run log

Today's mileage: 3.0 mi.
Total milage since 6/2/2003: 47.0 mi.
Course: 3x Google Loop
Calories burned: 771

Dan managing the AdWords training room at Google.

run log

I did my longest workout yet and spent 1.5 hrs in the gym running, lifting weights, and doing crunches.

Today's mileage: 3.6 mi.
Total milage since 6/2/2003: 44.0 mi.
Course: Treadmill
Calories burned: 891

Total caloies burned (including gym workout): 1370

stress test

I took a stress quiz at Fortune.com.

I scored a 26 out of 40 on the quiz.

Apparently, my score means: Severe Stress: You may still be coping, but life at work can sometimes be miserable. You might benefit from counseling.

Heh...I think I'm going to go out and toss a frisbee around now to get rid of my stress.

google is god?

Thomas Friedman wrote his Sunday column this week about Google, based in part on what he saw when he visited the company three weeks ago. He describes his trip in his column:

"It is a mind-bending experience. You can actually sit in front of a monitor and watch a sample of everything that everyone in the world is searching for. (Hint: sex, God, jobs and, oh my word, professional wrestling usually top the lists.)"

Given my experience at Google, I've found that our users search for much more than just sex, jobs, and wrestling. We've gotten reports from a person who started sweating, having chest pains, and when he typed this into Google, he realized after reading the first couple of search results that he was having a heart attack and called 911. We've also had a couple of grateful users write into us that they were able to find long lost relatives by typing their names into Google. I've used Google myself to find some random and obscure things, such has how to install and wire a MP3 CD changer to the back of my car.

In any case, the most random (and interesting) observation Friedman wrote about Google was a comparison to Google and God:

'Says Alan Cohen, a V.P. of Airespace, a new Wi-Fi provider: "If I can operate Google, I can find anything. And with wireless, it means I will be able to find anything, anywhere, anytime. Which is why I say that Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything. Throughout history, people connected to God without wires. Now, for many questions in the world, you ask Google, and increasingly, you can do it without wires, too."'

To that I say, Google still has a long way from knowing everything or for that matter, knowing what I want. (I still can't find out how to generate the codes to unlock my cell phone, nor can Google figure out whether I'm looking for information on a car or on a celestial body when I type in the query "saturn").

But it's rather nice that Thomas was kind enough to write such flattering things about us in his weekly column.

cnn vanity

Huzzah! Google Toolbar 2.0 made the front page of CNN.com.

run log

Today's mileage: 3.1 mi.
Total milage since 6/2/2003: 40.4 mi.
Course: Los Altos Rd/San Antonio Rd/Main St Loop

Tried out my new ECG-4 heart rate monitor today.
Calories burned: 806

Mike hard at work coding. Sent from my Nokia 7250 phone.

press coverage

We've gotten a bit of press coverage since we shipped Toolbar 2.0:

• As of 6pm today the Google Toolbar #1 on Daypop Top 40.
  
• ABCNews.com and the Boston Globe, among many other media outlets, ran an AP wire article about the toolbar (see below).
  
• The toolbar was even featured in the New York Times (they ran a CNET article about the toolbar)
  
• We've also gotten some coverage in Germany and in Australia.
  

From the AP article:

"Online search engine Google introduced several new gadgets in its popular toolbar for Web browsers, hoping to build even greater brand loyalty amid heightened competition.

The new software out Thursday for the toolbar includes a feature that automatically blocks pop-up ads, as well a program that automatically fills out Internet forms seeking a customer's name and address.

The function that fills in forms offers an option to store credit card numbers too, but the information is encrypted on the hard drive of a user's computer instead of Google's computers, for security and privacy reasons.

The toolbar also enables users to transfer online content to Internet journals known as Weblogs, or "blogs," by pressing a button.

Google emphasized that the new toolbar is still being tested and could be revised later.

The new features represent Google's most ambitious upgrade of its toolbar since the Mountain View, Calif.-based company offered the software in December 2000. The toolbar works only on Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer, the world's dominant Web browser."

run log

Today's mileage: 1.5 mi.
Total milage since 6/2/2003: 37.3 mi.
Course: Boot Camp Obstacle Course

volleyball & beer

Our company offsite at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk was awesome. I spent the day drinking beer, playing volleyball, and tossing a frisbee around on the beach. I couldn't ask for too much more.


(Mike and Adam in a 1-on-1 match)

I had the opportunity to take a Canon EOS 10D 6-megapixel digital camera with a 28-200mm lens to the offiste and snapped a ton of photos. The 10D is one sweet camera. The photos are really sharp and the color and dynamic range is just amazing.

rest day

No running today. I'm going to give my tired legs a break after yesterday's painful boot camp workout.

Tomorrow is our company's engineering and product management offsite at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. Looking forward to a relaxing day of sitting on the beach, drinking beers, and playing volleyball.

google toolbar 2.0 beta

We've released a beta version of the new Google Toolbar 2.0 today. You can download it here.



There's lots of awesome enhancments in the Toolbar 2.0, including a great pop-up blocker, an auto-form filler, a BlogThis! button that lets you publish a blog easily form any web page, and a new spiffy user interface that is a drastic improvement over the old one.

so tired

I'm so tired. We had our hardest bootcamp workout thus far.

We ran, lifted weights, did push-ups and crunches, ran some more, did more weight lifting and other painful exercises, ran more and did more weight lifting and push-ups, and then ended with lunges.

I'm going to sleep well tonight.

run log

Today's mileage: 2 mi.
Total milage since 6/2/2003: 35.8 mi.
Course: 3.5x around the e/Pi building (boot camp)

run log

Today's mileage: 3.1 mi.
Total milage since 6/2/2003: 33.8 mi.
Course: 3 x Google Loop

heart rate

My polar heart rate monitor broke. Sucks.

I found a Sports Instruments ECG-4 heart rate monitor on sale at rei-outlet.com. It even calculates the calories you burn while you exercise. Best of all it's half price--$60 as compared to the $120 list price.

I think I'm going to purchase one.

run log

Today's mileage: 3.1 mi.
Total milage since 6/2/2003: 30.7 mi.
Course: Los Altos Rd/San Antonio Rd/Main St Loop

books galore

There are so many different new books out there it's un-f*ckingbelieveable. I was at Borders bookstore earlier tonight and there were probably over 100,000 different books in the store. Can you believe that there are more than 1,000,000 different titles at Amazon.com?

Too many people have things to say, exposes to write, and stories to tell. One day I'm going to write my own book and add it to the pile of crap out you can buy at Borders and Amazon. The only thing is that I haven't figured what to write about yet, but whatever I'm going to write will be juicy.


(The crapload of books at Borders)

One book I found (at an Urban Outfitters--not Borders) was the "Burn Your Anger Into Ashes" book. It's quite wacko. When you get pissed off at someone, you tear out a page, write their name down, and light it on fire. I'm planing on starting a bonfire tonight.


(The burn your ashes into anger book. Tear off pages and burn when you get mad at someone or something!)

(All the photos in this blog are from my Nokia 7250 camera phone)

my new camera phone

The Nokia 7250 camera phone I ordered arrived today.

It's awesome. You can take photos on the phone and e-mail them to someone instantly. I'm going to try to set up a photo-blog where I can send photos from my phone and post them to my blog.


(Nokia 7250)

ouch

More boot camp today. Today we did strength training with weights and these really painful exercise bands.

I'm going to be sore again tomorrow...

google catalogs

Google Catalogs is cool. For that matter, so is Froogle.

You can buy everything from wetsuits to stuffed penguins.

run log

Today's mileage: 2.5 mi.
Total milage since 6/2/2003: 27.6 mi.
Course: Shoreline Lake Loop

death march

Google AdSense went live this morning. Basically, it's a program that lets web site publishers sign up, and in exchange for displaying content-targeted Google Ads on your website, you get a cut of the ad revenue. Once AdSense was launched, people started using it immediately, and hopefully it will do well over the next couple of months.

One of my friends was an engineer on the product, and he did a 2 day marathon coding session in order to get it out the door. I kept telling him to go home, but the pressures of shipping AdSense outweighed my concerns for his health. In any case, his entire team also stayed late into the night to get the product shipped, and it would have been ackward had he left his colleagues to go sleep.

When I was a release program manager at Microsoft, I remember working hard trying to motivate the many thousands of engineers on the Windows 2000 project to stay nights and weekends to get their pieces of the operating system written, tested, and integrated into the build. It was particularly painful on the last month before the end of any major milestones (beta releases, etc.), as we'd move to a 7-day a week, 12-16 hr/day schedule.

We called this painful drive to shipping a "death march" (in fact, there's even a book written about such things). Death marches aren't healthy, and it caused a ton of engineers to quit the Windows group and move to something much less intense after Windows 2000 shipped.

Anyhow, after what I went through at Microsoft, I try to ensure that the engineers that work on projects I'm involved with don't have to go through a death march (or at least, not one that requires multiple-day marathon coding sessions). Mainly, this comes from not setting arbitary ship deadlines that an understaffed team doesn't have any chance of meeting, and to priortize bugs in such a way that the team isn't fixing frivolous ones that few people will encounter. There are things you can't plan for--like last minute security bugs or website crashes--but for the most part, careful planning goes a long way to avoiding unhealthy last-minute, late-night marathon coding sessions.

Avoiding death marches is an art, and one that I'm still trying to master.

so so sore

I signed up for this fitness Boot Camp course at work and went to my first class today. Damn, I'm sore. We did situps, lots of crunches, sprints, push-ups, and other exercises designed to cause pain.

The past two weeks of regular running didn't help either. The exercises we do in boot camp work muscles I didn't particularly care to strengthen in the past. So I'm feeling it now.

12 more weeks to go...ouch.

run log

Today's mileage: 4 mi.
Total milage since 6/2/2003: 25.1 mi.
Course: Shoreline Lake-Theater Loop

sand in the shower

I went surfing agian at Cowell's Beach in Santa Cruz, CA. It was totally awesome.

The worst thing about surfing is the aftermath. You're all sore, and when you take a shower back home, there's sand everywhere. Yuck.


(Someday I'll be able to surf as well as Dane Reynolds)

run log

Today's mileage: 3.1 mi.
Total milage since 6/2/2003: 21.1 mi.
Course: Los Altos Rd/San Antonio Rd/Main St Loop

vanity publishing for geeks

Blogging, according to a few of my colleauges, is a form of vanity publishing for geeks. Geeks log on, write a bunch of drivel, and maybe a few people will eventually read it. One of my co-workers even claimed that he "didn't see it taking off anytime soon."

That's what people said about web pages back in 1995! I started making web pages in 1995, and people thought I was a big dork. (I'm still a big dork now, but that's a whole other matter). Boy, have things changed. Maybe it was geeky back in 1995, but if you (or your business, or your dog, or whatever) don't have a web page now, you're either a hermit, or you're living back in the stone age.

The same goes for IRC. It was the instant messaging of the early 1990s. Only geeks would log on, but they would chat about everything--from where to find porn to who would be the #1 pick in the NFL draft that year. And it's caught on...so much that there have been over half a BILLION downloads of instant messaging clients like AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ. Microsoft and Apple now ship IM clients with their operating systems now...you can't find a computer these days without an annoying window asking if you want to sign on or sign up for an IM account.

So to those who believe blogging is a joke, or just a dorky hobby, I say think again. Past history says otherwise. It's part of our nature to want to share our thoughts with the world, and blogging--which lets you publish to the world at the push of a button--makes doing so an order of magnitude easier.

The future is with me (and it will be with you too if you go to Blogger.com and set up your own weblog).

green machine

We have way too many random toys at Google. I just discovered that someone bought a couple of Green Machines. It's perhaps the wackiest thing I've every ridden. You steer it by pulling a set of levers that control the rear wheels. The rear-wheel steering "allows for crazy hairpin turns, and spectacular spin-outs," according to Amazon's description of the product.

I've wiped out on it multiple times; the folks at Amazon weren't lying.


Bostock riding the Google Green Machine

segway spill

I had a nasty wipe out off of a segway about a month ago. Well apparently I wasn't the only one...

run log

Today's mileage: 2.2 mi.
Total milage since 6/2/2003: 18 mi.
Course: 2 x Google Loop

trick out!

I went with Bostock to see 2Fast 2Furious. The plot was so hideously unbelievable that I thought that the Starship Enterprise would come swooping in at any moment to take away the two main characters.

Of course, seeing all the tricked out cars in the movie reminded me of my high school days when many of my associates would try to do likewise with their cars. The only difference was that they had no budget, and their cars looked more like Rice Rockets than the performance street cars featured in the movie. Heh...I remember rolling on the floor laughing when I saw a spoiler on a rice rocket Honda Civic in my high school's parking lot that was taller than the car itself.

Anyhow, I think I'm going to put Blue Neon Lights underneath my bmw...then again, I think not.

run log

Today's mileage: 4 mi.
Total milage since 6/2/2003: 15.8 mi.
Course: Shoreline Lake-Theater Loop

more gadgets

Nokia and Ericsson have been busy releasing a flurry of new spiffy looking cell phones.

The Nokia 6200 from AT&T Wireless just came out and looks really cool. Letstalk.com is giving the phone away for free with new activation so I went ahead got one..

I also want to get an Ericsson T610. It's the latest hot phone in Europe but won't be available in the US until December. I've asked a friend to see if he can find one for a good price when he visits Europe this week.

The great thing about GSM phones is that you can switch phones easily by taking the SIM card out of the back of one phone and putting it in another. Everything transfers over easily, including your contacts and phone numbers. Why other carriers and cellular protocols don't support this is beyond me.

run log

Today's mileage: 2.2 mi.
Total milage since 6/2/2003: 11.8 mi.
Course: 2 x Google Loop

run log

Today's mileage: 5.1 mi.
Total milage since 6/2/2003: 9.6 mi.
Course: Shoreline Lake-Theater Loop + 1xGoogle Loop
PR Today! Shoreline Lake-Theater Loop - 0:36:02

italian job

I went to to see The Italian Job. Overall it was a great movie--the plot was intriguing and the car chase scenes were awesome. I want to go out and buy a Mini Cooper S now.

hang ten

Surfing is hard. I went for the first time in Santa Cruz today with some friends. I got up, but it took a while. And I wiped out so many times I couldn't even count. But I will go back again. Nemesis waves: you haven't seen the last of me yet...

random trivia: what to wear to weddings

I received an invitation to a friend's wedding today. The invitation said "formal attire." Having not been to many weddings, I didn't know what that meant.

I tried to search for this term at Google and most of the search results were tuxedo shops or descriptions of different types of tuxedos.

But after trying a couple of other queries, I found a wedding website that appeared to be an authoritative source on wedding attire.

Apparently for daytime weddings, a "dark suit" with "conversative shirt and tie" is appropriate. Only when the invitation says "black tie" do guys need to wear their tuxedos.

Whew! And I thought I would have to go hunt down where I put my trusty tux...

quote of the day

"Jeebus hallelujah! All my porn is still safe!"

--My friend Matt Lee, rejoicing today after doing an inventory today of his data when he noticed that a game had corrupted part of his hard drive.


(Matt stuffing his mouth with Marshmallow
Peeps, sometime in April of 2000)

run log

Today's mileage: 2.5 mi.
Total milage since 6/2/2003: 7.0 mi.
Course: 2.5 x Google Loop

the telephone game

I remember playing the telephone game in elementary school.

You'd whisper something in your neighbor's ear--like "Bill's head is red." Your neighbor would do likewise in his neighbor's ear and so on down the chain of 30 kids.

At the end of the chain, the last kid would stand up and tell the class what he heard--"Jill's butt is bleeding"--and compare it to the original statment. The whole class would break out laughing at how ridiculous the end statement was and then wonder in amazement how "Bill's head is red" could change to something so random and different.

Believe it or not, this happens way more often than not in real life. Even with email, everything gets intrepreted out of context and people freak out.

At a place I had worked at in the past, a VP made an offhand comment about something, and a bunch of emails were sent around trying to figure out what the VP meant. No one bothered to ask the VP directly; people weren't comfortable doing so, and it was nearly impossible getting time on his schedule.

Suddenly a whole product group of 50 people dropped what they were doing and spent the next week coming up with a powerpoint presention that would show the VP the "value" of their project to the company. The comment turned out to be a joke he was telling someone else, and was in fact a compliment for the product.

Everyone laughed at the end--not at how funny the joke was--but at how ridiculous the situation was and how 50 people could waste a week on a frivolous presentation because they misunderstood a joke.

So lesson on the day: watch what you say and what you write in your emails. Someone's bound to whisper it to someone else or forward your emails on (and on), and it'll mutate into something totally unexpected.

ode to duct tape

Duct tape is probably the one of the most useful things ever made. It's waterproof, sticky, and has the incredible ability to hold things together. I've repaired tents, backpacks, and even shoes with it. The uses are endless.

You can even use duct tape to cure warts. (A dermatologist actually prescribed this to one of my friends over freezing his wart off).

And best of all--duct tape now comes in 12 different colors!

run log

Today's mileage: 2.5 mi.
Total milage since 6/2/2003: 4.5 mi.
Course: Shoreline Lake Loop (Short)

2 miles around google

I started running again.

It's been a bit over two weeks since I had an unfortunate injury to my right leg, so I'm taking it slow. But in the two weeks I haven't run, I've gained several pounds (and in fact, I've gained some weight since starting at Google). There's so much work to do that I haven't had much time to go out and run even before my injury, but that is going to change.

I don't think I can say it much better than my friend Kenny:

"Whenever I settle into a new place, I always get out of shape simply because it's easy not to stay in shape. Let's face it, it's easy to eat, study, bum around, and sleep.

On the other hand, I have never heard anyone say running is easy, and if someone does, then they aren't running fast enough. Running is as pure as sports get. There are no excuses in running, your only opponent is yourself. One's will to continue can often be much stronger than one's own physical state. That's how you increase endurance and speed, testing your own limits. Unlike other sports, where equipment and facilities are necessary, there are few reasons why one can't run. I've always thought that if you can walk properly without pain, then you can probably run.

I think running is a sport that takes time to appreciate. You really can't just go out and run for a few days, think it's boring, and quit. There is a certain amount of dedication required before any results are apparent. I've only been running a few times during the 5 weeks that I've been here, but I've decided that I need to get back into shape. It's pretty sad when a few of my pants (or as the English would say: trousers) start fitting fairly tight, when they used to fit loosely. I ran for about 30 minutes today along the Cam, and there's nothing like the sense of victory when the run is finished and the body begins the recover. If you've been running for a few years, then you might know what it feels like to get your 2nd wind during a run. It's almost like an injection of adrenaline, you can feel your body tingle and you suddenly feel stronger. The "runner's high" is commonly associated with the secretion of endorphins, a natural pain-suppressant that results in a euphoric feeling." (6/20/2001)

No more being lazy for me.

Run Log
Today's mileage: 2 mi.
Total milage since 6/2/2003: 2 mi.
Course: 2 x Google Loop

my first domain name

I registered my first domain name today (weschan.com) at GoDaddy! And for only $17.50 USD for two years! I remember that doing this cost $100 per year back in early 2000. Amazing how prices have dropped so drastically. Competition and free markets rule!

I've also migrated my blog to a new server; hopefully there will be a noticable speed-up in service.