"Open up the laptops in front of you, and I'll show you how to access our intranet."

The Google intranet. The repository of Googler-eyes-only Google data. It's every and any information addict's dream. And I can hardly stand how amazing it is to have access to it all. My fingers couldn't type queries fast enough and my eyes weren't scanning nearly quick enough for all that I wanted to learn. Can that be my job? Manually absorbing everything that their intranet contains, from seekrits to mounds of "trash" data? Do I really have to type lines of code? Can't I just sit here in absolute bliss?

There's an electricity here that's hard to describe, especially in a way that doesn't violate my NDA on my very first day of work ;) (Note the disclaimer at the bottom of the right toolbar on insanecats now? That's required. Wave hi to the pretty Google lawyers.) I'm not exactly sure what it is yet. But everyone seems actually ... happy.

"It's eerie, isn't it?", another first-dayer said to me today, "How utopian it is. I wonder what the catch is."

"I'm sure it involves ninjas," I replied absently, too busy watching the plates of food carried by employees around me to pay attention to what i was saying. "And possibly geese."

They taught us the secret handshake, and gave us the secret Google decoder ring that doubles as a whistle, and showed us the cages of pigeons who are used to work the pigeon ranking system. We each get a pigeon named after us. My pigeon has a lot of blue in his feathers and smells funny, but pecks the other birds, so he's okay by me!

So this is Google, I thought to myself, looking out over the employees prancing around and living their lives. The wizard's curtain has been pulled back to reveal ... not an old man, but rather a wizard even more magical than the illusion in front of the curtain.

In many ways, I couldn't be more thrilled.

But there's a tiny little nagging voice inside of me that wonders where I'm supposed to fit in in all of this. In a place this magnificent, where's my edge? A bright light isn't visible from the sun. Everyone here is smart and unique, so does that create a paradox? Should I become a happy cog in this perfect job or continue to blaze my own way?

The very fact that I catch myself asking these questions, and wondering these things, is indication enough to me that this is exactly where I should be. Not only is this an amazing place to work in its own right, but it's also providing for me exactly what I've been craving. A challenge.

I'm not sure what moment of today was the best. Perhaps you can help me select one.

When my shuttle arrived at Google at 8:30 this morning, there was dew on the grass, a warm sun overhead, and the only sound was my feet against the sand of their volleyball court. I walked in, made myself some of the best coffee ever, and sat down at my uber-decked out workstation. (No specifics, because, y'know, NDA and all that. You'll be hearing this a lot. But let's just say, wow!!) It was an empty, quiet campus.

Then some of us n00glers met up for a brief orientation lecture, and afterwards I grabbed some of them to head to lunch. I know I shouldn't be surprised that they're all smart and interesting people, but I kinda was. Instead of going to the main café, we decided to check out one of the alternative eateries on campus, this one called Café 150, where all ingredients are farmed within 150 miles of the Google campus. Everything was so fresh and tasty that it was unbelievable. You think you know carrot cake? You don't know from carrot cake!! And it was extremely cool to just chat with these guys and start forming bonds with my fellow Googlers.

Then on the way back to my side of campus, someone stopped me.
"[Catspaw]?", he asked.
"Yeeeees?" (Hippo says I'm naturally paranoid, but I think that it's further enhanced through practice.)
"Oh my gawd, you're [Catspaw] from PyCon!"
Some random Pythoner recognized me from PyCon two years ago. Cool town! He wants to do lunch at some point and hear about what I'm working on.

Got back to my desk and did some high quality intranet browsing. It's like surfing through Google Labs on crack and I couldn't be happier. On the way back to my desk I passed by Howard Rhinegold who was giving a talk, and got an e-mail about another talk going on that afternoon about organic foods, where organic coffee and dark chocolate would be handed out. And I marveled that I was getting paid to be here.

Near the end of the day, chatting with some colleagues, they asked what time I would be here in the morning. "I got in around 8:30 this morning", I said. "8:30?????", they all exclaimed at once, with fascination and disgust in their voice as if I'd just said that sometimes I like to chew on the heads of kittens. "You do mean 8:30 am, right?", one asked. That's right: I work at a place that thinks that starting at 8:30 is outrageous.

So here I am! Day two has finished and I'm totally hyped and ready for day three and four and five. And then I'm going to need a very, very long weekend to cope with the information firehose that was shoved down my throat this week.

Oh, and one more thing. That giant whiteboard with the Google Plans that talks about all their future projects and stuff? On the corner of the giant whiteboard, there's now a stickcat. All is well in the universe.

I still can't believe how awesome everything is here. It's been a full week, and this job is still as shiny as it was on the first day.

I've now created an internal google blog to help me cope with the fact that I can't blog most things on here anymore. And although you can't enjoy my wit, cynicism and sarcasm behind the Google firewall, you can at least take comfort in the fact that Googlers somewhere are being exposed to it. I already have a bunch of comments from random Googlers in various departments, and soon -- oh yes, soon -- all shall know the unique strangeness that is my histrionic narrative. ...Either that or I'll get bored and do something else.

I'm still adjusting to life on the scary side of the US-Canadian border. I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around the fact that a large chunk of the taxes I'm paying are going to the US army, or that I live in a country where fast food vendors print bible references on the bottom of their drink cups. I used to find this country to be scary while I observed it from the outside, but from the belly of the beast it's downright terrifying.

"Where are you from?", someone asked me the other day.
"Toronto."
"Oh", she frowned. "Are you related to the terrorists who were caught there?"
I blinked and probably just stared for several very long seconds as I waited to see if she was joking.
She wasn't.
"Yes", I replied, "all several million people in Toronto are terrorists."
The frightening thing? We probably are, by her standards.

But it's hard not to have a blast down here.

Here's an -- albeit blurry -- cellphone camera photo of real wardriving:


Myself and several nooglers were in a car, tailgating the Google shuttle on the highway, and using the Google shuttle wireless connection, via VPN, to connect to the Google intranet from the highway. Why, how do you spend your Friday evenings?

And if I don't stop drinking this amazing Google coffee, I'm liable to have a heart attack before I'm able to enjoy everything that this place has to offer. Gotta learn to pace myself...

This isn't just a brief shot of fun, this is actually my life now. Wow!

Yesterday's shopping expedition produced a vacuum cleaner, shelves, and hangers, thus permanently securing my position in the "lame shopping" hall of fame.

It's actually kinda fun to be nesting in my new place. I'm mostly unpacked, meaning that I no longer have to spend my evenings mourning the smashed remains of my UPSized worldly possessions. (See photo to the right.) So now I'm starting to prioritize what items I need to acquire that I don't yet have.

And the number one item is a bed.

I purchased a bed before leaving Toronto. But apparently the "free shipping" includes a short detour to the sun. So until the mythic bed arrives from its epic journey, I'm sleeping on the floor.

At first the novelty of sleeping on the floor was almost cool. But since then my back has left me in protest and replaced my spine with one that belonged to a seventy-five year old.

If I don't get a mattress soon, I'm going to purchase 400 kleenex boxes and build my own mattress out of tissues and duct tape.

Fortunately, the Google shuttle is comfy enough that I've been able to sleep on the way to and from work.

Oh, and speaking of the big G in the sky? Check it out! (Search the page for 'Catspaw') I'm a Google blogger! Hawt.

One of the most amazing parts of living deep in the heart of nerd town silicon valley, is that there's certainly no lack of things to do.

I've been not-so-secretly turning Kevin Marks into my insider agent to give me the scoop on important upcoming SF shindigs. Upcoming.org is practically exploding with everything that there is to do in SF each day.

[KevinMarks]: Where 2.0 tonight, Robot Games at the weekend, and mashpit, supernova, barcamp and bloggercon next week...

Not to mention the loads of Google Tech Talks accessible to me every day. If I was attending everything I wanted to attend, there'd be no room left in the day for actually writing any code.

"I should be a Google mascot", I said to a fellow noogler today. "Here's how it works. I go around basking in all things Google, doing nothing else, and when people ask me what the coolest thing on earth is, I reply: Google. I just go around loving Google all day."
"How is that different from what you're doing right now?", he replied, gesturing at my large bowl of raspberries, and the fact that I was sitting on a sunny grass field eating the large bowl of raspberries, and the fact that this was my job.

"I, uh, I would attend more outside conferences."

"I hear they don't have free bowls of raspberries at most conferences", he shrugged.

Okay, I clearly have to think this through in more depth. But my point remains! There's a lot of conferences, gatherings and shindigs in the SF area. And many of them sound very cool.

I haven't figured out a way to balance out my life yet. How'm I supposed to have time for all my Google love, attending fun outside shindigs, getting my life in order, all things Warcraft, staying in touch with people back home, and actually remaining alert enough to enjoy it all?

The answer is clearly going to involve copious quantities of coffee. And possibly inventing some sort of time machine. I'm gonna have to check with the intranet to see if Google has started work on that. Maybe that can be my 20% time project. The irony doesn't escape me.

I'm not a food snob. I've been known to eat fast food fries, and drink cheap coke, and consume so many hallowe'en skittles in one sitting that the company's stock prices double. So it would be a lie to say that I'm a food snob.

But I do know good food. Tonight I'm making orange cashew chicken for myself, and tomorrow I'm oven roasting veggies to serve on tortellini.

I consider myself to be mid-range in food snobberiness. I understand the place of purple peppers and organic emmenthal cheese, but I'm not above a slice of pepperoni pizza from pizza pizza.

With my move to the US, however, all of that is about to change.

American grocery stores gross me out.

At first glance, it's exactly identical to a Canadian grocery store. Nothing noteworthy. And why should it be? We get most of our food from our southern neighbours. But then I start actually shopping, and looking closely at the items, and suddenly I get grossed out.

For example, yesterday I was buying chicken breasts for my orange cashew chicken. The first thing that I noticed was that the chicken breasts were significantly cheaper here than back home. Like, as if a "half off" sticker was slapped on them. The second thing that I noticed was that they were literally bulging, as if they had been stuffed with water balloons. The third thing that I noticed was the warning on the back that they contain hormones. Ew.

Now despite the fact that I preferred to purchase grain fed chicken at home, I'm sure that I ate hormone-injected chicken many times and didn't notice. But it was something about the very cheap, bulging, hormone-infused chicken breasts that totally grossed me out.


Here's another example. I was in the frozen foods aisle looking for fruit juice popsicles and ran into whole frozen hotdogs and hamburgers. I don't just mean the meat, I mean the meat, bun and toppings all frozen together so that you can just microwave it and two minutes later have a whole hotdog ready, toppings and all. Something about these whole hotdogs and hamburgers inspired images of some overweight guy with nothing but whole hamburgers in his freezer and suddenly I was grossed out again.

I'm not normally squeamish, so I'm not sure what it is, but I'm rapidly starting to equate US grocery store = ew. Remember that feeling after you finished watching Super Size Me? I feel that way every time I walk out of these grocery stores.

Did I mention that all Google food, on the other hand, is made from organic ingredients?

I've decided that the only way to counter this "eww" factor is to start getting organic fruits and veggies, visiting my local bakery, and to look around the area for some sort of butcher that can offer me meat that contains fewer hormones than Michael Jackson. And then I'll be able to basically avoid the major grocery store chains, and the major wiggins they foster here.

Most programmers multitask in the following way:

• Coding
• Talking on IM
• Listening to some sort of techno music
• Drinking caffeinated beverage

After several years of doing these things simultaneously, encoding specificity kicks in and many programmers claim that they're unable to program unless they're multitasking with some or all of these elements.

My encoding specificity works a little differently, and I blame you folks back home. The guilty parties will know who they are.

I invent songs about the things I'm coding.

I don't even notice that this is happening. I'm just there, doing my usual thing, writing up some function that I've already designed in my head or on paper, and the next thing I know, I'm singing to myself some strange song about if statements or list comprehensions.

And I know exactly where I get it from, too!

Here's a clip back to a scene in my life a few years ago:

Music: o/~ Try to remembeeeeer... o/~
Graeme: o/~ Yeah, fuckin' remembeerrr... o/~
Music: o/~ Try to remembeeeeer... o/~
Nart: o/~ Remember the Belarussian popular front... o/~
Graeme: o/~ GUITAR! o/~
Nart: o/~ Remember the gnome things... o/~ What are those things? Hobbit. "Frolav." Sounds like that guy. What's that guy's name?
Catspaw: Frodo?
Nart: Yeah, Frodo. Frolav. His belarussian counterpart.

Between classics like "get yer gong on" and lesser-remembered (but still recorded!) songs like "o/~ Vietnam is gonna getcha. Gonna getcha. The jungle's gonna shoot ya. Gonna shoot ya. Where's that file that used to be in /usr/local/bin? Local bin. I moved it to my homedir. Where other users can't see it. o/~", the citizen lab has very bizarrely trained me to invent absolutely ridiculous songs while I code.

That wouldn't be so bad on it's own, but here's the problem.

Everyone there also used to blurt out their invented songs. Let us not forget the top-of-your-lungs singing of The Darkness or Don't Cry.

Google, as perfect as it is, isn't yet ready to be taught how to code in the ninj4 citlab fashion. They don't know that the secret to programming success involves loudly belting such songs, leaning back in your chair as far as you can go, and occasional fights in the cage.

But, for a few months at least, I'm not the one to teach them.

I'm feigning being normal.

So my songs will just have to live in my own little head until then. And I'll have to put in an extra effort not to accidentally sing them out loud.

o/~ I compiled yoooooooou, where did your build file goooooooo? Did building delete yooooooou? Where's your docstring, baby? o/~

Up until today, if you had asked me to enumerate the three best perks at Google, it would have gone:

1. The food
2. The totally relaxed atmosphere
3. The people

However, after this afternoon, I have to announce that there has been a reordering of the best perks at Google to:

1. The massages
2. The food
3. The totally relaxed atmosphere
4. The people

Wow. Seriously.

It's a typical Thursday, so you're at work, right? Well, unless you're a Googler. Then you're at an engineering offsite, bathing in the sun, playing DDR, eating salt water taffy, and chillaxing all day. So in my Google-land, the weekend starts on Thursday.

On Friday, I'm spending the morning giving a Google campus tour to african american middle-school girls in an event Google is holding to try to encourage more minorities to enter math / science.

Friday night is Serenity Now put together by the "San Francisco Browncoats".
In celebration of Joss' birthday, a midnight screening of Serenity is showing with all proceeds going to Joss' favourite charity. Am I picking this event over Supernova 2006, Bloggercon IV and Barcamp parties the same night? Damn straight I am. Joss ftw!

Saturday will probably be a crazy combination of maybe crashing Barcamp, maybe helping othermaciej convince dantekgeek and KevinMarks to ditch Barcamp and parade-side perch, maybe staying at home and working on getting myself that bed. Who knows! Saturday night is, of course, Molten Core.

Sunday I'm meeting up with other Googlers, and then there's a whole day of scheduled events.

Monday during the day I'll be going to work (I do that sometimes), and then that evening I'm gonna go listen to a talk by Will Wright and Brian Eno, from Sim City (and now Spore) fame. I've blogged about Spore previously.

Check that out. You call what you're having a weekend? This is a weekend. BAM!

I worked from home today in order to be here to get a bunch of deliveries. And you know what? There aren't enough "yay"s in this world to cover how thrilled I am.



The first package to arrive was a bunch of Google schwag. Other than the fancypants Google fleecy to the left, I also got a t-shirt and sweatshirt. I so totally have no qualms with sporting the Google logo at all times.

Keep it comin' and I'll keep wearing it, Google!

Next came a box of really nice pots and pans which were my graduation present from my parents. Because what's the point of cooking if your pots don't have nice glass covers so you can see what's cooking underneath and fantasize about how tasty it's gonna be once it's done?


Then came a box from Lelo! He coloured me the beautiful duck that you see on the left, complete with all crayon strokes going in the same direction. Thanks to Edeel and Pile for providing him with the crayons ;). And it came with a whooooooooole bunch of books he's been recommending to me. Enough books to last me months, even at my book-inhaling reading speed. Lelo = awesometastical.


And then? The moment I've been waiting for for weeks! My bed arrived! ZOMG! It's so soft (even as the "very firm mattress") compared to the floor that I could just cry. My spine is literally weeping in joy, which, quite frankly, is kinda freaky because spines normally don't have eyes from which to weep. That's how screwed up sleeping on the floor for a month has made it.

Quite the sum of deliveries, eh? *claps hands happily* Yay! Life is good!

There's been a brief conflict about which is better, working at Yahoo or working at Google.

Now as far as I can tell, the only argument that seems to be on the Yahoo side is:

• You're gonna get fat at Google. There. I said it. You can't control yourself, so the free food will kill you.
• Oh shut up, you would not use the exercycle and the swimming pool. You'd just roll the M&M's cart over to your desk and gorge."

Okay, that made me laugh. Possibly while I was eating M&Ms.

But last weekend when I was chatting with some Yahoo employees, they immediately started defending how great their job was because they were on the Apple team at Yahoo. Okay, Yahooligans, guess what? That doesn't mean that Yahoo is cool. That means that Apple is cool. You can't just steal Apple's cool by association.

And when your perks include things like "Tom Cruise visited", sheesh. There isn't even a battle.

But, just in case, let's end this once and for all. I present to you my breakfast this morning:

That's a large bowl of strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and chocolate-covered raisins and a coffee. And, why yes, everything is organic, thanks for asking.

Is it true that if you eat too many plump fresh juicy berries that you develop berryitis and turn into a strawberry? If so, please let me know, cuz I think I'm soon gonna be entering the high risk group.