colin dellow's bln

The Shoemaker quote reminded me of another time Lindsay pointed out the error of my ways. This time it was my misplaced belief in the existence of centrifugal force.

Clearly, the author of the xkcd webstrip had a similar experience in his formative years:



They're not all quite so nerdy. Well, they're all pretty nerdy. But some of them are good nonetheless.

So, some of the powers that be are demanding that I blog more. My bad.

What's on my mind?

Rapid Changes in Technology Scare Me

1. Lindsay has a website.
   
2. Actually, over half of the Dellow family have websites.
   
3. Tyler is asking me questions about how to wire up websites to SQL databases.
   
4. My mom has contributed to a mailing list run by the IEEE.

I'm Really Bad About the Name Changes Weddings Cause

Not content to yell at me from her own blog, my sister recently left a comment over here saying I should post more. She signed it "LG". I thought: that idiot, she typoed her own initials.

Oops.

Kinda like that one school year when I looked over the list of teachers at Central Middle School and asked, "Who's Mrs. Shoemaker?" and Lindsay asked me if I remembered attending Ms. Fleming's wedding.

Oops.

Frying Pan... Fire?

I interned on Microsoft Office last summer. I wasn't sure I liked the idea of working for people who hadn't shipped anything since the end of 2003.

So now I'm on the Microsoft Windows group. Windows XP was shipped in 2001.

Oops.

Oh, and the specific team that I'm on was conceived after the spectacular failure of Microsoft's Hailstorm project, whose architect famously declared that Microsoft "doesn't know how to ship software anymore" before jumping ship for Google.

Oops?

Well, probably not. Here's a description of his new life at Google:

This week at Google, I spent three days in Mountain View, and the last two days working from home. My team includes guys in our New York Times Square Engineering office as well as folks in Mountain View. On Monday, I flew up to Mountain View and arrived in the office at 10am. I worked until 3am and guess what. I wasn't the last one in my area of the building the leave! There was plenty of company. All these guys are proud of their work, love what they are doing, and wanted to nail their deadlines and then take a few days off for the holidays. At 330am I arrived at my apartment, slept for a few hours, and then arrived at the office at 8am, grabbed a free hot breakfast, and put in another full day leaving work at 4am. Again, i was not the last one to leave. I work in an area where a team is preparing for an upcoming launch and 90% of that team was there when I left at 4am, and they were there when I returned at 830am the next day. On wednesday, I had a short day. I arrived at 8am and had to leave to catch my flight at 7:30pm. Those guys that were there at 4am when I left the morning before were still there, heading down for dinner when I left at 7:30pm. For me, thursday was a normal 12 hour day, and friday was the reward. We met our quarterly milestone and met our launch. I am confident that my friends who pulled a few all nighters this week will also lauch on time.

Mmmm, staying up til 4AM working for the man. Enjoying a "short" 12-hour day. If you're gonna do that, may as well be a lawyer articling student.