Christopher Souvey's Blog

Just finished up the first day at Google ‘KO’! (I’ll explain the "K" in a moment)

I woke up at 7:30, took the bus and at 8, and arrived at the Moscone Center at 8:30, only to be greeted by massive registration lines.  The lines were organized by on the first letter of your last name.  As bad as S-U was (any Smiths in the building?), I am so glad to not have a last name starting with A.  All the lines were snaking around the room, making it nearly impossible to even find the end of the line.

The introductory keynote was supposed to start at 9:30, and they ended up having to let people in without registering (until later) so they could start it on time.  The keynote talked about Google’s goals and how each of their developer projects fit into these goals.  The highlight was the Android demo (on a real device) of Google Maps Street View.  The view was controlled by a compass inside the phone, so as you moved the phone, the view changed.  Basically the effect feels like the phone’s camera is turned on, except that you are seeing somewhere else (I also got to try out something similar in the Google Earth booth later in the day – virtual reality goggles that you could use to look around the 3d buildings in Google Earth).

I started out with a presentation about the current state of web technologies (all the various strategies and Ajax libraries), which was actually extremely interesting.  Then I went to a code lab (bring your laptop and work your way through a tutorial with assistance from the developers) on Gears (offline access and browser extension) – grabbing a sandwich on the way.  Next I went to another code lab, this one on the Google Maps JavaScript API (for embedding dynamic maps into webpages).  Finally, I caught the end of a session on the future of Gears (including peripheral access, file system access, & geolocation based on gps, wifi, cell, and/or ip).

The next hour was free time to wander, mingle, and meet with the developers of various Google tools (each of which had a demonstration booth) to ask them any questions.  I couldn’t get anything out of the App Engine developers about Rails support except that the Python layer is added on top of the App Engine layer, and so they do plan to support additional languages.  I also got a Gears T-shirt (go swag! – I also got a Google IO water bottle, bag, & T-shirt, which I’ll discuss in a bit).

Then it was time for the after-party ("After Hours"), and man does Google know how to throw a party.  They apparently gutted an arcade – they had various racing games, foosball, air-hockey, and pool setup in the conference hall.  In addition, they had a bunch of Wiis setup (one of which was projecting extremely largely on the wall).  Food-wise, they had some dinner items, an ice-cream bar, and two chocolate fountains (as well as free all-you-could-drink, which I of course, unlike nearly every person there, couldn’t have).  They also had a quiet area where developers could meet and discuss their experiences with Google products.  Finally, they had a live performance by Flight of the Concord.  Yeah… Google definitely knows how to party (plus it they are obscenely wealthy, which can’t ever hurt).

So, the moment you’ve all (haha… like people read this) been waiting for.  The T-shirts they handed out after registration have a fancy design on the front made of small and large white circles on a gray background (and the staff have the same shirts but inverted).  If you take the large circles as 1s and the small circles as 0s, and convert it to ASCII (from binary), the shirt spells GoogleKO.  On one hand clever (making a seemingly random design actually mean something), but on the other hand, its wrong! (unless its was an Easter egg? KO=knock-out?).

All in all though, it was a great day, and I’m looking forward to tomorrow (day 2 of the event).

Had a pretty exciting week:

• Bought a new laptop (12.1" HP tx2000 tablet with 3GB RAM) to replace my aging dv2000
• Sang a solo (Yesterday, Beatles) in Kirby Music Night (along with 12 other songs, since I’m in both Chorus & Chamber Choir)
• Finally got a cell phone (Motorola w490) with T-Mobile, and am paying $6 a month for unlimited wireless internet on it
• Caved in and got a Facebook so I can stay in contact with all the my friends that are graduating this year (since it finally set in after Music Night – we all started crying )

Next week will be pretty busy too:

• Meeting with school college counselor
• Going to Google IO (2-day web developer conference)
• Latin III final (my only final, since my other classes were AP)
• Last week of school (which I have mixed feelings about, since I’m happy for this year to end, but it will be my last week with all my senior friends)

Today, while I was supposed to be studying for my AP tests, I found all sorts of ways to distract myself:  watching TV, playing Super Smash Bros Brawl (unlocked every character & map and beat every event this weekend), and making fonts.

For the first one, I wrote out the alphabet and some characters, scanned them in, vectorized them, and made a font (using FontCreator).  It took a few hours, but it actually looks kind of cool.

This year in Latin, we wrote a fable, translated it into Latin, learned blackletter calligraphy, and are currently writing and illustrating it.  I found a sheet of paper in my backpack that I had been practicing calligraphy on (copying a random Latin passage), scanned it in, cut out the best of each letter, and made it into a font.  I actually really like how this one turned out.  Oh, and before you think, “ipfum? he is in Latin right?” know that it’s called a long, medial, or descending s, is often used in place of a short s everywhere other than the end of a word in blackletter calligraphy, and happens to also appear in the United States Bill of Rights.

Finally, for the last one, I just kind of threw something together from my cursive (which as you will see, is not very attractive).  This one was tricky, because all the letters have to attach to each other, so I had to modify all of the letters after vectorization so they would fit together with all the others.

If you want to download one of these, just leave a comment stating what you want to use it for, and I’ll mail it to you (as a TrueType font).  I’m not trying to moderate them or anything (I’ll let anyone who wants one take it), I just want to know what (if anything) people want them for.