Greetings from Dana!

[corgiaddict]

“Roosevelt smiles sheepishly, wondering why git isn’t chosen over this svn nonsense.”

[danawillow]

Corgi + computer science? Yup, pretty sure I can bring myself to hit the reblog button.

[gadsfasdfgasdf]

My dad wants these for his birthday and I physically feel like I cannot buy them for him in good conscience. I’m torn between being a good son and as a functioning member of society with eyeballs.

[nicolerosenbaum]

Sorry, can’t see what I’m writing, I just vomited all over my computer.

[danawillow]

noooooo I have shoes like these and they're so comfortable and make your feet feel amazing and happy

[fuckyeahvietnamesecrystal]

[danawillow]

Sorry people-I-know-in-real-life, I have found a new favorite tumblr.

[carlo-stormborn-deactivated2013]

[danawillow]

nicolerosenbaum:

This encompasses why I love Cam and Mitch so much.

Yes. I need to watch more of that show.

Also, today we had an intern flashmob to that song so this is conveniently relevant to my day.

[danawillow]

Guys today I was in a pie-eating contest. It was half awesome, half ahh-never-eating-pie-again.

Also, I saw Green Lantern and learned such valuable science, like "the bigger you are, the faster you burn." Didn't know that one before. I always assumed, you know, that it was the other way around, but what do I know?

[danawillow]

Quick update

I'm soooo tired but I figured it was about time for an update. Here's what's going on in my life:

- Google is awesome! Yesterday I found out what my project for the summer might be, which I kind of should have known about a week ago, but oh well. I had a mini assignment to do and I did it and now there are icons where there weren't before (or there will be... provided it works in IE)

- I have friends. That's always exciting.

- There's DDR at Google! I played once last week and again today :)

- Speaking of physical activity, there's also a crossfit group at Google and I went today and it was SO DIFFICULT wow. If I keep this up I'm going to be in awesome shape by the end of the summer, so I'm going to try.

- There's also a ball pit at Google which I haven't been to yet. And slides, which I have. And a dinosaur, which is just awesome.

- Saturday my friends and I did touristy things around San Francisco. The Golden Gate Bridge is really long, and really windy.

- Sunday we went to an amusement park! It was so so so fun except for the whole getting soaked in the beginning and spending the whole time waiting for our jeans to dry thing.

- Peanut butter at google is really sticky. SO sticky. It's really difficult to eat.

- I'm getting so much better at riding a bike. I fell my first time and I haven't fallen since! Technically I crashed today, but I was going really really slowly so I didn't even get close to falling off. I'm still not good at aiming.

- Today after crossfit I really wanted an odwalla smoothie, and I found a fridge that was supposed to hold them, but it was full of water. I was so sad.

- Apparently despite my general dislike of pop music, I really like mashups.

- There is a kid here that I went to elementary school up to about third grade with. I asked. It's him. He doesn't remember me or any of my friends BUT I REMEMBER HIM.

[danawillow]

First day!

Today was my first day at Google!

Orientation was at 8am this morning, so I had to wake up at 6 in order to take a 6:55 shuttle to get there in time :-/

Orientation wasn't quite as exciting as it could have been. Lots of paperwork and setting things up. But I got to reunite with some Princeton people (including my infosec ta... that was fun) and I met some other cool new people so it was a bit more bearable. After orientation, I met up with my host, who is really cool and fun. He showed me around our floor and told me about our team and what they do. I can't share it here because it hasn't been released yet, but I'll let you guys all know once it is. After that I spent most of the afternoon just reading about the team, looking at stuff on the internal network, and talking to people on gchat since you can't really do anything else your first day. Tomorrow I'll be talking to my host more about my project, and hopefully everything will be more set up so I can at least do the tutorials and stuff to remind myself of how everything works there.

[danawillow]

I'm back! And by back, I mean on tumblr. Not home. Because I am EVERYWHERE.

So the entire family wants me to keep updating this thing as a blog. Might as well give in, since it's a much easier way for me to remember stuff than my actual memory. I probably won't update every day this time, and I'm not sure how much I'll actually have to write about since Google has confidentiality agreements and whatnot, but yeah. We'll see.

So, my life since Budapest:

- Reunions! That was fun. We had a whole bunch of Tigerlilies shows, which some people were annoyed with but I was super happy because I hadn't sung in a while. Also whenever I saw someone I hadn't seen yet they were like "OMG DANA YOU'RE BACK!" and I felt super popular. So that was exciting.

- Home! Not too much going on there- lots of unpacking and repacking. I couldn't do too much since the red car is having problems :(, but I did get a chance to hang out with Rebecca, Jess, and Lindsay (and ran into Will!) so that was good. Lindsay and I gardened! I want a garden. I would grow all my own vegetables and make awesome salads. I had an appointment with the periodontist about getting a tooth implant, because apparently if I don't get one one of my teeth is going to keep growing and growing and eventually it'll have to be taken out and then my face will sink in and all the teeth around it will start having problems and maybe they'll fall out too and that just sounds scary. He says he thinks he'll be able to do the implant but he's not 100% positive- we'll see when I get back. On Friday I got a surprise visit from Dad 

- And now I'm in San Francisco! My visits to Princeton and to home were way too short. Being on a plane so soon after I had just gotten home was kind of a bummer, but the flight wasn't too bad. At one point, they sounded the PA and asked if there was a doctor or nurse on board, which was a little scary. Apparently someone had had an allergy attack, but at least two people responded to the call, so everything turned out okay.

After the flight, I had to find the BART to get into San Francisco, which was much harder than I was expecting. I followed the signs towards it and then I ended up in a parking garage and there were no more signs. The website had said the BART station was on level 3 above the international terminal, so I walked to that part of the parking garage but didn't see anything. Eventually I figured out that I had to take the AirTrain over to it, and I could have just done it from where I had started off. Oops.

Eventually I made it, and Renee (the woman I'm living with) picked me up at the BART station and drove me back to her place, where I was met with 4 dogs playing and jumping all over me. She looks after people's dogs, so only one of them is actually hers. The other three are going home today. They are sooo cute though- I wouldn't mind having them around a bit longer. She also has cats, which aren't quite as energetic as the dogs, but are still cute of course. I was really tired since I had been going to sleep and waking up early anyway this past week, and I was in a new time zone, so I made myself stay up until about 10:30 so I wouldn't have a jet lag problem, and then headed to bed.

Also, 11 days ago I was still in Budapest. Since then, I've been in Princeton, home, and now San Francisco. Too many places... good thing I'll be here for three months.

[danawillow]

Last weekend!

It's been a good weekend! Yesterday I just hung out for a while. At 7 I was going to go to the Szecsenyi baths with some people, but given the whole rapture / thunderstorms business, we decided to just stay inside instead. Aaron was a butt and decided to play dragon age all day instead of being social.

Today a few of us got together to do the Urban Treasure Hunt (http://www.rumkammerat.dk/Rumkammerat/Basic-info). It was a lot of fun, but we didn't finish :( We were really stuck at one point because we couldn't figure out the second clue- it was a speech bubble with three ós inside. I'm not going to say what the actual answer was here in case someone reads this that wants to try it, but it turned out we had figured out the answer as soon as we saw it, but dismissed it because it didn't really embody the whole clue and seemed way too easy but also non treasure hunt-ey. After that, we didn't have too much trouble figuring out the clues. We figured out what clue #5 meant and we knew where we needed to go, but we got there and could not for the life of us find clue #6. So we got ice cream and went home.  Fun stuff.

[ieffinglovedinosaurs-blog]

[danawillow]

fuckyeahdementia:

velocirapture

[danawillow]

So my Hungarian oral exam yesterday was surprisingly really fun. The first part was our presentation where we each just made a powerpoint about ourselves. Next, she put a bunch of words on the table and we would each take one and try to get the other two to figure it out without saying the actual word. Then she put a bunch of papers on the table, each one the answer to a question or some sort of statement, and we (together) had to come up with the questions. After that she put some themes on the table and we each picked one and asked the others two questions about that theme, which they then had to answer. So overall it was not difficult at all and pretty fun.

[danawillow]

Today in combinatorial optimization we played math games! It was so fun! Great idea for the last day of class.

So yeah, my day was pretty awesome, and then I went to go home, and at the metro station they had people checking tickets on the way out, which they basically never do (I've never seen it at my metro stop and only once or twice at others). Now, the problem is, even though my metro pass doesn't expire until the end of next week, my student card expired yesterday, and since getting a new one requires going down to BME campus in the middle of the day when I'm at AIT, I figured it wasn't worth it to go get a new one when I'm only going to be here for another week anyway. Well, apparently I was wrong. So I got fined :(

But then Sarita came over and I made us a yummy dinner and I finished my cinema essay (I still have to go back and edit it but it's basically done), so the day ended well.

6 days!

[danawillow]

Software Usability presentation today was fine. I felt like Mate and I were better last night when we practiced for Lilian and Goose, but oh well. It still seemed to go okay. Although at one point during the presentation when we were on a really unimportant slide, Gabor decided to jump in and take an issue with the word choice for one of our user types. The two user types were "minimal user" and "casual user". He did not like "casual" and made sure I knew. So I explained why we chose that word, and he was not happy, and I had to be like "Gabor. This is not important. Nobody using the product would see this word choice; it's just to help Mate and me along. I would very much like to continue the presentation." Everybody else either thought it was hilarious or was astonished that I would stand up like that against Gabor considering he's the head of AIT and Hungary's most successful entrepreneur or something like that. I don't know... he criticized me and I thought it was unjustified and unimportant... I'm going to explain myself! It was pretty funny though.

After classes today, Lilian, Aaron, and I went out for dinner with the computer graphics professor! He's a really cool person, so we had a good time, but I'm SO FULL right now, so it's time to take advantage of this food coma and head to bed.

[danawillow]

I think Mate and I have gotten more accomplished on our software usability project within the past two days than in the entire rest of the semester. It's amazing what a deadline will do to your productivity...

So yeah. Presentation tomorrow. I'm pretty satisfied with how things are, so I think it'll go well.

Today's final was fine. Not going to post details of it since Lilian hasn't taken it yet (feel better!)

[danawillow]

Combinatorial Optimization final tomorrow.

Computer Graphics mini presentation / probably some code for this assignment Wednesday.

Software Usability presentation Wednesday.

Hungarian presentation / oral exam Friday.

Cinema essay due Friday.

Semantic/Declarative final Monday.

LET'S DO THIS.

[danawillow]

So today was an exciting day in the Csengery apartment. I was walking to the kitchen to go make myself some lunch, when I noticed a white smoke near where we read the meters for electricity and gas. It smelled funny too. So I called Aaron in and we looked at it for a while, and it seemed to have something to do with the electricity box. So we turned the electricity off, but nothing changed. We figured it must have been from the gas, so we turned that off and the smoke and smell seemed to go away. We also called Barbara to have a look and offer her Hungarian expertise to call up someone that would be able to fix it. First, the guy that fixes all the problems with the whole building came in and took a look. He told us the problem was actually from the electricity box, and then spent the rest of the time on the phone with the electric company trying to figure out whose fault it was and who should pay to have stuff fixed. Then they called the electric company to come over, and like any good facilities repairman, they gave a time estimate of "within the next six hours." 20 minutes later, they were here. Apparently the problem actually had to do with some electricity box thing that was outside one floor below us, and connected to our box. So something went wrong there and starting burning, and we saw/smelled the effects of it in our apartment. So everything seems safe and cleared up and we won't have to worry about it. But yeah. Fun stuff.

[danawillow]

Good news: I was really productive today!

Bad news: I had tickets to see the Budapest Festival Orchestra tonight, and somehow in the midst of my productivity I just completely forgot that it was today, so I missed it. Thanks friends, for you know, the whole "hey where's Dana she has a ticket let's call her and make sure she's on her way" thing. Forgetting about me = not cool in my book. I've had way too many bad friend experiences to not be affected by things like that, even if they just didn't realize. In all honesty, I'm not that upset that I missed the concert since it wasn't a huge priority of mine, just something new to see. Yeah, it was a waste of money, but that happens. I've saved money in other ways that I can afford to waste it other times. But it still makes me upset to think that people here, who aren't necessarily my best friends here but are still my friends, wouldn't even have the courtesy to call me up to see what was going on. Because I would do it for them, and I have a feeling they would do it for each other. And yes, you could say I'm being melodramatic or whatever, but I've had way more experiences like this in my life than someone should. I'm not exactly sure what I should expect from people, and I'm sure it was an honest mistake, but it's still opening old wounds that I thought had been healing pretty nicely.