October 16, 2009

My One Lunar Cycle No-Post-iversary

Yeah, it's been that long. 28 Days Later, stuffs and things at varying orbitals of excitement have been happening with acceptable regularity:
  • Not only am I the proud owner of a longboard, but this particular plank of my comprehensive transportation platform now bears the inimitable insignia of one Randall Munroe. (I can only wonder what joyous blasphemies #666 will bring.)
  • Finally made it out to the infamous DNA Lounge; this SF institution has the peculiar distinction of being owned by ex-Netscape programmer Jamie Zawinski.
  • Canadian Thanksgiving shindig, complete with full turkey and pumpkin pie. Need I say more? (No, but I should probably add this: there's another Canadian Thanksgiving dinner this Sunday hosted by the Stanford Canadian Club; despite what their (apparently infrequently updated) site says, it really is this weekend.)
  • Pretty Lights at The Independent last night. If you haven't seen them, you really should.
How's Facebook? (Come on - if you care enough about me to read my pithy musings, you're probably expecting an answer to this question.) Intense. It pains me to say it, but Facebook has so far provided much more in the way of personal development and work-related awesomeness than Google ever did. How can that be? It comes down to recruiting strategy: Google casts as wide a net as possible, hoping to grab what it considers to be the best of the best before someone else does. In my opinion, this strategy is bound to backfire. You end up with a zillion interns and, well, less than a zillion interesting and/or useful projects; it doesn't take a math major to see that you can't pair each intern up with something worthwhile to work on. (It does take a math major, however, to look at the whole situation and start rambling about bijections.) Here's the point: half of the interns coming out of Google are extremely wary of returning, and that can't be good. ("Half" here is an extremely unscientific guesstimate, but several co-interns (who will obviously remain nameless in such a public forum as The Internet) have expressed similar sentiments.)

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