just higher than the cut-out allows, so I tried to come up with an alternative. I could try to just leave it the way it is, but that means the top of it would lean back which I would not have been okay with. I could put some cardboard underneath the bottom to raise it above the molding, which seemed to make it look a little worse. Lastly, I could find a saw and increase the size of the cut-out to fit the molding. The first problem was that I didn't have a saw. Second was that to secure the bookshelf to the wall, I needed to put a screw in the wall which required me to have (1) the right screw which was not included, and (2) a drill, which I did not own, to make a pilot hole. I was gonna think about all that while I went to help Calvin assemble the TV stand. There, too, we realized we needed a circular saw attachment for a drill so we could wire everything the way we wanted.

We decided to set out for a local hardware store, and luckily there was one only 10 blocks down the street that was open for another couple hours. I got myself a drill, some accessories for it, a hand saw, and we got the screws we needed. Happy with the purchase, and that we headed home to finish everything we started. First, we stopped at a local food co-op to pick up some food for dinner. We've already eaten, and I'm not entirely sure what I ate (it contained pork), but it was delicious.

Excited to get everything ready, we went right to work. I found out the hard way that the saw attachment I got for my drill didn't fit, so that would be useless for now. So instead I had to use the drill-bits I got, which is something you're explicitly not supposed to do with them. Additionally, the stand we got for the TV was just too small to fit one of the speakers in the audio system (read: first world problems). One of the things Calvin got needed another part that wasn't included, which we of course did not get. We didn't have enough coaxial cable to reach where the TV was without jerryrigging something. In short, it was really just a bunch of small things that made it difficult for us to get things done.

In the end, we finally got a good amount of stuff done. Here are some pictures of the state of our living room at various points to give you an idea:

Boxes...
...boxes everywhere.
Our living/dining room. Note that Calvin has been using it as an office before he gets a desk.
We have a lot of packing materials that we're getting rid of a little bit at a time.
The TV stand is finally finished.
Yes, the TV glows in the back.
There's still plenty of work to be done, but we made decent progress this weekend. It will get even crazier next week when our last roommate gets here on Thursday since he'll also need furniture. That means next weekend will probably involve another IKEA run, and even more furniture construction. My hands are getting pretty calloused, but hopefully having power tools now will make that a little better.

Time to eat some toaster strudels. BYE.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Learning the Ropes

No pictures this time, so bear with me. I will definitely have some next time because Calvin will have moved in by that point and I'll be sure to document it.

You would think that my downtime out here would be pretty quiet and uneventful given that I've only been here 2 weeks and neither of my roommates have moved in yet. While I might normally be content to stay in and relax, I've become enamored with everything out here. Akin to my "culture shock" in Palo Alto, I want to take in as much as I can. Unlike last summer, however, I have no idea how long I will be out here. It will certainly be longer than the 3-month internship, and likely at least a year so that I don't back out of my apartment lease. I have been ball-parking my time here at 3-5 years which has to do with career decisions as well as personal reasons. There's nothing that says I won't stay longer than that, especially considering I've been told many times that it's very easy to become accustomed to life and work out here. But I figure that's a good point to reevaluate my options and interests. I anticipate a lot will happen between now and then, though.

Anyway, on to what I've actually been up to. Work this week was really interesting. First off, I still don't have that much explicit work to do as I'm still in the ramping-up phase. I think that's a good thing for now, since every day I still feel like I'm learning a lot and getting the lay of the land. I still felt plenty busy, though. One of the best parts of my week was yet another orientation.

I feel I should preface this with some more information about exactly what I'm doing. First and foremost, I work at Microsoft. Within the entire company, there are about 7 different divisions. These include Windows, Interactive Entertainment Business (IEB - basically Xbox), and Microsoft Office Division (MOD, where I am). Within each division, there are even more groups. I really only know about MOD, so I'll confine my discussions to that. I work in the Apple Productivity and Experiences (APEX) group within MOD.

So the New Employee Orientation (NEO) I went to on my first day was for all new employees regardless of what division you're in, or even if you're an engineer. That was all well and good, but it didn't really drill down that much. That wasn't its purpose, though, and I did get a decent overview of various aspects about the company as a whole. This week, I have the opportunity to attend an orientation specifically for new hires within MOD. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, but definitely wanted to learn as much as I could in my first few weeks on the job. I was pleasantly surprised - I got to learn all about the history of Office, how it's changed over the years, where my group and I fit within the context of everything, etc. It was really crazy to see the very first version of Microsoft Word - a command line tool with no graphical interface that was still revolutionary for its time because its main competitor was the typewriter. The graphical version was released for Apple's Macintosh before Windows, in fact 5 years earlier. A lot of people are unaware of the close relationship between Microsoft and Apple, although it may not be as close now as it was in the late 80s. I find the history of this industry incredibly interesting, and not just because it has given me the opportunity for the career I want. I highly recommend people go learn about it. You can watch Pirates of Silicon Valley for a dramatized viewing of how events transpired, and of course the de facto Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson for a more personal account. And lastly there's the combined interview with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at the All Things D conference in 2007, the first part of which is below, and the entire thing of about 90 minutes here.


Hang on, I'm off on a tangent again. So the Office orientation was really cool, and I learned a lot. The other thing that I learned a lot from was making various decisions with my parents about some of the benefits I receive at work. I had to learn about the different health care plans, which was right for me, what (if anything) I should contribute to my Health Savings Account, etc. Additionally, what is a pre-tax vs. Roth 401(k), how much should I contribute to that, and so on. It was pretty big stuff, and something I knew extremely little about, so I was glad to have their help.

For Saturday, I planned to attend a picnic in Bellevue. The local chapter of 1 of the professional societies I belong to was sponsoring it, and I figured if nothing else, it was free food1 2. So I planned the various bus routes I would take and headed out to get there. As I approached a stop where I would transfer busses, I saw a bunch of orange traffic signs that could not be good. Essentially, I learned that the 520 floating bridge (the one I take to get to and from work) was closed for the weekend for construction. Unfortunately, that is how the bus I planned to take would get across the lake, and so there was no service for that route this weekend. Feeling a little flustered, I tried to think of an easy way around it, but the only conclusion I came to was that I'd have to figure out how to take another bus that crosses the 90 bridge further South. I had already missed half the event by the time I figured out what to do, so I just ended up not going. I was pretty bummed about it, partly because of the free food and partly because of the opportunity to meet some people out here. I had other things to do, though.

My roommates have been sending themselves packages here, and it's worked out pretty well for the most part. One package from the USPS needed to be picked up at the local office, though, so I figured out how to take the bus there. This time the busses worked just fine, but my destination was nowhere to be found. The little packing slip I had listed the address, and I was staring at a building at that address that looked nothing like a post office. After some exploring the area, I asked some people walking by if there was in fact a post office around, and they said there was not. The nearest one was a couple miles North, and I figured that would be a decent place to start. After spending enough time navigating the busses, I knew off the top of my head how to get there, and so I did. While on the bus, I realized my mistake: the building numbers on the street I was on effectively reset at a certain point. Essentially, I had gone really far away when in fact that post office was only a couple blocks from my apartment. In the end, I got the package (which was heavier than I anticipated) and walked back to my apartment.

I spent some time downtown throughout the weekend as well, seeing what was out there. I saw the new Zach Galifianakis movie, The Campaign which was alright. Getting to and from downtown is really easy on the bus, and there is always plenty to do there. I also finally went to the gym for the first time since moving out, and it was not fun. There's a fitness center in my apartment complex, so at least I didn't have far to go.

After getting back late on Saturday night, I went up to the roof deck of my building for a chance to see the Perseid Meteor Shower which is one of the most prominent and easily viewed meteor showers. I was a little to close to the light pollution of Seattle, so I didn't quite see the 100 meteors per hour that NASA predicted, but I did get to see at least a few. Some of them were faint against the surrounding light, and I'm sure I missed some just by blinking. I tried to take some long exposure pictures with my camera, but again the light was not in my advantage. Next time I'll have to go to some remote location, of which there is no shortage here.

I picked up some more furnishings as well from people that are moving out of my building next week. It was mostly small things for the most part, stuff like garbage bins, a fruit bowl, laundry basket, etc. It's surprising how much those things make a difference in the feel of the place, though. There's also another comfy chair for the living room so that my desk chair can now reclaim its rightful place. And some floor lamps help a LOT since there are only a couple overhead lights in the apartment.

Well, I'm hungry now, and I want a sandwich. Time to go to Subway just a couple stories down. No real plans for the rest of the day - just gonna enjoy my new 55" plasma TV and get ready for this week. My first roommate, Calvin, arrives on Tuesday so I'll be going into work a little late that day, but things will be a lot different after that.


1. Still in that college mindset 
2. This one is just for my friend Ian. See what I did with these footnotes?

Monday, August 6, 2012

Stitching Some Pictures

Just wanted to share some very wide pictures I took over the weekend. I've been experimenting with this photo-stitching thing where you can take multiple pictures across a scene and then software "stitches" them together. Some of them didn't come out that great, and you can see how the vertical alignment doesn't look right, but here they are nonetheless:

View from top of the building in Bellevue
Green Lake
MORE Green Lake. I love this place.

Who Said Seattle Doesn't Have Nice Weather?

I initially anticipated this weekend to be laid-back and relaxed. After my first week of work, I just wanted to decompress and do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. Despite my best efforts, I didn't quite turn out like that, but I think things ended up even better that way.

After a long night's sleep, I woke up on Saturday with only one thing in mind: buying a TV. My roommates and I have been doing lots of research about what TV to get, but ultimately I was going to buy it and so it came down to my decision. After reading lots of reviews and even going to look at some in person, I finally decided which one to get. It would be my very first plasma TV (as opposed to LCD) and also the largest at 55". The Best Buy in Bellevue (just South of Redmond) had it in stock at a good price, and so I decided to spend some time in Bellevue since I would be out there. The weather forecast predicted 80's and sunny all weekend.

One adventure I would attempt would be to located the company headquarters of Valve, a video game company. They make a lot of good stuff for only have a couple hundred employees, but also apparently have one of the coolest offices to visit. I even sent their CEO an email asking if I could stop by because I've heard of that working for other people. I haven't heard back from him yet, but it is a nice weekend so perhaps he wasn't checking his email. Regardless, I decided to stop by anyway and see if I could just snap a picture or two.

I wasn't exactly sure where to park once I found the building, but I did see a sign for Microsoft employee parking. Since I technically fit into that group, and had registered my rental car, I figured to try it. My ID badge let me into the garage, and so I had a free place to park out of the sun. The building I parked in was right next to where Valve purportedly was, so it was a quick walk over. Unfortunately, you needed badge access to get into that building. I saw a couple people going in and out, but couldn't muster up the courage to just follow someone inside. It reminded me of that time my mom & I did something similar to get into the computer science and engineering building at the University of Washington. I wasn't technically allowed to be in there, and figured that maybe the building is open during the week and so I could try then. We'll have to wait and see...

Another thing I was aware of was Seafair happening in the Pudget Sound area all weekend. It's an annual summer festival featuring a bunch of events you can read about if you want. One I was acutely aware of was the Blue Angels' performance. All week, the local government had been advertising that due to safety regulations, the I-90 bridge that I usually take to and from work would be closed at various points for practices and performances. I had some time to kill since I didn't make it to Valve, so I went to the top of the Microsoft building - the 26th floor to be precise. This gave me a great view of Lake Washington and the performance:

The building on the right is what I was on top of.

View from the top.

ZOOM. Lots of boats getting ready to watch.
View of Mt. Rainier
Begin lots of pictures. I got lazy. 

































There were a bunch of other people up there with me, so I got to do a bit of bonding. When the show was over, though, I set out to get my TV. To make a long story short, the TV wouldn't fit in the rental car I brought with me. Not wanting to wait for delivery, and risk that they try to deliver it while I'm at work, I decided to drive back to Seattle. From there, I managed to secure a large ZipCar that I got to and from on the bus. After lugging the TV into my apartment safe and sound, I returned the car with just minutes to spare. I spent some time around the big shopping area downtown where the car was, which I didn't realize was there until I had to navigate through all the pedestrian traffic.

Sunday was another fun day. In the afternoon I hopped on the bus North to an area called Green Lake. This suburb outside of the city surrounds a swamp-turned-lake that seems to be a popular destination, especially when the weather is nice as it was this weekend. There's a walking and bike path that goes around the entire lake, almost 3 miles altogether. As soon as I got off the bus, I knew this would become one of my favorite destinations. There are tons of great places to eat near there too, as well as some frozen yogurt places. Some more pictures:

Lots to do.



The view from my spot.

Doggy paddle.
Also plenty of open field space


So I got to read, relax, explore, get some sun, basically anything you could ask for on a sunny Sunday afternoon. After taking the bus back to my apartment, I went to see some furniture and stuff that people were selling just 2 floors down from my apartment. They are moving to Australia in a week and a half, so it's an "everything must go" thing. They were really nice, and gave me some recommendations about stuff to do in the area.

I was glad to have my TV set up so that I could spend Sunday night watching NASA's Mars rover, Curiosity, make a clean landing. It was an amazing accomplishment for the JPL (Jet-Propulsion Laboratory). I literally spent like 2.5 hours watching the feed and news coverage as Curiosity attempted to complete its 7 Minutes of Terror:


Eventually, the people in the control room were celebrating as they confirmed the rover had successfully made the landing. The first results were new pictures of Mars:

Left: front camera showing the shadow of the rover. Right: wheel and Mars horizon
While it may not be on the same level as putting a man on the moon, it's quite a feat. One that I (and many others) hope renews interest and excitement in technology and engineering. Who knows, maybe NASA lies in my future somewhere.