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Steve took Eric and I to a Panic! at the disco concert last night. I had not heard of this artist, but since Steven goes to Yale I thought I would trust his taste.

The music turned out to be pretty rock’n. By far the most exciting part was when they covered “Tonight, Tonight” by the Smashing pumpkins. The whole time I was getting a “we’re trying really hard to be an Adore era pumpkins knock off with a poppy twist that will make the teenies love us” sort of vibe. They did a good job of it. In particular, they had the gothic clown style make-up and sideshow thing going on. My guess is they figured most of the people in the audience were not familiar with the pumpkins. They were probably right.

A few notable things happened.

1) The Dresden Dolls played. They also had a dark poppy gothic feel. This makes me wonder if this sort of music is becoming mainstream again. If so, Billy better get crack’n on his next release!

2) I met a celebrity. She thought I was in high school and I thought she was 16, turned out to be some good laughs. I ended up carding her for proof — and yep — she was of age. Then she told me she had a VIP pass… I had never seen a VIP pass before, so I asked to see that too. Yep, she was VIP! Then she told me she was a geek and I didn’t believe her there either… but then she pulled out her video camera. Yep, she was a geek too. Look at her website for more proof.

3) The venue was below MTV. This also explains the teenie bopper theme. $3 to check a coat!

Anyway, that was fun. Show was over by 10:30pm — I’m sure so everyone could make their curfew.

This weekend I’m planning on seeing We are Scientists, Jose Gonzalez, and Belle and Sebastian (it’s a long weekend). Gooooooood times. I <3 NYC.

Went by the apple store with Amid and Aaron… pretty sweet.

Aaron was wondering how they would fill a store with so few products. However, when we arrived he quickly realized, “Oh, they just put a lot of the same product out!” He was correct. Lots and lots of ipods.

On the walk home I tried to take a photo of some fireflies. They were not as clear as I wanted, but the photo turned out to be pretty interesting.

Look for the tiny neon green dots

And finally, there was a Google field trip for interns to see a Yankees game.

We lost, oh well. It was cool place to eat a hot dog and some crackerjacks, if nothing else.

Still having lots of fun!!

Today started about 72 hours ago.

Steve, Eric, and I decided it would be a good idea to go to a night club. So we did.

Steve and Eric

Markus Schulz

the crowd

Turns out that the featured DJ in a club comes on around 3am. Lesson learned! I ended getting home around 5am that morning…

Promptly at 10am the same morning I woke up and headed to the cloisters with some other Googlers. The museum was pieced together using chunks old castles and cathedrals, mostly coming from Spain. The stained glass was my favorite.

Wrapping up Saturday we went to one of the co-workers house to lunch. I got a rare glimpse of Gramercy Park, one of the last private parks in Manhattan. Only residents near the park can have a key which costs a few hundred dollars each year to keep! It’s like a country club for city people!

Today was the first Summer Stage, in central park, I was able to attend. The featured artist was Feist.

Along with Feist I saw Buck 65. That guy was weird! Which was very entertaining!

Central Park rules. While it does still feel completely fabricated compared to back home, it is a little reminder of the corn town.

That’s about it for this weekend. Next planned event it a Yankees game Tuesday. Time to walk home!

When I walk into work, I see this:

swirly!

Then when I have lunch on the balcony I see this:

note the “who”

Then when I go out and see Martha Wainwright she looks like this:

She was a lot clearer when I saw her

Then when I see Gomez my view is this:

Well, that’s an arm… but it says “Gomez”

Ah, armless, there’s our guys

Then when I take the subway home it looks like this:

This one is way nicer and has a lot fewer people than the one I actually ride home

That was yesterday… today I took salsa dancing lessons with some co-workers and went out to a bar/restaurant to test out my skillz! The girl I asked to dance just made things really awkward (more so then me, even!) so I lost all confidence and just people watched for an hour or so.

Tomorrow is a Markus Schulz concert — this will be my first live trance experience. I’ll take my camera!

Yeahhhhhhhhh! I finally sniffed a wireless network from home! I’m going to try to make this quick before I get dropped again.

First up: It’s hard to check my personal stuff at work. Not because they restrict it, just because I forget while I am using all the internal mail stuff. Don’t be offended if it takes me awhile to respond.

About work: IT IS AWESOME. My team is cool… a bunch of admins…. that all are appropriately admins. I have not started on any serious projects yet, but this is reasonable considering it was only my second day.

What my days have been like so far: Today I was able to wake-up, shower and commute in approx 45min. I’ve ridden the subway about 10 times so far, and tonight was the first time I was actually able to sit down — because I was on the slow train that nobody rides.

First shocking thing I heard: A fellow admin, “Well I used to use email client XYZ, but I get about 5000 emails a day now, and I can only manage that with gmail”. My reaction, “Wha wha wha?”. So, yeah, I’ve been playing with gmail to figure out how you can manage 5000 emails per day with it. I’m still learning, but it has vim style key-bindings and a really good search.

Going to a Gomez concert tomorrow and a Yankee’s game next week.

So far so good.

Ahh! Midway through EECS graduation last night (I didn’t graduate — just helping) I left corn-town and headed for NYC.

Well, it happened. Five hours of flying, two hours of sleeping, and a 45min taxi ride later… I’m here. First thing I found my apt got settled. The place is pretty nice.

After that I wandered around the local neighborhood with roommate Peter. After we walked a good 30 blocks I took off for times square to figure out where I am going to be working. On the slow train it took me about 15min to go from my apt to the office… pretty sweet! From there I wandered back north for 50 blocks to the Museum of Natural History.

Real life dead dino!!

Anyway, work starts tomorrow, and I am REALLY excited to see what that is like.

My blogging pattern has been really weird lately. Sometimes I blog about stuff that is only relevant to school and my life, and other times I am blogging about work stuff. I’ll be honest, the fun in blogging about work is that a lot of people read it (people even translate and repost them!).

But, ya know, I have other things to talk about.

My music listening pattern is just as weird as my blogging one. It goes something like this: Find a new artist, get a new artist’s album, find particular song on artist’s album, listen to song over and over and over until all my roommates hate me and I think, walk, breath to the beat of the song.

So here it is folks! Find / buy these songs and make sure repeat is on!

* The Flaming Lips - Do You Realize??
This is my current song. I’ve listened to it enough that roommate Mike hates it, but I’m still hooked. In particular, I really like the part where he says, “The sun going down is just an illusion caused by the world spinning around.”

* Say Hi To Your Mom - Super
I hope he is not making fun of people. It could be that he is just mocking some folks — but I really hope and think his positive message is true.

* Stars - Don’t Be Afraid To Sing
Title is enough. Skip the secret track after this song, it’s not worth it.

* Billy Corgan - The CameraEye
“Close enough to die a time… or two or three”. Billy! Come back to us!

* 13 & goD - Soft Atlas
“Without a universal law there is no gravity, without gravity there is no atmosphere, without atmosphere there is no chance at life…” Men Of Station was almost the song I listened to over and over, but Soft Atlas ended up taking over — per suggestion of Neighbor Emily.

* Bloc Party - Like Eating Glass
Makes me wave my hands in the air, even while in an office chair.

* Arctic Monkeys - Perhaps Vampires Is a Bit Strong But…
Catchy overload. Only listen to this one if you want to be caught up in massive catchyness. The lyrics don’t even matter — it’s f’n catchy.

* The Faint - Birth
Sort of gross, but very well put together.

* Snow Patrol - Set The Fire To The Third Bar feat. Martha Wainwright
I love this song. I love Steven Garrety for sharing it with me. If you only have time to pick two songs out of this list, pick the flaming lips one — and this one. a. m. a. z. i. n. g.

* Ratatat - Noose
This song is new to me, and I’m not sure if it should be on this list… but I have listened to it about 20 times.

* Tegan & Sara - Where Does The Good Go
Seriously, where does the good go? This song is the reason tenant emily hates tegan and sara.

OK — that’s all I got. If you need any help finding any of these songs, let me know. They are all worth your time.

… but my last day as an employee at the Mozilla Corporation is June 9th. By the end of next week I will have worked for Mozilla for exactly 1 year.

I thought it would be appropriate to talk about my experience at Mozilla via a chronological “highlights reel”. So yeah, here it is…

Polvi’s Mozilla Highlights Reel / Shout-out frenzy

June 2005 - June 2006

• Being hired!
• Supporting and befriending Justdave (he was the only sysadmin when I started)
• Implementing the Linux Virtual Server infrastructure that powers www, addons, aus, and various other things
• Researching and purchasing an network wide backup solution
• Being a booth-babe at OSCON with Mary and Rebron
• Getting Mitchell and others kicked out of a bar at OSCON
• Realizing that Brendan Eich was Brendan Eich
• Trips to the colo with Myk, in particular our discussion about profit and cost centers
• Releasing developer.mozilla.org
• Making Deb happy by releasing developer.mozilla.org
• The hour of terror
• Tejava
• Watching 5 seasons of Buffy with Mac daddy Aas
• An all night bug triage with justdave
• Riding in Stuart’s Lotus, “Heyyyy, wanna take me for a riiiiiiiddddddde?”
• Sneezing so hard I broke my powerbook
• Being one with spreadfirefox (the performance, the hacks, and the community)
• Getting locked in my garage in Mountain View on a Saturday at 1am when my roommate was gone for the weekend, and having Chase pick me up and take me to the Office (no keys, shoes, phone, or wallet) for sustenance and an ssh connection
• Physically picking up and driving cvs.mozilla.org across town
• Interviewing Aravind
• Having an engineering manager be hired
• Having a IT manager be hired
• The hand scanner at the colo!
• Trembling as I put www.mozilla.com into production, diverting a majority of www.mozilla.org traffic to it during the Firefox 1.5 release AND having the most kind and gracious moral support from Paul Kim while I did it (I had not physically met Paul at this point… seriously Paul, that was awesome, thanks again)
• Meeting Paul Kim
• The run around the office saying hi to everyone during the first 10min being on-site
• Screaming out Steven Garrity (from acts of volition radio!!!) at an inappropriate time
• Working with morgamic
• Working with morgamic to stabilize addons
• One hardcore night of Perl profiling with Shaver
• Being honored as Oregon State University’s Student Employee of the Year
• Going to nVidia to a “what’s up” with Jensen, Stuart, Vlad, Jonas and Oremj
• Any interaction with Karen
• Justin’s calm and helpful explanations of hosted environments, dealing with vendors, ASPs, and life
• Learning python
• Meeting preed at a LUG meeting before meeting him at work
• Developing a big enough collection of mozilla shirts that I can be constantly wearing a clean one (thanks marcia!! :)
• Talkin’ shop with Lilly and Schrep
• Learning the innards of mysql
• Taking a first look at mozilla statistics
• Being given guidance while looking at mozilla statistics

Whew!

Surely I left plenty-o-experience and people out, sorry about that… I’m human! (heart)

So, what’s next? In a couple weeks I’ll be moving across the country (NYC) to work for Google. Why? Well, it’s an experience thing. Mozilla has treated me extremely well and it is really hard to just get up and leave, but I’m still young and impressionable, so I need diverse work experience. I’m excited about learning completely new things, meeting completely new people, and understanding a completely different company.

I have no idea what I am doing after the summer is over. Nor do I have any idea what I’ll be doing when I graduate from college (spr ‘07).

I would especially like to thank the “powers that be” at Mozilla for supporting students. My heart is filled with joy because this year we have more students than ever working for the project.

So yeah, thanks for the amazing experience!

PS: If anyone is in NYC this summer around July 16 — I’ll be having my 21er! Parrrtay