After a little bit of searching, I discovered a site that will allow you to calculate the distance of any saved path in Google Earth. If you highlight the path name in the sidebar and copy it, you can paste it into the box on the site as xml.

The picture above is the run I did last Saturday, before exams destroyed my life. School is on the left and the Cobb’s Hill Reservoir, my destination, is on the far right. The path I made put the distance at 9.3 miles. I’ve made the kmz file available for download.

I suppose I could just measure the path once, but I really would like to be able to keep these paths, for two reasons. It would be nice to be able to change them later on, in case I make a slight variation on a run. But the real reason is that I just love data. I think it would be really neat to make an entire collection of the runs that my team does, and then put them on the internet for anyone to download – new freshmen, other area runners, etc.

I also want to use Google Earth to find some new places to run this summer. I’ve been canvassing the same trails for five or six years, and they are getting worn out. A lot of my runs need to be extended to fit college training distance as well.

On to the point of this post – my summer plans. I decided about a week and a half ago to take a job with IBM. I’ll be a member of what IBM calls a “Speed Team,” a group of six interns that spends an entire summer overhauling a mission-critical component of the business. We’ll be working on the automation of the dice, sort, and pick process for MPWs (multi-project wafers).

I was on another Speed Team two summers ago, and it was a very positive experience for three reasons. Speed Teams at IBM have a lot of executive visibility – we often had meetings with managers three levels above us during which we had to present, with metrics, our methodology and progress. It gave a sense of importance to our work. Secondly, there was never a shortage of things to tackle. I am the kind of person that needs to be kept busy and to have two or three projects going at once so that if one stalls then I can move on and come back to it laster. Lastly, it was a blast to be in a room with only other interns. We had our own lounge/meeting space, and could shout to each other over the cube walls if we had questions. I’m hoping that this summer will be just as rewarding.

“What happened to Google?” is the question you’re all probably wondering about. After putting myself through their stressful interview process, I decided that I couldn’t let the IBM job offer expire to wait on a job offer from Google that may or may not have come. I never actually got rejected, though, which I’m proud of! When I let the recruiter know of my decision, I inquired about what time to start the internship search next year. This was the response I got:

Tyler,
I’m so sorry we were not able to turn this around quick enough. Please contact myself or (name removed) in December. Best of luck and please do keep in touch!

I didn’t know that they wanted to receive undergraduate internship applications that early – about two months earlier than I applied this year! Hopefully, should I decide that I wish to try for another Google internship next year, I won’t run out of time like I did this year. To anyone who got a Google internship this summer, congratulations! I’m a little bit jealous, but I’ll get over it. Burlington, VT is a great place to spend the summer.

Most companies are wrapping up their intern hiring by this time, so I wanted to make sure that I had a backup plan in case Google didn’t come through. I interviewed for a few positions at IBM over break and got two job offers that sound interesting and challenging. Both want a response by this Friday. I’m not willing to let those go in order to chase a Google internship that may not happen, so I’ve let the Google recruiter know that I’m on a tight time schedule in hopes that she can find me a group within the week.

I’m not sure how the intern hiring process works at Google. The recruiter mentioned that it can take anywhere from “one week to two months” to find an appropriate match, and that matches are made based on “intern experience, skills, and interview feedback.” The emails that she sends make it sound like they want to hire me, but they’ve really let the ball drop these past few weeks. I think that they must be busy trying to hire people to fill full-time positions. I also wonder if maybe this process would have gone faster if I had applied for an internship out in California, where they have more of their workforce.

Either way, I’ve got another week until I have to make a decision. Both options have their merits. If I work at IBM, I can live at home for free and hang out with all of my friends. I would give all that up, though, to have the chance to live in New York City and meet a whole new set of people. I think I’ll be happy no matter which way it goes, but I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed anyway…

Update: The second interview went alright. There were more abstract math questions this time, more emphasis on algorithms rather than data structures, although there were a few questions about trees and lists at the beginning. Once again, the interviewer was really interested in hearing my thought process, so I tried to think out loud as I was solving the problems.

Being a big fan of a hierarchically organized folder system, I was initially put off by the complete lack of folders in Gmail. I have at least 20 folders in Mail.app, and 10 or so rules so that most of my mail gets sorted as it comes in. Then I realized that Gmail has tags, which might be better than folders because messages can have more than one tag. In addition, they won’t immediately disappear into a folder where I’ll forget about them; they’ll stay in my inbox until I choose to archive them. Also, Gmail’s conversation feature, which groups messages by thread, is really, really nice.

I’m about to pull the plug on Mail.app by forwarding all my Rochester email to Gmail. The only thing that is holding me back is that if I do that, my mail will be split between residing on my hard drive and on Gmail. So I think I’ll open Mail.app every once in a while and download my Gmail messages, so I have a copy on my hard drive. This would also save me the problem of having no access to my mail if I did not have an internet connection. I haven’t completely decided what to do yet; hopefully I’ll figure it out in the next week or so.

Tyler:

Your first interview went well! We will now begin the process of matching your experience and preferences with groups within Google who are looking for interns this summer. Once we find a match, we’ll set up your second phone interview.

I’m looking forward to it. Now that I’ve gotten past the initial screening, I feel like I can relax a little bit. Hopefully the second interview will be less of a quiz and more of a way for my potential coworkers to determine if I would be a good fit on their project.

The first interview went really well. I got asked about my previous internships, then I was grilled on data structures and Big-O analysis. The culminating task was solving a design problem based on the one of the data structures we had just discussed in detail. My first solution was inefficient, but after a bit of prodding I had a stroke of genius and came up with one of the two optimal solutions.

My advice to anyone who has a phone interview with Google is to know your data structures. Know them well. If it has been a while since you took a data structures class, review them. I was really lucky that the stuff I reviewed was exactly what I was asked about. The questions aren’t simple, but having a good core understanding of data structures and other computer science fundamentals will help immensely.

And now I will cross my fingers while I wait for next week to arrive!

I did things the right way with Google from the beginning. One of my professors has a colleague who works in Google’s NYC office; I got in touch with her by email, and had a recruiter contact me to set up a phone interview within the week. I was extremely impressed by their quick turnaround time.

The phone interview is 4pm on Tuesday. I’m nervous and excited. I’m hoping the Googler on the other end doesn’t completely own me, but I also realize that this could be the gateway to a really awesome opportunity. The interview is scheduled to be 45 minutes, and the email that I received said, “In terms of what to expect in your interview, you will be asked a variety of technical questions including questions around coding, algorithms, design, problem solving, and general computer science fundamentals.” I consider myself a decent interviewer and a good under-pressure thinker, but I keep having dreams in which I am drooling in front of the phone saying “Huh” as the interviewer asks me to write a complete operating system kernel in 5 minutes.

Luckily, I believe that Google is looking for people that know how to think, not people that have memorized the solutions to all the problems they have ever come across. After all, Google is inventing new areas of computing science as they construct a massively parallel system that has to deal with a truly staggering amount of data. The people there are inventing new algorithms that have revolutionized internet search, not implementing something that every student is taught in CS101. I say “luckily” because this is the type of interview I believe I will excel at. I know my CS fundamentals, and I hope to be able to use them to come up with a solution to anything they throw at me.

That being said, I still plan to review a bit. Today I read the chapter on sorting in my data structures book. I plan to review my labs from C++ class last year, specifically the ones on templates, memory management, object-oriented topics such as polymorphism and overloading and linked lists and trees. I’ll try to remember the details of the stuff I did the past two summers, in case I get asked about that. Toss a bit of general OOP theory on top, and I’ll be good to go. Wish me luck.

Since this is my first website, I had been checking Google every few days to see when I would get indexed. It makes it feel that much more real – people can find what I write now. Google’s cache shows that my page was first picked up on September 6th – which is only 3 days after my first post. The conventional wisdom on the internet says it takes about 2 or 3 days to get listed, so I guess they were right on the money.

Now all I need to do is to get people to search for snier (admittedly an obscure word) and I’ll be all set!