Igor’s blog

Yesterday after work Greg and I went to a lecture by Wilson Hsieh, who is an Engineer at Google. He also happens to be a PhD and so, surprise surprise, the talk was geared mostly to other PhD students. We were obviously worried that it would be way over our heads, but it turned out to be very understandable and really interesting. The presentation was about Google’s massively distributed data storage system called BigTable, Andrew Hitchcook posted a nice summary of a similar talk.

What I found more interesting is all the PhD-ness of the talk. We walked into the room and saw that there was pizza laid out on the first tables, and everybody had a slice. We also saw that pretty much everyone looked like a PhD candidate, you know the look. We quickly found 2 seats between some people and started looking around, seeing many of our TAs from years gone by. After a minute or two we decided that what the heck we’ll venture for a slice of pizza or two. And just in time, because the talk started as soon as we were back in our seats. To my surprise the speaker mentioned the word PhD at least, oh I don’t know, a bazillion times. You heard me, a bazillion. I guess there’s some sort of pride from being a PhD candidate, but come on, they were all PhD candidates, who are you trying to impress? Another thing that struck me as interesting is there was no such thing as a “quick question”. Unless quick is somewhere around the 3 minute mark of course. Overall the talk was great, and I was impressed at how easily he could compress the very complicated ideas into simple explanations. Well done!

After the talk Greg and I decided to go into the newly constructed Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research building. This building is very modern and cool looking and just happens to be on the way from the Bahen centre to the Queen’s Park subway station. We came in just as the janitor was locking the doors, and wondered around the yet unfinished lobby. I must say that it’s pretty nicely done on the inside, although it looks much bigger from the outside. We then decided to go see how it looks on one of the floors upstairs, and randomly picked the 6th floor. After a few unexciting looks at the sixth floor, where we spotted 2 books on Perl in one of the offices we headed back to the elevator. Here we had a weird encounter. We met a guy who apparently graduated from the CS department in 2003 with a degree in Software Engineering, and decided to go work with some researchers in the biotechnology area since jobs were scarce. Who woulda’ thunk? The guy was pretty nice, but wouldn’t shut up. He told us that the 6th floor was apparently where all the computer people sat. So apparently we got sucked in without even knowing it. *sigh* I guess you get what you deserve. On the way back to the subway the guy just went on and on about how jobs in industry was probably better and this and that, even though his girlfriend (I presume) was walking along the whole way. Oh well, I guess I have to be grateful not to be stuck in a boring research programming job .