the least significant bit

I was not really brimmed over with enthusiasm when the guy who is renting me the room where I’m going to stay until end of July asked me to come to his workplace to sign the rental agreement. However, this feeling turned into sheer excitement when I found out that the address he gave me - 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View - was the location of the Google headquarter.
Since I have heard a lot of positive things about Google as an employer, I was very keen to see everything with my own eyes.
The first thing I noticed after my arrival was a nice beachvolleyball court surrounded by a lot of impressive buildings - wow, that was pretty cool.

After meeting my host I got a visitor badge and we headed right to one of the restaurants (if I remember correctly there are 14 different restaurants on the site).

When I entered the restaurant I was overwhelmed again - so much different food to choose from and everything was free. This must be heaven
Well, after spending 15 minutes deciding what to eat I finally ended up with pizza and salad - as usual
When we were finished with eating, my host showed me around the offices and other facilities the company has to offer.

Every few seconds I saw something which made me think either “wow, that’s awesome”, “unbelievable”, “oh my god, that’s incredible”, “I want to have this” or “this is totally crazy”
Every workplace that I saw consisted of at least two 24-inch (or something like that) screens, I saw one guy who was using 6 monitors and a laptop.

The gym was also very impressive, next to it there were even two whirlpools.

There are ‘micro-kitchens’ everywhere to get a snack or something to drink - well, this doesn’t look very ‘micro’ to me

Ok, that’s it for today - see ya.

It’s now one week since I am in Palo Alto, CA. I’m here to do an internship for about 7 months. The whole trip started on June 30th when I took a flight from Vienna to London Heathrow. In Heathrow, I had to stay at a hotel for one night because the flight from LHR to San Francisco was scheduled for July 1st 10:50am. Although the security has been highly increased on Heathrow Airport because of the terror attack on Glasgow Airport the day before, there were no major delays and everything went smoothly. The flight itself was quite enjoyable, thanks to extended legroom, nice people sitting next to me and the inflight entertainment system. It was my first long-haul flight by the way. After the arrival on SFO airport I lost a lot of time at the baggage claim area because my bag with the kitesurfing-gear was lost (they delivered it to my hotel the next day). On the ride from SFO to my Hotel - using Supershuttle to save a few bucks - I saw my first real iPhone. The guy who was sitting next to me on the van got it the day before.
Things have been quite stressful during the last few days, because there are a lot of things I have (or had) to do:

• Find a place to stay until July 15th (my company provides me with accommodation at a hotel for the first two weeks). Status: IN PROGRESS
• Buy a car. Status: IN PROGRESS (well, at least I got a bike today)
• Open a bank account. Status: DONE
• Check out the kitespots in the area. Status: IN PROGRESS (I haven’t been kitesurfing yet but I’ve been windsurfing at the Shoreline Lake near Mountain View)
• Get a SIM card for my cell phone. Status: DONE

Well, that’s it for today. I don’t have anything else to tell at the moment but I’m sure there will come up a lot of interesting news I will be glad to share with you on this blog during the next few months
So, stay tuned!

Do you know twitter.com?

Wikipedia says:

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) via SMS, instant messaging, the Twitter website, or an application such as Twitterrific. Twitter was founded in October 2006 by San Francisco start-up company Obvious Corp.
Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and also instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone is the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, or through an application. For SMS, currently three gateway numbers are available: short codes for the USA and Canada and a UK number for international use. While the Twitter service is free, posting and receiving updates via SMS may incur charges from the wireless carrier.

Twitter is intended to be text-only, however, I have spent a few hours to write an application which allows to take a photo from your iSight and publish it on twitter together with your text.

You can download the application right here: http://datenmafia.org/phototwitter/
Since it is a Java application it should work on the most common platforms, however, I have only tested it on Mac OS X yet.

Please feel free to play around with it and post your feedback.

If you haven’t seen Google Maps Street View yet, I would strongly recommend to try it. Awesome!

The CCC just released the audio and video recordings of the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress. More information can be found on the CCC Events Weblog.

I just stumbled across an interesting website of a russian design agency named Art. Lebedev Studio.

I especially like some of their industrial design work, for example the Optimus Maximus Keyboard or the Verbarius electronic clock.

I would be very pleased if someone could help me out with an invitation to the Joost-Betatest. Can’t wait to try it

Update: Already received an invitation, thanks.

How to create your own Apple Rumor

Examples:

Our Apple informant has confirmed earlier reports that we will see a Sub Macbook Pro at WWDC 2007.

An operative deep inside Apple has given us this exclusive news about a Flash based Mac Pro or Wifi Enabled iPod Shuffle no later than Macworld 2008

An Anonymous tipster has given us this exclusive news about a 16 Core iMac no later than Fourth Quarter 2007

Since I had quite a lot of time to read during the last few weeks, I decided to have a look at ‘Mobile Web 2.0: The Innovator’s Guide to Developing and Marketing Next Generation Wireless/Mobile Applications’ by Ajit Jaokar and Tony Fish.
For me, the first 90-100 pages were a bit boring to read since it was just general blah about what is web 2.0, ‘content is king’ and stuff like that. After this part, it gets more interesting since the reader gets a good overview of the current situation (both technical and non-technical) in the area of mobile web/widgets/AJAX/LBS etc.
The third part of the book deals with topics like ‘how to set up a business in the mobile sector’ or ‘how to partner with mobile network operators’ (also quite interesting to read) etc.