Welcome

The first few days in San Jose have been pretty good. Sunday I went to San Fransisco using public transportation. It took me about 2 hours. I started out at my apartment getting on a bus, then a light rail train, then the CalTrain. I was supposed to get on another bus after I got off the CalTrain but I turned the wrong way out of the station and missed it. I took a cab from there to the apartment I was going to look at.

The apartment ended up not being what I wanted so I am still looking for a place. I have a few appointments set up on Saturday and I am hoping to have something locked in by the end of the weekend.

Monday morning I attempted to take a series of buses to work but got on the wrong one so I had to turn around and go back to the apartment where I caught a cab to work.

I met a a few of my fellow interns who were starting that day. I was also told that there was a shuttle from the apartments where I am staying now to work everyday. They neglected to tell me that when I checked in.

After getting my badge one of the other interns and I went to the PayPal campus which is about 10 minutes by car away from the eBay campus.

My boss met me in the lobby and took me to my desk. I have my own cube and found a brand new laptop and docking station at my desk.

I am working with the global platform and risk teams. I will be doing six weeks in each of the departments. From what I have been able to gather over the last few days. Global platforms works PayPal sites in other parts of the world. Risk works with Phishing, Spoof, Fraud and helps develop things for the customer service representatives in another office.

I have a mentor from each area that is going to help me with my projects for the summer.

Today they told me what projects I will be working on this summer. I have a few long term and a few short term projects this summer.

I am really excited about the things I will be working on.

I started my day today at 3:30 am Eastern in Bloomington and arrived in San Jose around 12:45 pm Pacific. It has been a pretty long day of travel.

The trip was fairly uneventful. I went back through the Dallas airport today where I was just last weekend. I almost felt like I was retracing my steps.

After I got into San Jose I checked in to my temporary apartment. I have two weeks from today to find a more permanent place to live. I am hoping since I am out here I will be able to get something. Apartments out her go so quickly.

My corporate apartment is nice, it is a good sized place right off of the pool. The closest grocery store is a Japanese grocery store. It is about the size of a regular grocery store unlike the Asian grocery stores in Bloomington. They had a few American brands but pretty much everything was not in English. I bought a few things of noodles and some tiny frozen fruit popsicles that are exotic flavors.

The closest American style grocery store is about 8 blocks away so I am going to go there tomorrow to get some things like cereal etc.

The area I am in right now is very car centric. I am hoping to move someplace where there is more stuff within walking distance.

I start work on Monday. I think that is when it will stop feeling like a vacation.

This week has gone by so fast. I leave very early tomorrow morning for San Jose for three months.

It is sort of a strange feeling since I haven't even been in Bloomington a year and now I am taking off again.

I shipped 3 boxes of clothes and kitchen/misc stuff to San Jose this morning and I have two full suitcases and a backpack of my tech gear that I am taking with me on the plane tomorrow. I don't know what I will need for three months since the weather varies. Since I don't know where I am staying I don't know if they will have the knives, pans, measuring cups etc that I need to cook.

Today I was thinking how strange it is going to be adjusting to another new place. Two completely new places in less than one year.

I am also car less from now until I get back. I stored my car at a friends house for the summer. It is going to be strange not to just get in the car and go to the grocery store or Target etc.

I don't have a more permanent place to live yet but I am going into corporate housing tomorrow for two weeks.

I start Monday morning at 9 am and I have to make sure I leave in plenty of time to get on the bus/light rail to get to work.

It is exciting and scary all at the same time. This feels a lot like when I was getting ready to come to Bloomington but there are a few more uncertain factors. The housing thing is a big thing to me since I am not sure where I will be living in two weeks. It has made forwarding mail a huge mess.

I am going to miss my friends but luckily I do have a few friends who are going to be in the San Francisco Bay area this summer. I am sure I will make a bunch of new friends at eBay/PayPal.

So have been off of the radar for a little over a week. So I will be posting a few catch up post of the events of the past few weeks.

I enjoyed the last few days of CHI even though we didn’t win the student design competition we had two finalists and the competition was really strong. The question for next year seems interesting looking at homeless people. That has to be a difficult group to get human subject committee clearance to work with. I know some of the professors are going to write to the coordinators to see if they might consider changing the question or adjusting the population group. It will be interesting to see what happens with this.

On Friday I went on the tour of the Berkeley Information school, Yahoo Research Berkeley and the Berkeley Institute of Design (BiD). The first stop was BiD they had a lot of really cool projects they were working on. http://bid.berkeley.edu/ The ones that really stood out to me were: the cell phone that you could use motion from the camera to control. A video conferencing setup where you could see the other people in a more realistic way, gestures were not reversed and it was easy to refer to a specific person, http://bid.berkeley.edu/papers/chi_2007/multiview07/. The other one that I connected with more than the others was looking at group design processes. The student was looking at the possibility of putting together a design process that would make it easier to avoid the pitfalls that groups often fall into. This sounds like an interesting project to follow since we are taught that there really isn’t a method for design there are just structures that can help you.

The information school talked to us about their masters and doctoral programs. They also had a few students come in and present their final projects. The professor who talked to us had been working on a project looking at flickr and the social implications of it. Another student had created a map for organizing social activities that would allow people to nominate and vote on where they wanted to go. http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/

The culture of the I school seemed a lot like IU Informatics. The professor who talked to us about the program told us how the students were friends and enjoyed doing things together. The school is not computer science and doesn’t have anything to do with computer science. Instead they are the evolution of the library science program.

Yahoo research Berkeley was an interesting place. They showed us a few of the projects they have developed. My favorites were Tag Maps they used flicker tags and mapping software to display text to show you where there were photos tagged with a certain label. http://tagmaps.research.yahoo.com A related development was the zone tag photo uploaded that allows you to upload photos to flickr with tags, http://zonetag.research.yahoo.com. http://www.yahooresearchberkeley.com/

All in all it was a good day and I saw a lot of interesting things.

In the last two weeks there have been two squirrel attacks in two parts of the country. While I was in San Francisco I heard about a squirrel attacking three people. Squirrel enters S. San Jose classroom, attacks two adults and a student - San Jose Mercury News

Today there is a story out of Orlando where a squirrel attacked a lady at a shopping center. Squirrel Goes Nuts At Shopping Center - WESH.com — Orlando, FL

What is going on here? Have the squirrels gotten tired of being chased and hit by cars. Maybe it is a cross country squirrel revolution. ;)

Just two really odd stories fairly close together.

This morning I woke up and had to think about where I was. It was sort of odd to not realize that you are home. I have been in four different hotels in two cities in the last two weeks. I got in late last night, technically early this morning since I didn't get in until midnight.

Since I was the last person on the Bloomington Shuttle the driver was nice and dropped me off at my house. I was planning on calling a cab from the Courtyard Marriott.

I am in town until the 19th packing boxes, cleaning and wrapping up other loose ends before leaving for California for the summer.

I have a backlog of stuff to post from my trip and I will scatter that through out the week.

I haven't had time to post since I have been busy attending the conference during the day and working/going to parties at night.

In general the sessions have been pretty good. I have been to a variety of different presentations which have triggered a lot of thoughts for me about my research for next year.

Monday - The CHI finalists were announced after the poster session. We had 2 teams move on to the final round. A bunch of us went out as a group that night to celebrate. We had a few professors with us and a few Informatics alums with us.

Tuesday - The first of the parties. A large number of us went to the eBay/PayPal party. It was held at the tech museum which was really nice. The food was quite good and there was an open bar with good drinks. I got to talk to a lot of interesting people and meet some of the people I will be working with this summer.

Wednesday - IU placed 3rd and 4th in the design competition. Everyone was very happy about the showing we had and the teams both got a lot of really good feedback from the judges.

That night some of us went to the Adobe party. This was defiantly the best party. Adobe held their party in their newly redesigned studio. I wish I could have taken pictures because the space was so awesome. Before I went up there I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement so I couldn't.

They had a bunch of offices and cubes on that floor and decided to tear those down to put in open cubes, white board tables, a white board that ran along the wall with magnetic markers and really cool flat panel boards that you could write on using special pens and they also work like TVs since they had Wiis set up. From their windows you could see mountains off in the distance. They also had nice snacks. I got to talk to a few people who worked there about some of the stuff they were working on in a very vague sense.

After the Adobe party we headed to the Google party at the Tech Museum. Everyone was invited to this party so it was a madhouse. The whole museum was open and packed. We explored the exhibits and since there were so many people there I didn't get a chance to talk to any Google employees. I got a chance to ride a segway. I'll post some photos of it later.

When they kicked us out of the museum we went to a bar in San Jose with most of the professors and just about all of the IU students. We had a bunch of the other CHI student design competition finalists join us at the bar.

After identifying myself as being from IU many people said wow you guys are everywhere. I don't even know how many students we have here but it is almost all of the first year class.

Tonight we are going to see Spiderman 3 at midnight and then just about everyone is leaving. I am going to take the tour of Berkley and Yahoo Research Berkley before spending next week in San Francisco.