November 20, 2004
Tonight we fly to Sri Lanka for a week. Yes, a week is too short. There's always someone insisting you don't really know a country until you've spent six months there. Maybe. But the planet is large, employer holidays are not, and I've come to take a more global view of this whole travelling thing. Here's to country number 85.
November 19, 2004
People ask me what I actually do at Google. That's secret, of course. Google is fond of secrecy, usually for good reasons. But every now and then something that feels like it should be locked away turns out to be a freely available academic paper. The Google File System is one of those. And there's another paper floating around that will really blow your mind.
November 16, 2004
As of today, the Zurich office is officially a Google office. We have our own massage chair. This is not a frivolous matter: per the founding decrees of Larry and Sergey, no Googler shall be more than thirty feet from food, caffeine shall flow unlimited, and there shall be a massage chair. And there is exactly one company in the world that makes the right kind.
November 06, 2004
The new apartment now has a dedicated media PC. To celebrate, I decided to switch from WinAmp to iTunes. Download, install, drag the music folder onto the library: smooth. Then iTunes failed to notice the files had moved, and I started clicking things to fix it. This is the story of how a perfectly reasonable sequence of clicks nearly destroyed my entire MP3 collection.
November 02, 2004
Every blogger seems to be doing it, so here goes. Bush is a man with a plan and wastes no time executing it. Kerry is uninspired and largely copies his opponent. Neither is exactly inspiring — but with the world divided, the budget surplus destroyed, and freedom under attack, the choice still comes down to one decisive factor.
October 30, 2004
Switzerland is expensive, sure — but ask a Swiss person and they'll tell you the quality is higher, so it evens out. They're wrong, and not for the reason you'd expect. Sometimes crappy is exactly what you need, and the absence of cheap options turns out to be a quiet tax on the poor.
October 28, 2004
Zurich seems easy-going and international until the small Swiss rules surface. The kitchen is closed, but please eat your takeaway pizza outside in the rain. Or: this is a Bierhalle, but at dinner time we won't serve you just beer. Luckily, globalization sends in Pakistanis and Brits to undercut the local traditions.
October 28, 2004
Trying to install Windows 2000, I went looking for a floppy drive to make a boot disk — and discovered my laptop didn't have one. I'd been working on this machine for five months and never noticed. Remember when the iMac dropped the floppy and everybody wondered what on earth you'd do without one?
October 25, 2004
After months of breathless speculation, PalmOne finally announced the new Treo — the phone that was supposed to be the love of geeks everywhere. And then the specs landed, and the inner geek wept quietly. So what's a christmas present supposed to look like now? Maybe — gulp — an MS Smartphone?
October 18, 2004
The Economist's Big Mac index uses burger prices to spot over- and undervalued currencies. While furniture shopping in Zurich, it occurred to me that an Ikea Billy bookcase would do the same job — and Ikea conveniently uses the same URL scheme in every country. Twelve countries later, the rankings hold some surprises. Rip-off Britain, anyone?
October 10, 2004
The alarm at the Google Zurich office is strict: leave the door open too long and a pseudo-police guy turns up. Last night, though, the door was the problem — it wouldn't open. Then a rescuing colleague arrived and promptly got locked in too. What followed involved emergency exits, mumbling uniformed men, and a secretary who knew about two very important keys.
October 08, 2004
Der Untergang shows Hitler as a human being, which only makes the whole thing scarier. But what struck me most wasn't the dictator — it was the generals, still taking orders right up to the bitter end, and even after he killed himself. Soldiers risking their lives to fetch gasoline to burn the Führer. Why do people keep following, long after the system is plainly falling apart?
October 07, 2004
I often wonder if all white people look the same to people from other races. We assume we look more different — different hair, different eyes — but maybe that's just because we pay attention to those things. Then I came across a little online quiz: eighteen portraits, guess Chinese, Japanese or Korean. My score suggested I might as well flip a coin. A three-sided one.
October 04, 2004
My wife voted on the movie by falling soundly asleep. I knew it wouldn't get better, but couldn't quite give up on the time already invested — that's where technology rides in. WinDVD lets you speed up playback in 5% steps, and the audio still sounds normal. Bad movies compress at 40%. Which led me to wonder whether BitTorrent could fix incomplete downloads the same way.
September 30, 2004
A year ago I was hacking Google from the outside with their API. Now I work there, and the fellow hackers keep emailing me for tips I can no longer give. The best tricks were always against the Terms of Use anyway. Then one day I spotted a complete rip-off of Google's site, posted the link internally, and ten minutes later...
September 28, 2004
Tell anyone you are moving to Switzerland and you get the same line, usually delivered with a smirk about cuckoo clocks. Five hundred years of peace, and what do they have to show for it? On my five-minute walk to the office I got approached by two hookers and a drug dealer. Boring is not the word.
September 21, 2004
The Treo 650 ships in late November. My birthday is November 24. Coincidence? I do not think so. The wanting has turned into lusting, and I have been telling my inner geek for months that with the right gadget I could finally become an organized person. Memo recorders, paper planners, whiteboards — all abandoned. This time will be different.
September 19, 2004
Finally installed Skype, late to the party as usual. Internet telephony left a bad taste eight years ago, so I had been skeptical. But this works like a dream — and at 1.7 cents a minute versus the 16.5 Swiss Telecom charges to call the Netherlands, it raises an awkward question: why do I still pay for a landline at all?
September 14, 2004
Mountain View Google had a barbershop and an oil change. Zurich Google does not, but everything is within five minutes anyway. The strange part is what this does to time: you go swimming in the lake on Saturday, pass the office on the way back, just check one thing, and somehow it is midnight and you are calling California.
September 12, 2004
Finding an apartment in Zurich was supposed to be impossible for foreigners. We landed one minute from the Niederdorf, two from Google, three from Central Station. Europeans like to think the rest of the world is queuing at our borders. Then I asked a Ukrainian colleague if he would rather work here than the US. His answer settled the question.
I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.