Super Cracking

The removalists come on Friday the 4th of November, I leave Melbourne at 10am on Saturday the 5th, get to Japan at 18:30 the same day, leave Japan at 17:45 on Sunday, arrive in San Francisco at 9am the same day, then start at Google 24 hours later. Hectic.

I'm sure the excitement will outweigh the killer jetlag (work starts at the equivalent of 2am Melbourne time), and thankfully my temporary accomodation is only 5km (3mi) from work, which is a nice, comfortable, 'wake me up' walking distance.

In between the farewell social engagements and finishing off my masters, I haven't had the time I would like to update MeHere, sorry about that (let's forget that I've managed to start and finish both F.E.A.R. and Quake 4 in the past few days). MeHere will probably get updated a fair bit when I'm in the US, as location-based stuff is just *so* much more useful over there.

And since I get asked: I don't have a timeframe for returning to Australia, I'm not even thinking that far ahead - unlike the H1B, the visa category I'm on lets me renew every two years indefinitely but I'm not allowed to apply for a green card. So it's not like I'm leaving forever.

My extra-cute-yet-evil younger brother Dene has just hit 16 and each time I see him from now on it's going to be like "omfg!11!eleven1 u r tall" ... I'm going to miss him like crazy.

Wootastic

I just received my visa. AHHHHHH.

Looks like I will be in SF on the 5th of November.

When Am I Going?

To answer the most frequently asked question, I still don't know when I'm going - I still don't know anything about my visa. While those applying for H1-B visas generally get a 24 hour turnaround, I applied for a new type of visa made just for Australians - at the time I applied, the procedure for application wasn't yet finalised, so I was told that I might have to wait anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks.

A bit of poking around a few days ago revealed that other Australian Google employees who applied after me had two-week turnarounds, and as I'm now up to three and a half weeks I'm presuming that *something* is amiss (enquiries are being made). Since I got the job sometime in April and had expected to have left by the end of September, this extra waiting is excruciating. Further, the removalists require two week's notice, so even if my visa is granted tomorrow, I won't be leaving until November.

And in answer to the usual follow-up question, I'm spending my days working on my final Masters project. Though that's being hampered by a recent turn of sleeping terribly, as I tend to stay awake until the morning California time (~4am AEST) to see if the immigration lawyers have heard anything (they've been ever-so nice), and then I spend all day Australian time checking my physical mailbox.

I just want to get over there and start working.

MeHere Greasemonkey Scripts

I've now made three Greasemonkey scripts that use MeHere. You can find them on the MeHere site, or at userscripts.org/tag/mehere. The scripts themselves are pretty simple and most likely contain things that are wrong / out of place (particularly stuff around variable scope), but they should give you a good idea of what's what.

MeHere

The past few nights I've been a bit restless, which is good as generally it gives me ideas to execute during the day. So now I've made a followup to MovinGmap called MeHere.

MeHere is open - you can connect Google Earth to it and follow yourself around there, and you can have your friends connect to you and you connect to your friends so you can all see each other running around within Google Earth in realtime. It also runs nicely in the background and offers up data in other formats so you could write Greasemonkey scripts to integrate it with any other online or offline location-based application.

Or you could just use it as a GPS tracker for Google Maps.

PS I did have even bigger plans for MeHere, and those may still be coming - I just thought I'd throw this out there.

PPS As I'm yet to actually start at Google (hurry up Visa), this has nothing to do with them.

Update: The site now has an example greasemonkey script showing how to connect to MeHere and do stuff with it (in this case, adding a 'show stuff near me' link to GeoURL). More to come!

Grand Challenge

It's 4am here, and I'm glad I stayed up - the DARPA Grand Challenge is on, and the website is doing a spectacular job of showing the current race status, with a self-updating leaderboard tied to a map of the course. It's especially interesting because most all the teams are going so well this year (last year, no bot made it past eight miles of the 100+ mile course).

<canvas>

I'm giddy - I know this is a sign that I'm behind the times, and that other people have done much nicer things with it, but finding FireFox 1.5's support of the 'canvas' tag gives me that same buzz I got when I discovered C++, JavaScript, Java and OpenGL and felt that I was about to be given a whole box of new toys (VML didn't give me quite the same high because it was a pain in the cods to use). Here's a five minute quickie (FireFox 1.5 or Safari required).