alex.polvi.net

Scavenger Hunt

The past two days have been nuts!! It all started yesterday (Thursday) around 1:30pm. Google arranged a “scavenger hunt” for interns. We got into teams and bounced around the city. We started at Bryant Park, moved to Grand Central, then wrapped things up at Rockefeller Center. Our team ended up getting 3rd (out of 8), not too shabby!

Ozomatli

Andriana and I decided it would be a great idea to join the Salsoogers (salsa dancing googlers, I made that up) for the Ozomatli concert.

This is a latin/hip-hop group that I had never heard of. The concert was pretty good, but it went FREAKING CRAZY when they got off the stage and played in the audience. First it was like, “OK, this is cool — they are walking through out the audience.” But then they stopped… RIGHT IN FRONT OF US.

No zoom, I was literally right under him

Then they made the entire crowd sit down!!

Everyone is sitting, that is why the girl in red is so tall

Danced hard, rocked hard. Wow. That was a good concert.

The rest of Thursday evening
We tried to meet up with some different co-workers for metal/punk-rock karaoke… but I got carded and they actually did the math correctly. The conversation went something like:

Bouncer: Holding my id “What day is it?”
Me: “…”
Bouncer: Looks at sheet
Andriana: “Comon, it’s like in 2 days”
Bouncer: “The police don’t care”

No worries, this will not be a problem in about 24 hours.

So then we went to an awesome Japanese restaurant instead! I taught the waiter how to say “vanilla”. After that Andriana and I wandered around the city and had a fantastic time just chilling out!

That was just yesterday

Today I finished up my first project at work, then headed out for the ops off site. We went to this neat restaurant near the river. The place was nice, but the food left a lot to be desired. It was located conveniently at the other end of 79th (where I live), so I was able to just walk home.

Tomorrow is the Siren Music Festival. The most exciting part is that Kim will be joining us!!!!

I’m sure there will be plenty of photos and stories from this weekend! Stay tuned!

Did I mention I’m having a lot of fun!?!?

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.