I Love New York!!!

Well… apparently not as much as I originally though. Still, I had been waiting to shout that since we began planning this trip so here’s a short clip of it.

I guess I just had so much expectations that I ended up being disappointed. I do not want to go into details about the trip and the places that I was able to visit so I will just include a summary on them:

• Google New York – Great Conference! Awesome Food! Geeky (but really cool) People!
• Bowling Green – Nice view of the Statue of Liberty. Not as good as what Dids, Lei and Je had but good enough
• Wall Street – Nothing much there really but I did see the New York Stock Exchanges and the most expensive street corner, Wall Street-14th.
• Ground Zero – Construction was ongoing for a new highrise.
• Grand Central – Simple but has a cozy feel to it despite so many people going about. I wanted to eat at the Michael Jordan Steakhouse but it was way out of my budget.
• Public Library – where Uncle Ben (Spiderman’s uncle) was killed. =)
• Philippine Embassy
• Rockefeller Park – Of course, the huge Christmas tree won’t be there till December so there was not much to see
• St Patrick’s cathedral – The place looked really elegant, and there was a wedding ceremony too. Something that does not happen a lot according to Mitch (it must cost a fortune)
• Time Square – Those huge screens are simply amazing.
• Empire State Building – Lined up a looooooong time to get up and I guess that’s why it ended up disappointing me.
• Serendipity cafe – Nice, cozy place but I was disappointed with my order. I will never get ravioli again, well except maybe for the ones that comes in Chef Boyarde cans (they come free at work!)
• Central Park – Huge place. We did not even get to cover one-fourth of the place. If I was to live in New York, this will probably be one of the places I will frequent.

Although it did not meet my expectations, I still did enjoy my New York trip. Especially because of the people who made it all worthwhile. (I have another separate entry for this but let me just do a quick shout-out to Mitch and her family. Thanks a bunch, Tito, Tita, Joanne, Jun, Ian and, of course, Mitch.)

Worst thing about GTAC?

Don’t worry, our dear organizers, I will not be flaming you or the conference in general. I just need to get this out of my system so I can finally stop being pissed at myself and start laughing at myself.

The worst thing about GTAC is.. me and my bad sense of direction.

The funny thing too was that I was actually bragging to my New Yorker friend after the first day that going through the subways by myself was a piece of cake. With just little directions from her, I was able to get around the city right away. Unfortunately, my sense of direction failed me at the worst time.

It would have been OK if it happened during the first two days of the conference. At least, the Google office will always be accessible. But NO, it had to happen on the third day, when we were supposed to be on a cruise around the Hudson river. Aargh!

That must be one of the worst feelings.. when something slips by you right in front of your face (and very slowly at that) with you being helpless about it. Yep, I missed the cruise by minutes, probably even seconds..

Bad thing was that I had pushed back all other plans with my other colleagues because of this cruise. I had wanted to make use of the opportunity to mingle and discuss with the speakers and other participants, hoping that I could get some ideas for work as well as my MSIT thesis topic.

Still, looking at the bright side, I did get to see other parts of New York (that’s another story) and I have more than enough really to take home from the conference.

Blogging From Google New York

I am at the Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC) in New York as I create this blog post. This is actually the second day of the event but I was smart-enough to leave my laptop at my friend’s place yesterday.

I am just so amazed (and overwhelmed) with all the topics that have been discussed. We briefly started our automation efforts a year ago but was never able to push through with it but now, I am seeing more and more need for it especially since we are expanding our coverage but NOT expanding our resources. Sure, I expect introductory pains again but we must get through this to prepare ourselves for even more coverage of the product.

Hopefully, our big boss in the QA group will allow me to experiment on these new stuffs that I am learning here. Who knows, I might be able to discover a thesis topic for my MSIIT through these experiments..

The cool thing about it is that they are posting the video of the seminars on YouTube.

GTAC 2007: Allen Hutchison – First Principles

For more videos, see the YouTube playlist for GTAC talks.