Dr. Matt Lee (mattl)

Google!
Okay, so today I got up pretty early, after Robin called to let me know someone was trying to steal the Defective by Design hazmat suits from our porch. Around 8am, Jason drove me down to the Googleplex. Driving in California is kinda fun, though I suppose especially in a sports car.
The Googleplex is a strange place. For a start, there are security people everywhere, which is a little disconcerting, but also, the sheer size of the place is overwhelming. Anyway, eventually got pointed at the right building and made my way to registration, which amounted to being give a bunch of freebies and pointed towards food, with instructions to make myself a name tag. Each table had blank tags and Sharpies and lots of geeks. I didn’t recognise many people, but eventually ran into Steve McIntyre from Debian.
Breakfast was good. Lots of cakes and cookies with random Google beverages. Lots of the drinks at Google are not usual brands – this seems to be Google sticking it to the likes of Coke and Pepsi, but also trying to provide healthier alternatives at the same time, which is no bad thing.
After breakfast, we were ushered to a giant room where we met the Google Summer of Code team – Leslie, Tiffany and Todd. Chris DiBona was also there, though he had been largely not involved this year, or something.
All the Google staffers are really nice, very outgoing and far too energetic for early-o-clock. The first session was working out where all the other sessions were going to be. This was the outcome of a ‘sticking dots on talks that sound cool’ exerciser we’d had over breakfast. A few of the interesting ones for me overlapped, but there was a bioinformatics one which related to and gave me an opportunity to shill tnemirepxEym. Also during one of the sessions, Mr Jon Phillips from Creative Commons showed up, proving that he is indeed a real person and not just a figment of my Facebook page.
Lunch was a make your own sandwich affair. I made two. Kettle Chips were on offer.
In the afternoon, more sessions, plus I managed to find a fridge stocked with (Diet! erk) Mountain Dew and proceeded to various talks. The day ended with a summary from Leslie, a group photo and then a bus ride back to the hotel.

The hotel was actually pretty awesome. It was more of a motel than a hotel, but they had various lax rules, such as allowing a few hundred free software hackers take over their pool area, load up on booze and later, pizza.
Running tally of Mountain Dew consumed: 1200ml.