My thoughts in e-text

I drive a Ford Escort SE sport car. The gear shift is manual (stick as some would say). When I first came to San Jose a couple of weeks ago to join Google, I came with nothing more than a suit case full of clothes and important documents. Obviously I needed a rental car to go places, so I took a rental car from the airport. Although I knew I had a choice, I still went with an automatic car, just because I wanted to concentrate more on looking at my maps and GPS unit rather than worrying about shifting gears and working the clutch. The first couple of days I got used to driving it. Basically every time I wanted to go fast or after applying breaks, my left leg moves trying to find the clutch while my right hand automatically moves trying to shift to a lower gear. This was no fun but I had to adjust. Acceleration wasn't a problem since the car seemed to smoothly change the gears, I didn't feel the urge to change gears. Anyway after 2 days, I started to like it for the sake of simp...

Today I decided to try out Google shuttle since I am planning to use it daily once I move to a new apartment. Obviously I wanted to try and see how a 1 hour long drive will be. Although I do not have motion sickness, people asked me to test it out before deciding to stay so far away from work. I drove about 40 miles to Danville and got on the Google shuttle. The shuttle was a very nice limo type bus with nice seats, a couple of four seats with tables between them, wifi access and overhead video displays (although no movies have been played during the ride). I tried out what I would routinely do if I used the shuttle which is basically coding and reading both books and web. All of them worked out fine. I did not feel any motion sickness, but sometimes I found it hard to concentrate on reading the small font on Dr. Dobbs magazine when the bus is shaking too much. Reading from my laptop wasn't that bad once I did a few Ctrl-+ to make the font bigger. After reaching Google, I attended ...

After a couple more classes later had a nice non-veg Indian food. Starting to get a hang of things here at Google. Had a brief talk about what my starting project and 20% project will be. Did some house-keeping chores (organizing calendar, email widows on my massive monitor, updates to laptop and desktop etc). Still a lot of things to learn. And I have 3 classes tomorrow!

Today again has been a very busy day. Google has this nice set of classes that all Nooglers take for the first 2 weeks. It gets Nooglers up to speed with the technologies and culture at Google. As you might have already guessed, I cannot reveal much about anything, but it suffices to say these classes are very very useful. But again there is far too much information (not that we are expected to know everything in one day, but I wanted to anyway ;-). We were given several books that are helpful in our professional career at Google. The greatest thing about Google is the work culture. I liked the fact that Googlers can work 20% of the time on any project. It lets your wander freely in the wild. No idea is too small. Actually brainstorming ideas is strongly encouraged. Engineers have a lot of flexibility even for the main project, and the mentoring is excellent. Simply put "no question is too dumb to ask" here at Google. There are no managers telling you what to do and any time...

Wow! Just wow! I love everything about Google. Although all day long today we just had to go through lots of presentations, and doing some paper work, it was very informative and useful. In the morning all the nooglers were ushered into the front lobby to set passwords for our Google accounts, got photographed for our badges and were led to some snack areas to give ourselves some treats and drinks. Then we sat for a day long marathon of HR related presentations and paper work. We stayed from 9 to 5 in the room except for some short breaks and lunch. What I loved about the day is how very well everything is organized. Each step is completed in exactly the intended time slot alloted for it. Well actually within +/- 3 minutes. There is a lot of information and I will definitely have to go over the slides to remember everything. Later in the day we got our badges. Coming to lunch. It is simply superb. Well I had lunch at Google before during my on-site interviews. But every time the food w...