Mike's Blog

Another day down in AU. We’re taking a short foot rest break in the middle of the day so time to blog about yesterday.

Coogee Beach: The biggest waves I’ve ever swam.

Yesterday we slept in until almost noon. After a relaxed breakfast lunch at the cafe below our apartment we hopped on an east bound train. We intended to go to Bondi Beach, but while en route we decided to mix it up and take a bus south to Coogee Beach and walk along the coast north to Bondi Beach.

Each beach had its own list of prohibited activities. This helped figure out what was implicitly allowed at the other beaches.

We were greeted at Coogee beach by ten foot waves and warnings about a strong riptide. A beach like this would be closed to swimmers in the US, but surprisingly the conditions did not seem to stop anyone. The beach was packed and this was on Monday afternoon. Winnie relaxed on the beach while I headed into the surf. These were the largest waves in which I’ve ever body surfed. After an hour of splashing around I was exhausted and a bit scraped up from smashing force of a few waves that caught me off guard.

It was time to start our hike. It was about five miles of boardwalk broken up by short diversions on to the rocky cliffs to observe the incredible surf. As we approached Bondi Beach there were sculptures and other art scattered along the beaches and cliffs.

Cliffs and Surf: typical scenery along the hike

Exhausted we took a break for some Sangria and Tapas. We finished our meal just in time for a sudden and intense thunderstorm. The lightning we saw while waiting for our bus was incredible. The storm was short lived, though, because by the time we returned to our apartment the rain had diminished and lightning could only be seen in the distance from our high perch on the 42nd floor.

A Sip of the bay (this took many tries to get right)

All in all, it was a great day. I even figured out the coffee system here:

• short black - regular espresso
• long black - similar to american style black coffee
• flat white - kind of like a bitter latte

It’s the morning of my second day in Australia. I’m sitting at Caffe’ Molinari, the nearest free WiFi to my apartment. We’re going to head to the beach in a few but I’ll take a moment to recount my first day and first impressions. As usual I’ll go with the engineeresque bulleted list.

The Trip Over

• After taking off from work a few minutes earlier than I anticipated I arrived back home for a final packing check. We gobbled some left overs, loaded up the car, and we headed to the BART station, the cheapest long term parking around.
• We hopped a train and about 15 min after we parked we were already checking our bags. Security also went quickly and after I took my last opportunity to stretch, we boarded the plane.
• We had the front most seats in the tail section of our 747. This means we were in the roomiest pair of seats in coach. We both managed to sleep a bit. I did not spend as much time reading my printouts of Guice documentation as I anticipated.

  The trunk of the Christmas tree in the Queen Victoria Building

• We were required to declare our prescription drugs and the candy bars I was carrying to customs but puzzlingly because we were software engineers and not civil engineers, they decided not to search our bags.

Getting our Bearings

• We cabbed our way to our apartment. We arrived at about 9am, a few hours before check in. We took this opportunity to acquire sim cards for our cell phones. This was quite easy but we had to wander around for a few minutes to find some WiFi to steal in order to activate them over the web.
• Once our room was ready we headed up for a change, a shower, and some tea. The room is quite large: reminiscent of my friends’ studio apartments.

  Winnie in Hyde park

• We headed out and embarked on the closest walking tour in our tour book. This included visits to the Queen Victoria Building, Hyde Park, and The Strand Mall. We also took a brief detour through the Royal Botanical Gardens.
• Our stomachs began to rumble. We dropped by a food court in the basement of an office building and enjoyed some pasta. We followed it up with some drinks from an bubble tea shop: EasyWay.
• After a short rest at our apartment we headed back to the Royal Botanical Gardens for some dusk photography of the skyline and the famous opera house. Once the sun set the sky filled with giant bats called flying foxes.

  Winnie’s photo of the Sydney skyline.

• Once darkness fell we headed back to the apartment only to stop briefly for a couple bottles of chardonnay and some delicious ramen.

First Impressions

• Food and alcohol are expensive. They’re between 3/2 and 2 times the price of California. This is likely due to a combination of a weak US dollar and our location in the down town of the biggest city on the continent.
• Sydney is quite diverse. The variety in food selection is excellent.
• The parks are beautiful and appear to be under utilized. On a day like yesterday in San Francisco Golden Gate park would be packed, but the botanical gardens were quite empty.
• Businesses close early but people hang out late. At 4pm most of the businesses and even many restaurants were starting to shut down along our walks, yet late into the night the side walks were almost as crowded as mid day.
• There is Star of David graffiti everywhere. I’m not sure what’s up with that.

I suppose it was just a matter of time. While hacking away for the Ning Appathon contest I created a very small piece of software that may actually be useful to someone some day, so I open sourced it: PHP REST Bucket.

It’s a minimal (a.k.a. featureless, inflexible, poorly scaling) implementation of a key value database with a REST Web Service interface. In other words its a web application that other software can use to store and retrieve data by name, and not much else.

I wrote it so that I could quickly prototype Ning Applications that need persistence beyond what is provided by the available APIs (e.g. more than 10k of data). Lets see if anything interesting comes of it. At the very least I’ve now raised my nerd rating by at least one level, especially since I hacked it up while wearing my free 1337 hat in front of a trendy coffee shop.

Facebook is a very sophisticated platform. They’ve done a lot over the past several months to implement as many of their features as possible using a generic, standardized interface. This includes their security policies. While this amount of grace is very impressive to me as an engineer, it’s often extremely confusing as a user. Features I expect to just work require excessive configuration. To make matters worse, their documentation is incomplete and out of date.

This week I reactivated my profile after a long period of absence (now that beacon is finally going away). A lot has changed in the last two years. The first thing I wanted to set up was my limited profile so I could prevent those not-really-friends from seeing every detail of my life. Being I’m quite computer savvy, I figured this would be no problem. I figured wrong. I spent a couple of hours reading release note blog entries and Yahoo! answers.

To save you time digging trough that vast mess of conflicting advice, here is the step by step I followed to set up my limited profile:

1. Log into your account and click on ‘Settings’ at the top of the screen.
2. Next, click on the ‘manage’ link to the right of ‘Privacy’
3. Click on ‘Profile’
   
4. Figure out what you’d like to block on your limited profile. I blocked just about everything.
5. For each thing you’d like to block, click on the drop down. Select ‘Only Friends’. Click on the same drop down again. This time select ‘Customize…’
6. You’ll see a modal window pop up. On this modal window click on the text field below ‘Except these people’. Next click on the icon to the right of this field. You should see a drop down which includes your limited profile. Click on the limited profile record.
7. Repeat for each type of content you’d like to restrict.
8. Once you’ve configured each field don’t forget to save your settings.

Good work! Your boss will now have to spy on you the old fashioned way, by looking over your cube wall.

My company, like many tech companies of our size, go through about a soda per person per day. We, like many similar companies, order cases of Coca Cola products from Costco. For months I’ve been letting those Coke Reward points go to waste in the trash. That was until today.

Today I actually took a moment to check out the website. I was thinking, “Maybe I can scam some free soda or a hairier jump jet out of this.” Little did I know that it gets much better than a stinky jet. As it turns out for 400 points you can either get a CocaCola trendy tote bag, or a $20 gift certificate for finelobster.com. There a 6 pack of live lobsters will run you about $135 with free shipping. This means it’s time to do some unit math.

What does this mess of math result in? 1 lobster every 27 work days! If I take a few minutes to gather the codes (which should be easy since I’m one of the only people who bothers to restock the fridge), I’ll be paid back in a lobster about every month.

This is one of the most exciting things I’ve realized in weeks!