So in a where-in-the-world-is-acme-now-and-isn't-it-time-he-starts-to-really-loathe-timezones kinda way, today I was in Mountain View, California at Google's Building 42. Yes, 42. I know what you're thinking, but they don't actually number buildings after the answer to life, the universe, and everything. There's a building 43 too.
Considering I've been in sunny spring-break-central Fort Lauderdale, California, it's a bit colder here. And cloudy. And it rained a bit. And there's no beach. But the cars are still huge!
You know when dot-com fever was everywhere, and all these companies spent money on their employees and silly toys and cute offices and everything? Well, Google is like a time warp. They have lava lamps absolutely everywhere. The offices are cool and asymmetrical, Google logos everywhere, kitchens, free drinks, balloons and train sets. It is retro chic, in a weird dot-com-still-exists way. Very neat.
I got to see quite a bit of Google, due to unintentionally getting lost, and the fact that lunch was fabulous. No really, fabulous. We're talking wonderful kitchen, wide range of food all really well seasoned and cooked, and excellent chocolate brownies. It's like a university, only where all the students are intelligent, the buildings fancy, and the food amazing. Yes, I was impressed.
I had heard about some people visiting Google for fun/food, but now I really understand. Google is a dream. A hope. A new frontier, with interesting scaling problems. Now who wants a Google lava lamp?
Re:Had you let me know ...
acme on 2005-03-23T15:23:25
Sadly it was a fly-in, visit Google, fly-out kind of deal. I would have loved to come visit people I know in Yahoo! and elsewhere. Next time!
World Timezone Map Multi-TimeZone Clock (which doesn't support the 0.5Hr splinters
Seriously, sounds like a fun trip.
Re:Have Time Zones got you down?
merlyn on 2005-03-23T00:47:43
I set my digital cameras to Zulu, which makes it easy to not need to remember to reset them as I travel. And I have a script that reads the EXIF "created at" time and forces the mod_time on the file to that time, making them easily discernable at the Finder or "ls -lt" level about recent activity (timezone localized).Re:Have Time Zones got you down?
merlyn on 2005-03-24T19:26:41
I've been asked for the script. Here it is in all it's undebugged and undocumented hacked-up glory:#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
$|++;
use Image::ExifTool qw(ImageInfo);
use Time::Local;
for my $file (@ARGV) {
my $ii = ImageInfo($file, qw(DateTimeOriginal DateTime))
or warn("Skipping $file\n"), next;
my ($created) =
grep/\S/, @$ii{qw(DateTimeOriginal DateTime)};
next unless $created;
warn "using $created for $file\n";
if ($created =~ s/([-+ ])(\d\d):(\d\d)$//) {
my ($sign, $hour, $minute) = ($1, $2, $3);
# warn "ignoring offset of $sign $hour:$minute\n";
}
my @digits = $created =~/(\d+)/g or next;
if ($digits[0] < 1900) {
warn "bad year $digits[0] for $file";
next;
}
$digits[0] -= 1900;
$digits[1] -= 1;
my $gmtime = timegm(reverse @digits);
if ($gmtime > time or $gmtime < time - 86400*90) {
warn "preposterous gmtime for $file: ", scalar gmtime $gmtime;
# next;
}
utime($gmtime, $gmtime, $file) or warn "Cannot utime on $file: $!";
}
