Bryce Boe

After just finishing my post on F8 I’m going to keep this one pretty short.

I actually was only at Google 3 days last week because of F8 and I took Friday off to head down to Santa Barbara for a wedding. Anyway since I use IRC at work I discovered ERC which is a emacs IRC client. It’s awesome because I love emacs. Additionally at work I was continuing to make progress on my project so that’s always good.

Tuesday there was a volleyball skills competition which was fun. I didn’t do so well because it only tested serving and passing in which neither were really about skill but more about being able to adapt to the particular test. I guess that is a skill which I wasn’t good at, nonetheless it was fun. Additionally Tuesday evening I had dinner with some interns from my building I had yet to meet. These are future colleagues for sure if we don’t become good friends. Yeah that was my work week. It doesn’t seem very exciting from an observer’s point of view but I assure you I am having a great summer.

Aside from work Thursday evening I went to Adam and Kristin’s to have dinner with them as well as Cheri and Laura. I taught Laura the basics of the card game Pusoy Dos which her dad should be pleased with as he and I used to enjoy playing.

As I said before, Friday I went down to Santa Barbara for a wedding. Not having any good clothes I was freaking out that I was going to be under dressed, and waiting until the last minute didn’t help. Let me just say I transformed into a baller after an hour of shopping at Nordstrom’s a few hours before the wedding. I walked in right as they opened and as innocent as a bearded man can be I said, “help please” as I had no idea what I was doing since the last time I had dressed up was for Prom in 2004, and that was easy as everything came as a combo rented, and my mom was there.

There was actually some ballin sales going on, or at least they did a good enough job to make me believe they were on sale. I ended up with black Hugo Boss pants, a light blue Hugo Boss button down and Allen Edmonds “Wendel” shoes in black. Yes I probably spent a bit much, but damn it feels good to be a baller.

Anyway the wedding was awesome and one of my most fun friends, Margaux, attended with me. I can’t wait for the next one! Anyway, on Sunday Molly, Mira and I headed back. They came down to hang out for the weekend as well, which worked out great because solo six hour drives suck. We stopped at the best Clam Chowder place, the Splash Cafe and DAMN it hit the spot well. Upon getting back to the Bay I headed over to Ann’s house for some awesome homemade Mac and Cheese. Ann is one of the interns I met on Tuesday.

Anyway that was last week. Ann and I are going to see Wall-E tomorrow, and I am very excited as I have been wanting to see it. I also still need to see Batman. So much to do.

The following is a detailed description of last Wednesday, 2008-07-23.

I started the morning by driving to a park and ride next to the San Antonio Cal Train station. I was aware that parking was $2 but I didn’t have the common sense to break my twenty prior to arriving. Fortunately there was another person in the area, and I asked him if he had change for a $20. He did not, but he was very generous and handed me $2. I made it clear that I was very thankful and then took care of my parking fee.

This was my first train ride, so it was kind of exciting, but other than that, there wasn’t too much to it other than speaking briefly with three traveling Egyptian hotties who were also going into the city. Upon arriving in San Francisco I walked to the location of the event and checked in at the front. The hottie who handed me my badge was also a UCSB alum so we chatted briefly.

From noon to one I basically walked around and collected as many tshirts as possible. I ended up collecting 6 shirts prior to attending the keynote. The keynote was quite interesting, however I don’t really want to write about it. Following the keynote I sat down on a couch to check my email, and a few minutes later a Facebook employee sat down next to me. Naturally I struck up a conversation with him in which he and I conversed about our jobs and college background. It was then, the unthinkable happened. After drinking half of my espresso my hand must have decided that drinking espresso wasn’t as effective as direct contact with the skin, because my hand lost the ability to hold the cup, thus spilling coffee all over my pants.

After attempting to clean coffee off my pants I realized all I could do was just hold my head high as I walked around and smile at the people who noticed the huge wet area on my pants. I had additionally thought of leaving, but I didn’t pay $50 for just the keynote. At this point I simply wanted to hide for a bit while my pants dried, so I sat down to browse the internet some more. It was then I realized I only had a few minutes of battery left and had forgotten my power adapter. I simply thought, “today is a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.”

After a few talks my pants were dry, however they were horribly stained and the smell of espresso was inescapable. Nonetheless the day was looking up as dinner and beer were now available. After chowing down a bit I spoke with some more Facebook people. I got a very strong impression that Facebook is an awesome company to work for, and am now interested in interning there next year. Anyway I asked them if they knew this guy Chris that my UCSB advisor is in communication with and they pointed him out.

I’ll simply say I wasn’t sure how this introduction would go, however Chris had a beer in hand so I thought it was the perfect time, if any. I approached him, asked if he was Chris and without hesitation he looked at me and said, “yes, and you must be Bryce.” I was blown away that he knew who I was as he is Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer. Anyway he introduced me to his wife, and joked that I was one of the trouble makers from UCSB. A quick minute or so of chatting and we parted ways. I got the impression from him that our research group should be successful in collaborating with Facebook, which is great news.

Following that introduction I was feeling awesome, despite the pant/espresso situation. I went to talk to some UCSB graduates I had met earlier who created a Facebook application for their service called Zimride. While talking I spotted Mark Zuckerberg, or Zuck, as the Facebookers call him. I excused myself for a second to introduce myself to him.

Now we need a quick bit of back story before continuing. Facebook had released their new layout earlier that week, which I manually switched to Tuesday night. After a few minutes of using it I started to get infinite redirects thus killing my Facebook experience at a critical time. As a developer I wanted to file a bug and I figured Facebook would have a support email address so I tried many different combinations of addresses, all of which were immediately bounced. So I sent an email to Mark directly, explaining the problem, thinking he’ll never read this.

Well I was incorrect. I walked up to Mark and said something along the lines of, “Hey Mark my name is Bryce Boe, and I just wanted to take this opportunity to meet you.” To which he replied, “Nice to meet you, and thanks for the email you sent me last night. I forwarded it to the appropriate department.” So I once again was shocked. Mark Zuckerberg, a celebrity amongst the technology crowd, was able to recall something I did. I told him that Facebook essentially revolutionized the college experience as all parties were organized and later remembered through Facebook events and Facebook photos respectively. I then asked for a picture, and the coolest thing happened. He said, “Sure! Hey dad can you take this for us?” Mark is only a few years older than I, however one doesn’t expect a billionaire’s parents to be around. I think it was awesome that his parents were there to share the experience with him. After our brief chat Mark played Rock Band with his family and I returned to talking with the Zimride people.

Shortly after I rode the train back with one of the Zimride guys, Kylan, and we chatted it up for nearly an hour. Oh and the Egypt hotties from earlier, happened to also be on this train so we had a little laugh about the odds of the situation.

Thus my seemingly great day, turned awful, happened to swing around again to be one of the most awesome days this summer, despite now needing a new pair of jeans and continuously worrying that I smell like espresso.

Yes I realize it’s Thursday but I was gone all yesterday at F8 so I’m a day late. This one is coming straight from the keynote yesterday. More on F8 later.

Watch Bill O’Reilly flip out!

See how carelessly he goes from uptight to calm and collected once on air. Haha, wtf?

If you are visiting looking for information on Jaymie Darrow please see my previous entry:
A Loss — RIP Jaymie Darrow

Lately I have been writing my Google updates on Sunday, unfortunately after hearing of Jaymie’s death, I didn’t feel like writing about my week, and it still feels inappropriate to do so, but life must go on. The following is very ranty, I apologize.

Last week I finally started making progress on my project. The group I’m working for wishes to have a set of tests to run when kernels are updated to see how the performance of various kernel aspects have changed overtime. Fortunately there is this testing environment called autotest which is open source, and from what I can tell started as a Google project. Anyway, last week I familiarized myself with the parts of autotest necessary to complete my project. I even somewhat inherited a side project which is assisting with some beta testing of autotest from our local branch.

I used the Google showers for the first time after some pre-lunch volleyball. I attended a talk on why women should not donate their eggs for money. Basically the lady was saying all the risks are currently unknown and some women develop Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome. Though she had no numbers to support her claim, she connected many women with cancer following egg donation, some resulting in death. Additionally she mentioned the website Hands Off Our Ovaries a few times.

Wednesday morning I coined a new term, albeit a fairly dumb term. Nonetheless the term is qiki, pronounced quickie. As all words in the English language containing a ‘q’ have a ‘u’ immediately after, I decided that the ‘u’ is simply implied. Anyways qiki means to quickly wiki something, and should be used in the cases where someone quickly wikis something so that they seem as if it were already something they knew. This came about when I was chatting with Monica and she mistakenly wrote “did you just qiki that” rather than “did you just wiki that.” Anyway feel free to now uses phrases such as:

“Did you qiki that?”
“No, however I just qikied your mom.”
“Qiki this!”
“I accuse you of qikiing, you qikier.”

Tuesday evening I made my second wikipedia edit after watching some Star Trek in which they the Next Generation crew visited DS9. Along those lines I am now on the final season of The Next Generation. Wednesday evening I went out with Victor and Art in Palo Alto, and Thursday evening I went to Los Gatos to celebrate Alaina’s birthday. Both nights were fun, and I’m glad I was able to spend Alaina’s birthday with her. Saturday I joined Eric and Art in San Francisco for a night in the City. I enjoyed my first San Francisco bus ride. We got pretty toasty, spent upwards of $60 each and crashed at another friend’s house who had just returned from a flight; she’s a flight attendant.

Saturday I came to the realization that I hadn’t backed up my computer in nearly a year so started doing that. Not wanting to burn my backups to DVDs, I signed up for Amazon’s S3 storage service and am working on a few scripts to move my files to the remote backup. The one thing I didn’t like about their storage service is there is not an out of the box way to upload files to the service. One either needs a third party’s software or be a developer themselves. Fortunately the latter applies to me. I quickly found an existing python library called awspylib and while testing I found a minor bug and contacted the source owner. He made me an owner of the project and I then submitted my changes to the svn repository. Additionally after a few emails he offered me the possibility of a summer internship for next year at the company he works for, Isilon Systems. It seems that it would actually be relevant to my research, so I’ll have to keep that in mind nine months from now.

Well, again I apologize to anyone that read though this poorly written post. I of course want people to read what I write, but on the other side much of this content is for my own archiving purposes, and for my future children to read. This actually reminds me of two things. I need to backup my site, and that I have wanted to write a blog entry to my future children describing my current thoughts on parenthood. That one will be interesting, especially when I read it twenty or so years from now.

As a twenty-two year old, I am fortunate to have not lost any close loved ones, however there have been four people who I was moderately close to that passed away. The first, whose name is escaping me, was in seventh grade when a fellow student who I shared classes, and occasionally ate with, died from cancer. The second and third were Angela Nguyen and Jonathan Kendall. I met Angela freshmen year of college and later Jonathan when she began dating him. They were traveling with some friends in the Bay Area during Winter break of our junior year when their vehicle rolled and engulfed in flames; three others survived. Finally a little over an hour ago I was told Jaymie Darrow, who lived a few houses down the street from me at UCSB, was found in the water near a La Jolla Palomar Mountain campsite. The cause of death is uncertain at this time, but it appears there was no foul play.

I would not say I was very close to any of these people at the time of their death, but nonetheless in each case I have been uneasy about how to react. It is sad to no longer have these people with us, but at the same time death is a part of life. I live life aware that I could die at any moment and when I think of my own death, I only concern myself with how others will react. Should I die tomorrow I feel my death would be a terrible burden on my parents, and others close to me, but that is my only concern.

Therefore when a person passes away, I try to think of how they would want us to view their death. Not knowing Jaymie very well, all I know is she was a highly energetic and positive person. From this I can only deduce that Jaymie would want us to think of her death in a positive light. Thus I have this to say:

Jaymie,

I am glad I had the opportunity to meet you and hang out the few times that we did. Your death, as tragic as it is, will only strengthen my memory of you and the times we shared. This tragedy is a reminder that friends and family members will not always be around and therefore that we should make the most out of the time we have with them. Jaymie, you will be missed, but not forgotten.

Rest in peace.

This one isn’t really a surprise to me, but I couldn’t really find anything better. Someone posted this nearly two year old unresolved Ubuntu bug to digg.

The bug filer complains that the current cow displayed when someone types apt-get moo does not look like an actual cow. The following is output from my terminal:

bboe@sybok:~$ apt-get moo
         (__)
         (oo)
   /------\/
  / |    ||
 *  /\---/\
    ~~   ~~
...."Have you mooed today?"...

The following is what the cow would look like if today’s patch is accepted:

         (__)
 _______~(..)~
   ,----\(oo)
  /|____|,'
 * /"\ /\

...."Have you mooed today?"...

Oh and the new version is a super cow, as can be seen with the cape it is wearing. Haha, wtf? I just love the way open source software works.

First I would like to acknowledge my mother’s coworkers who started reading following last week’s bidet story. I hate to set the bar low, however I do not think I will be able to keep up to par with that level of humor. Anyway thanks for reading and please feel free to leave comments, as that’s one thing this site is lacking in.

Week 3 was not as eventful as the previous weeks, however the highlight of the week was lunch with Cheri on Monday. Cheri, who I think of as a second mother, was in the Bay visiting her eldest daughter Kristen and Kristen’s boyfriend Adam. When she arrived at Google I presented her with my Stole of Gratitude for all that she has done to aid in my college success which started when she pushed me to apply to colleges during my senior year of high school. For that and the countless other ways she has helped me, I owe her my deepest gratitude. So once again, thank you Cheri.

As I mentioned previously each of the Google lobbies have a Naked Juice shelf with seemingly all 28 varieties of the drink. Starting last week I made it my goal to drink every flavor, one each morning. I shared this information with the receptionist in my lobby who thought it was an excellent idea which I think is because she may have already conquered this feat. Anyway she’s quite cute, so every morning following breakfast I go into the lobby to grab a naked juice and chat with her. Such a great way to start the day.

Following Monday’s lunch with Cheri nothing worth mentioning happened until Friday. Friday I attended a talk given by a fellow Ph.D intern, and later in the day we had a T.G.I.F. social in which there was free wine and beer, as well as various hors d’Å“uvre. An intern who also is a DJ provided the music for the social. I had a buzzing amount of beer and then went and checked out Sergey and Larry’s office with some other interns followed by a game of cutthroat.

Saturday I went to the Computer History Museum with other UCSB graduate students. The Museum was quite interesting though only two percent of their collection is currently on display. The free tour (admission was free too) covered various stages of computing from punch cards to vacuum tubes to integrated circuits to super computers and finally to personal computers.

Saturday evening I had a delicious dinner at Victor’s, courtesy of his mom, and then he and I went to Berkeley to meet up and drink with our friends Mira and Molly. Since I had just received my first paycheck on Friday, the first round of Patron shots were on me.

Anyway that was the week. I am still greatly enjoying my summer. To end this (and hopefully provoke comments) I want to spice it up by commenting on a video clip I saw on the news last week. Unfortunately I cannot find the clip online, nonetheless the context was two Southern people were asked how they would feel about having an African American president. One lady’s cut response was “I think he’s a Muslim”, and another man’s response was something along the lines of “there aren’t many black people around here. The only black people I see asking for change are holding out a cup.”

I comment to this in the form of the following questions:
Does having a middle name of Hussein really imply that someone is Muslim? And more importantly, what would it matter if Obama was? Are the parents of children not teaching their kids to be accepting of everyone despite their skin color, religious beliefs and sexual preference? What message are our nation’s citizens sending their kids about acceptance when they are openly opposed to a candidate solely on the basis of race or religion. And finally, why are we still considering religion when making political decisions?

I hope everyone has a great week!

On June 27 New York Times reported that Turkish Hackers ‘hijacked’ a few of the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) domain names. Last Thursday (July 3) ICANN confirmed these attacks mentioning that social hacking was partially involved. It should not be possible that the company in charge of assigning IP address and domain names loses, even temporarily, control of their domain names? Of course they are probably constantly under attack, nonetheless wtf?

On Monday, I discovered pancake breakfast is pretty standard at the Moma Cafe and oh so delicious. Tuesday I had an awesome time playing volleyball. Lots happened Wednesday. I had my first experience with a modern bidet and I believe it went something like the following.

I went into the bathroom to deuce it up, and upon opening the stall I uttered, “what the fuck” which fortunately no one was there to hear. I was baffled because the back of the toilet seat had some sort of contraption, and there was a control box affixed to the side of the stall. Proceeding with caution I put the seat down, put a piece of the butt paper down and I sat upon the toilet. At this moment I let out a faint pleasurable “oooh” due to warm comforting feel of the seat upon my butt. Yes it was heated.

While I was doing my business I was checking out the controls to the side. I was quite intrigued by the button that read “rear cleaning” so after dropping the kids off at the pool I pressed the button. Next came the noise of the servo followed by a warm stream of water. I then proceeded to try the drier button but decided against the last button as I didn’t think a front cleaning would do me much good. Bidets are awesome.

Wednesday continued when three of my college friends, A, E, and M came to visit me for lunch. They were quite impressed by Google and seemingly determined that they picked the wrong choice of college major. I reminded them that Google hires non-computer science students as well, but they were skeptical.

Finally Wednesday at work ended amazingly as I had my free massage. Let me just say it was incredible and much needed after the soreness from Tuesday’s volleyball. Following the massage I met up with A, E and M that visited for lunch for dinner at a Chicago style pizza place called Patxi’s which was quite delicious. Damn, Wednesday was awesome.

Not too much exciting happened on Tuesday, I was just finishing up stuff for the long weekend, which the weekend was pretty awesome. Along with the A, E, and M I went into the city for the 4th. Because it was a pretty nice afternoon, and for other possibly dumb reasons, we decided to walk from basically the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a long, but enjoyable 6 mile walk. After reaching our destination I played a little flip cup and then the four of us headed toward Berkeley for fireworks and pizza. Saturday I worked on priceTrackr, and today I did a hike/walk of the Stanford Dish area with E.

Finally this evening I went to dinner in Newark with part of my second family. We had some delicious sushi of which I am still full, then went back and celebrated an early birthday followed by some wii Guitar Hero. Finally it’s bed time. Night.

So I left work a little early today because they weren’t serving dinner tonight and because I had some stuff to take care of. Most importantly I was contacted by this guy Tom, an EE major at University of Illinois, who would like to donate a server and help improve priceTrackr. So I of course was like hell yes, thus tonight I have been running a few scripts to start collecting some fresh newegg data.

After crawling the user comments pages I have gathered over 35,000 unique newegg product IDs with which we could seed our crawl with, thus essentially eliminating the need for the user submitted add item page. However I don’t think we’ll quite have the resources to update all these items multiple times in a day, but one never knows. Maybe we’ll start small and make a decent amount of ad revenue to warrant switching to a cloud computing server structure. That would be pretty sweet, but of course we must start with baby steps.

Anyway I’ll make updates with priceTrackr’s progress along with everything else. Jeeze 3 posts this week; one might start to think I have nothing better to do