A week ago I found out that I didn’t make the cut for a job I’d applied for at Google. It’s a bummer, but such is life. I figured I’d share a little bit about my experience with them.

I don’t want to go into detail about the specifics of the interviews, but I’ll give a very brief overview: I applied, was contacted by a recruiter, went through a phone interview about my history and skillset, solved a problem/challenge for them (which was a blast =)) and got flown out for a day of interviewing at the Mountain View campus.

Mountain View is a lovely town, as are its neighbors in Silicon Valley. I got the chance to hang out with my old roommate (whom I adore), and live it up a little with a friend/coworker from here in State College who is interning at another company out there. The hotel I got put up in was very posh and cool, and Google seemed to spare no expense in making me feel comfortable. I felt quite special just getting flown out.

Google’s campus is absolutely wild. It’s the second time I’ve visited there (the last time was in 2008 on my way to LA, I had lunch with a friend there) Everyone there has such an energy about them. Looking around in the cafeteria, you can definitely tell that these people are experts. The people that interviewed me absolutely blew me away. Each person was so knowledgeable about design and engineering. Each interview was really different too, and I was presented with some really fun challenges and perspective-changing discussions. I really relished my time there.

After being rejected, I’m not too upset. It would have been awesome to get to work there, but I’ve only just graduated college. Maybe after some time has passed and my skills mature a bit, I’ll have the chance to go back and interview again. At least I know now which neighborhoods in the area are good for me.

I’m extremely thankful for the opportunity to go out there. In my furor of a job hunt, it felt great to have Google take an interest in me. If anyone there reads this, thanks for giving me the chance, and flying me out. Maybe I’ll see you in the future =)

This afternoon I was eating some fresh raspberries (pleasant) and came across a surprise (even moreso pleasant) in my inbox. My portfolio was given the honor of being EyesonPixel’s site of the day for May 3rd, 2010! “Stoked” is an appropriate word to use here, I think. Thanks!

For those who are interested, follow their Twitter page. They tweet with a new site to be inspired by each day! I’m honored to join their collection.

A former colleague/mentor from back when I was a research assistant at CSCL posted an article earlier this month over at Interaction-design.org that I thought I’d share some of my favorite tidbits from. His article talks about the history of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) and how it carved out a niche (which really isn’t a niche by definition) for itself amongst the overlap of several disciplines.

Here’s a little bit of what he had to say.

“The challenge of personal computing became manifest at an opportune time. The broad project of cognitive science, which incorporated cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, cognitive anthropology, and the philosophy of mind, had formed at the end of the 1970s. [...] Thus, at just the point when personal computing presented the practical need for HCI, cognitive science presented people, concepts, skills, and a vision for addressing such needs.”

“…it no longer makes sense to regard HCI as a specialty of computer science; HCI has grown to be broader, larger and much more diverse than computer science. It expanded from individual and generic user behavior to include social and organizational computing, creativity, and accessibility for the elderly, the cognitively impaired, and for all people. It expanded from desktop office applications to include games, e-learning, e-commerce, military systems, and process control. It expanded from early graphical user interfaces to include myriad interaction techniques and devices, multi-modal interactions, and host of emerging ubiquitous, handheld and context-aware interactions.”

“In the early 1980s, HCI was a small and focused specialty area. It was a cabal trying to establish what was then a heretical view of computing. Today, largely due to the success of that endeavor, HCI is a vast and multifaceted community, loosely bound by the evolving concept of usability, and the integrating commitment to value human concerns as the primary consideration in creating interactive systems.”

Dr. Carroll really brings up an interesting point. I only became interested in HCI a few years ago, and it’s easy to find evidence that HCI was still emerging as a science in decades past. Ever hear about punch-cards? He mentions that the timing for this was “fortuitous”, and I’m inclined to agree — as technological engineering advanced, psychology has become a bigger part of building software features and interfaces.

Case in point: Imagine doing your taxes (something we all have to do) on something like Visicalc (which was immensely popular back then, apparently). I doubt you could do it without plenty of paper and a few missing chunks of your own hair. Now compare it to modern web-based tax software, which asks you natural-language questions about your finances, computes your taxes, and mails the forms for you with a guarantee. It’s easy to see how consideration for users has really grown in the past few decades, and Dr. Carroll hit the nail on the head. We’re lucky that advances in technology and psychology coincided so fortuitously. Just imagine Visicalc on a high-def display.

Well, it’s finally up.

Thanks to the following people:

I assume this is the part where the orchestra starts to play in an attempt to cut me off. But really, thanks for the help, everybody.

It feels weird. I don’t know what to do now!
Probably should start getting a case-study post ready..

Now that I’ve committed to writing on this thing again, what (if anything) do people want to hear about? Code tutorials? Photoshop stuff? Should I just make a sequel to my Alton Brown posts? Perhaps become a HORSE the band dedicated blog?

haha, I’ve no clue.

This thing on? I hope the new look goes over well. I’ve got a few more changes to make over the next two days, but this is the gist.

sucks.

Every check I get is thrown immediately out, I’m eating horribly, not accomplishing anything I had planned, feel generally worse than usual. No time, no money, no zest.

Least I’ve got some sweet friends. That’s about it right now. The rest seems like a series of mistakes that’s been going on for months.

Where did I go wrong?

For all 2 hits per month that bother coming here, I’m fiddling with things for awhile. So if you see the theme change, or things added/removed, don’t be alarmed.

Lets, um, muse?

So, it’s been apparent to me that I need to blog more, and seeing as I’m moving out of my house in a few weeks, and the school semester ending, I’ll have time to do that. So, let’s give this a shot (shall we?) — I’m going to blog more about the progress of stuff I’ve been up to. “What stuff?”, you might ask. Well, here’s a taste:

To Do:

• Record Music: I’ve been toying with this for the past month or so, and I think I’m going to try to record two demos of material. I’ve got about 12 or so songs that I’d really like to put out there, 6 listenable to the general public, 6 listenable to people with bad taste in music (i.e. myself). The first 6 are under the working title of “A Forgotten Flight” and sort of fuse post-rock with some kind of folk. I’d call it post-folk but my friend Chad beat me to the chase, apparently.
• Unveil my super top-secret new TimKnapton.com: It’s been under the radar for months now. I’ve poured everything I could into sketchpads that will never see real sunshine. Everything designwise I’ve picked up in the past year is going to get applied, it’s gonna get a whole lot of new content (including my much-neglected portfolio), it’s going to tie seamlessly into numerous webapps, and it’s going to be killer. Just you wait. That’s all I can say. Get stoked, me.
• Photoblog enhancements: Nothing huge, but a lot of under-the-hood changes need to be made to my photoblogging platform. I’m also working on making it shinier and ajax-powered (by option of course in the administration). Also, I have about 3000 photos from last summer that I never sifted through. I’m sure there’s some good ones in there that I can put up as content too…
• Complete 3 movies: I got an idea for a movie that would be really easy to shoot. All I would need would be me and my tripod, a few friends to act, and time to edit. It’s that last one that I haven’t had in awhile now. The other two movies are longboarding ones, so I figure I need a skating friend at some point, but before even that I need to perfect some of my sweet moves. =P
• Get back into client work: I just want to design something fresh. Everything in my portfolio is from like 2006, and everything worthwhile I did after that doesn’t exactly belong to me, so I could use some fresh clients. If you need a site done, I might be nice and do it for free if you give me enough creative freedom =)
• Get in shape: For someone who skates every single day, I’ve got nothing to show for it except burly leg muscles haha. Maybe I’ll start doing crunches or something.

That’s about it. Those are my non-obligation obligations. Cheers to self-improvement.

Peace out, girl scout.

So, I really love my new place here at PSU, but I drafted this a long time ago and figured I’d remember some of the good old days of living in my last apartment. Here’s a few highlights.

• The Volcano and Banana Floaters Tea: As a housewarming event, Steve and Alex stole a volcano-aquarium thing from the girls upstairs (which was kept proudly in my room). During this process they did other stuff to their place, including putting a banana into the teapot. A few days later we were talking with Grace, who was drinking a cup of tea. “Why does this taste like bananas?” she said. As we held in our laughter she exclaimed that there were “banana floaters” in her teapot.
• Count Beerula’s Lair: Our kitchen had a giant cardboard cutout of a beer bottle wearing a dracula costume. You could put your head through the “face” and everything. This was Count Beerula. He lived in a closet in our kitchen, a closet that actually went up to the second floor, boarded off behind the wall of our housemate’s closet. On rare occaisions we’d go into the lair and beat on the wall screaming her name and making spooky noises.
• “I’m a responsible individual!”: For Steve’s sake, I won’t put this up here.
• The Cake rule: Our first meal in the place, we found a box of cake mix and sprinkles left over by the previous residents. We made it and someone said “There should be cake every weekend. And there was. Often we’d bet away our cake-baking duty, and arguments could be won or lost simply by retorting about the quality of that person’s cake that weekend. “Dude I really just don’t think he’d be a good candidate for president.” “Oh?! Well your cake this weekend is terrible!”
• The HPTI Problem Solving: I have a post about this elsewhere. I’m too lazy to link it.
• Balloons: After the HPTI Problem-Solving competition, I hid the balloons steve put in my room away. For about 3 weeks, every time he would leave, I would take out a balloon and draw a happy, toothy, grinning face on one of them. Then I would place it somewhere in Steve’s bedroom, usually wearing one of his hats, or peering out from under a pile of clothes or something. Every time he found it, he would pop it on a nail in my door. After awhile, Steve started losing it, and refering to the balloon as “Him”. “I don’t want to see ‘him’ again. ‘He’ shouldn’t be smiling so much. Balloons don’t even have teeth!”
• Valentines Day Brownies: Once I made brownies (as a substitution for cake which I was quite sick of) but sadly they got burnt. Oh well, I iced them anyways but nobody in the apartment would touch them. A week later, for Valentine’s day, we took the stale old brownies and wrapped them up on a plate with a Valentine, leaving them at the door of the girls above us. They actually ate them. Upon finding out, we all almost died of laughter.
• The night of the eclipse: The first day I moved in, I took Steve’s horrible old microwave (circa 1888) and put it under the counter since the one I brought was so much better. One night, an eclipse drove Steve mad and he told me that it hurt him that I did that to his microwave. Then, he ordered me as the director of the teaching-intern program (which i was a part of) to switch them again. Instead, I put the microwave in his room and started microwaving some easy-mac in it. Steve again was upset, and ordered me to move it back, which I did not do. Then he faked an e-mail to my boss about my insubordination and went off to tell me that if we microwaved the punxsatawney phil beanie-baby, that all would be forgiven. Phil caught on fire, and was put on display with the fine china (read: budweiser plastic cups) in the china cupboard.
• Juice!: Steve, who was an avid fan of Arrested Development, would often bounce about the house exclaiming “Juice!” similar to the show’s character Buster Bluth. In the show, the character Buster would get high off of high-fructose corn syrup. In real life, Steve got crazy sugar rushes off of my homemade sweet-tea (admittedly it is just like rocket fuel). Steve often had times where he’d ween himself off of it, or go on binges where the pitcher would be empty in like 2 days, screaming “Juice!” (ala buster) with every cup.
• Beggle: Steve hated the way that some people pronounce the word Bagel. So we determined that “beggle” was a whole different word. Definition: To jollily implore goods or services from another party. Usage: Molly beggled six-hundred pounds of buffalo meat from the zoo.
• The Holiday Inn Guys: Go on youtube and search for the holiday inn commercials with the business guys. There was a week where we quoted it more than we actually talked to eachother.
• Tea for Grace: As a present for our upstairs housemate Grace, we made her some tea out of tea, cloves, ketchup, peanut m&ms, some stuff I forget. She didn’t drink any.
• Trombone language: Once Steve came into my room and refused to speak in any language other than Trombone. He just made trombone noises in my doorway for like 10 minutes.
• “Downtown!”: Steve put on a hoodie and paraded around the apartment with the hood up singing the song “Downtown” by Petula Clark. After stalking me and Alex, singing the song, making food and singing the song, bursting out of doors and singing, etc., he would run into his room, take off the hoodie, and pretend nothing happened, only to don it again and start up again.
• Steve’s hammer smash: Steve took out his frustrations on a dvd player. With a hammer.