Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

My team had another nice feature launch today: Data Liberation, “Mark as viewed”, and New! :-)

In addition to all the core feature work, I spent a ton of time making the screenshots. Take a close look (click to see a larger image):

And this one:

I’m so glad my PR team has a good sense of humor. :-)

The first part of my career involved a lot work that normal people don’t really know about. Whether it was my work at Xilinx on the VHDL IDE (specifically on simulation and testbench generation) or my early work at Microsoft on Visual Studio and the .NET Framework, it’s really a small group of people that use those products or understand what they are.

Then, later at Microsoft, I worked on the high-profile, but ill-fated, WinFS project. Pretty much, everyone in the industry knows about WinFS, but most non-computer-dorks don’t because the project was cancelled before it launched.

When I started at Google, I spent a year or so on Web Search, but still didn’t have a great answer when non-engineers asked me, “What exactly do you do at work?” Since the internals of Google Search are a trade secret, it’s tough to describe the specific improvements I made. Let’s just leave it as: search is measurably faster and more relevant thanks to the work my team did. :-)

Next, I started doing a lot of behind the scenes backend infrastructure stuff for Google Apps, which, again, is hard to point to without giving away secrets.

Fortunately though, I recently started working on Google Docs, and we’ve been busy. In fact, this past week, we had two nice feature launches: Shared Folders and more and Doc Previews in GMail.

So, if you were wondering what I do at work all day, now you know. Well, some of it anyway. :-P

Crissy and I have been nomads the past few weeks; I had long business trips to Seattle and Zurich, and Crissy came along for both of them.

The first trip to Seattle was about the perfect length (about 5 days, anything longer and I start getting cranky and homesick). Unfortunately, the trip got extended because Colorado got 18 inches of snow the day we were supposed to fly back. The earliest we could get rebooked was 4 days later!

The helpful United representative did offer us an alternative though: we could have come home a day earlier if we didn’t mind catching a connecting flight through Calgary!

Anyway, we did get a few more days to see friends and hang out, so it wasn’t overall that bad. Except that once we finally got back to Denver, we had 3 days before we left to go to Zurich.

As you know, I love Zurich and this was my third time visiting (see my Travel category for posts on the last two trips). Since Crissy came along, I added a couple weekends to the trip so that we could see the sights and Crissy could meet my Zurich friends.

We have tons of photos and and experiences to share; I should have the pictures up and blog posts written over the next few days.

And for now, we’re glad to finally be home. :-)

As I mentioned last week, Crissy and I bought an elliptical machine and put in the family room in front of the TV, so we have absolutely no reason not to exercise.

So far, I’ve worked out everyday since we got the machine (11 days in a row! woohoo!) and I’ve been noticing some great changes already. For starters, I’m sleeping a lot better and while I’m a little more physically tired during the day, I’m much more mentally alert. Also, I’m slowly getting over the initial hump, as each successive workout now is getting a little easier.

I’m planning to tighten up my diet very soon and I’m hoping the pounds start rolling off. Specifically, I’m going to reduce high fat foods and increase lean proteins. And most importantly, I’m going to observe Lent this year and give up desserts completely.

Wish me luck! :-)

We finally got our Elliptical Machine delivered today, so I have no excuse to not work out and lose some weight. After a long search — these machines are pricey! — we settled on a Life Fitness X3 Advanced. It was one of the few machines I found with a nice stride and since it was last year’s model, we got a reasonable price.

It’s set up in the family room in front of the TV. And since it’s big and conspicuous, hopefully we’ll use it often and I’ll slowly transition from a nerdy, overweight Indian to just a nerdy Indian. :-P

As an added incentive I’m tracking weight, resting heart rate, calories burned, and a few other stats. In a few weeks, I’ll have enough data to make some graphs that hopefully trend in a healthy direction. And in a matter of months, I can make a Powerpoint presentation! (Don’t worry, I’m just kidding.)

As soon as it was delivered, I did a short 30 minute workout; I better workout tomorrow too — no excuses!

My blog’s admin dashboard is telling me that this will be Post #300! Seems like Post #100 was a long time ago.

I thought I should do something fun to mark the milestone and decided that I would replace the existing “South Park Vijay” picture and try to get a nice “Simpsons Vijay” picture (I used Simpsonize Me).

Unfortunately, the results weren’t that good; the character doesn’t really look like me: the hair is the wrong color and style, the glasses are the wrong shape, etc.

So South Park Vijay will continue to grace this blog, until a better cartoon equivalent is found.

Could someone please write the “Elmo-ize me” app? That would rock.

A close Cinciripini family friend, Gene Speichinger, passed away a couple of days ago. He had a pretty incredible life, including a dozen years of rural community development in Peru:

In spending 12 years working with the Quechua Indians of the highlands in southern Peru, Gene worked on the construction of schools, roads, wells, electrical and mechanical installations, bridges, and management of a 5,500-acre cooperative farming project, and was director and pastor of a the Catholic church in Capachica. In this time, he became fluent in Spanish and the native language, Quechua.

There’s a visitation on Sunday and the funeral on Monday, both in Columbia, Missouri, at the Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church.

Since the blog hasn’t puked since yesterday, I’m ready to declare it “most likely back in business”.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled ramblings. :-)

I found a few more problems and hacked over them. Hopefully the hacks work and I can send some time this weekend trying to fix the problems permanently.

My last post was a bit pre-mature, I only got permalinks working temporarily. Now I think I have them working permanently, which fixed the RSS problem (all you RSS readers should now see this post). Here’s what I went through:

• Problem: Site completely down (wp-load.php parse error)
• Solution: At first I tried to restore wp-load.php with the original, but that just led to more parse errors in different files. So I reinstalled Wordpress. Site back up, but RSS and Permalinks still broken.

• Problem: Permalinks broken
• Solution: Republish .htaccess file from Wordpress. Temporarily fixed problem. Discovered .htaccess file was being reverted within minutes of publishing new version.

• Problem .htaccess file reverting
• Solution: Removed rewrite rules from Wordpress block in the .htacess file. Now Wordpress isn’t randomly overwriting stuff. This fixed the permalinks and RSS feed problems.

Hopefully no other problems show up. I’m still curious what caused this. I didn’t touch the blog for days before it went down. Perhaps my hosting service upgraded some of the servers or something. The traffic spike prior to the problems is also something I need to look into.

I hate software. :-P