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Tue, 29 May 2007
[15:56] Google Maps Street View
Today Google released Google Maps Street View at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 conference. There's a bit of information about it on the O'Reilly Radar but it's best to just go play with it: Across the road from the Googleplex.
[Posted at: 15:56 29/05/2007]
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Fri, 25 May 2007
[15:00] SRE Crawl
Recently my group at work was subsumed by the overarching SRE group. Since there are now a considerable number of groups operating under the SRE banner it was decided that we should all get together for a bit of a meet 'n greet in the style of your traditional pub crawl, so that's what we did on Thursday. We downed tools at 12:00 and embarked upon a 4-stop tour of the campus. Events included:
- Tricycle Races:
This event involved racing a child-sized tricycle around a traffic-cone course. This was the initial stop on the crawl and, at this stage, most people were still sober so there was some decent competition. The tricycles did not cope well with a succession of ~100Kg+ engineers attempting to propel them at high speeds and depending on how long it had been since the event started your attempt could have been severely hampered by the differential between the direction the front wheel pointed and the direction the handlebars pointed. I managed to come in second place at 59 seconds, well behind the blisteringly fast 29 seconds of our glorious leader.
- Cupcake Eating Contest:
This was advertised in advance so I knew not to eat breakfast or lunch until after this event! Luckily the cupcakes weren't insanely sweet so I was able to deal with them effectively and ended up tying for first place in this one. I managed to ram 14 Safeway cupcakes into my gob in the alloted two minutes. I offered an "eat-off" challenge to the other winner but he graciously declined.
- Karaoke:
Sadly, I got paged and had to go deal with some stuff, by the time I got back the list was o'er long. I got to have a bit of a sing-along with YMCA though so it was all OK! - MarioKart:
Ahh, you don't really appreciate MarioKart until you've seen eight players playing on two projectors :)
[Posted at: 15:00 25/05/2007]
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Fri, 18 May 2007
[18:38] One Terabyte consumer hard drives
Holy crap! Hitachi have released the Deskstar 7K1000, a one terabyte consumer level hard drive! A brief search turns up a price range around the $US400 mark which I think is pretty damn reasonable for that much storage.
Of course, it is now:
a) completely impossible to back your stuff up to anything other than another hard-drive; and
b) completely irresponsible to be running without at least RAID 1 on anything that you're storing your massive collection of photos, videos and random text data that living a digital-life implies.
Note to self: Must do something about backups...
[Posted at: 18:38 18/05/2007]
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Thu, 17 May 2007
[17:11] National Bike To Work Day and the Conference Bike
Today was National Bike to Work Day here in the US so, as usual, I biked to work. Not particularly stressful with my massive 1 mile (1.6 kilometres) commute but it seems that a LOT of people biked in from as far away as San Francisco! There were Energiser Stations set up all over the place, including here at Google to keep bikers energised and happy. More interesting though was this interesting bicycle, seen here hanging out at the Google Energiser Station:
It was revealed later in the day that this is one of two new "Conference Rooms", now available for mobile, healthy meetings...I love working here! There are more details on this delightful machine at http://www.conferencebike.com although the details of how it actually works are not readily available.
[Posted at: 17:11 17/05/2007]
UPDATE:
I finally got to take one of these for a spin! We had between five and seven people on-board for a lap of the campus and for the most part it was pretty easy. Uphill they're a bit tough with less than the full contingent (especially when the driver has the handbrake on) but on the flats it's all smooth-sailing and speed-humps present no real obstacle! It seems that the driver can operate it in single-user mode for re-location purposes and, consequently, their pedals are geared much higher than the other six seats which means that at speed, there's no real need for the driver to actually pedal.
[Updated at: 17:28 27/05/2007]
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