Noogler, Day 18: The geekiest social scene

[Preface: I wrote all this last night, and promptly forgot to post it. D'oh!]

You may have noticed that my posts have been getting shorter. There's two reasons for this. The first reason is that you may well be getting quite tired of such long posts! A second reason is that now my days are not all completely different from one another.

Some of my posts are about the day's events, and some are about my philosophical musings on things like the campus atmosphere and 20% time. It looks like I've been moving from the former to the latter over time, as I'm doing less cool day-to-day stuff and more coming to understand the environment around me. That means that at some point, I'll probably stop doing the daily posts, and move to an as-I-think-about-things format.

Now that I've talked about that, I'll talk about the cool day-to-day stuff I did today. I was social today. Well, I always try to be pretty social, but moreso today. After classes, I spent some time hanging out in peoples' offices. This involved things like talking about the referral process, so I can refer my friends. Of course, a number of the people I'd want to refer work at Juniper, and my contract with Juniper says I can't refer people from there for a year... oh, well.

I also found out about schwag. The general shirt cabinets tend to empty out fast... I've been told that 10 minutes after they're stocked, they're emptied of everything but the small women's sizes, and those still don't last long either. Really, if it's schwag I'm after, my best bet is to go to http://www.googlestore.com/ and find what I'm after! I did manage to scrounge up a couple of shirts specific to the SRE team, though.

Today we had an Ads SRE party. This involved us going into a room with snacks and drinks and playing Wii. (The team has a Wii, with four controllers, and a number of party games.) I was fortunately able to help several people get going with the games, since I own most of the ones we have, and all the ones we played today. Nevertheless, I'm sad to say I was handed my hat in Wii Tennis and Monkey Battle, and we didn't finish the Mario Party game. Nevertheless, I think everybody had fun.

After that, I talked to Cheryl for a little while. She's the newest ads SRE; she just joined this week. See, there's a lot going on your first week, and while the SREs are all very supportive, they went through different training programs. I didn't really have anybody I could go to and say, "OhnoI'msofarbehindWLAAAUGH!". Well, I could, and might get sympathy, but no empathy, and there's no way they could have said "I went through the same thing, and felt the same way, and it turned out alright." So I figured I could do that for Cheryl.

After that, Matt came to visit. When I called him, he had just picked up food from Seto Deli, but they were closing, so he had to get it to-go. I invited him to come over here and we could relax and visit. I picked up some grub at Charlie's, and we sat around outside and ate our food. After that, we relaxed for a little while in some comfy sofas nearby, and then embarked on the self-directed one-hour tour that our guest center has designed. It's a tour that I'd been meaning to take anyway, just to explore the campus, but I was glad I could bring Matt along. I still think he shoulda tried one of the smoothies, though.

It looks like the entire campus is about socializing today. Earlier, there was a farmer's market. While I was showing Cheryl around, there was a dance class going on not far from our offices. There was a university that was having a mixer for current and past students here. There was some sort of event that involved firepits around the volleyball courts. On my way back from dropping off Matt, I saw that the firepits were lit, and there were people around talking cheerfully. Then the sprinklers came on.

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