The week I moved, quit my job, and got engaged

Here's what I did a couple of weeks ago:

• Monday: FHE
  
• Tuesday: stained glass class
• Wednesday: told my manager at Apple that I was quitting.
• Wednesday evening: Karren and I decided to get married(!!!).
• Friday: ring shopping.
• Saturday: moved from the apartment I've been at for a year and a half to a house.
• Also Saturday: bought the ring.
  

It was a pretty stressful week. :)

Moving

My current roommate and I moved from our cheap apartment to a really nice house that we're renting. It's way nicer (dishwasher! washer and dryer! granite counters! less than 10 years old! carpet! AC! a yard! heater that works! garage!), and actually slightly cheaper since we'll have four roommates instead of two. I really dislike moving, but this one was definitely worth it. I don't know why we didn't move earlier.

Quitting

I've been at Apple for about two years (if you count my internship, which I do, since I was doing the same work on the same team), and it's a great company to work for. They're releasing amazing products and doing very well financially. The people that I worked with were very smart. I worked on some really cool stuff.

"So why quit?", everyone asks. Unemployment is high, you have a great job at a great company, your career is really starting to take off, and you're leaving?

Yep!

Don't worry, though: I'm starting at Google a week from tomorrow. :)

I left for a few reasons:

• I'd like the option of moving from the Bay Area (like, if I ever wanted to buy a house), and Apple's only engineering offices are in Cupertino. Google has offices all over the world.
• Google has more rigorous engineering practices that I think will help me to become a better engineer.
• I identify more with Google's values.
• More freedom to work on different things. It's pretty easy to move from project to project, and I really like working on new things.
  
• Free lunch. :)
  

I still like Apple a lot, and I like their products. The decision was hard, but it felt right, and I hope that it works out well. I'm excited to start my new job in a week. (Since I'm sure people will ask, I have no idea what I'll be doing there. They interview people for a general "engineer" position, and assignment to a team happens right around the time that you start. Hopefully it will be something cool. :)

Engaging

Last, but definitely not least, I got engaged! Karren and I have been dating for almost a year, and we're getting married on October 9 in the Oakland LDS temple.

There was no proposal.

Seriously.

Sorry girls looking for a story to gush about; you'll have to look elsewhere.

We've been talking about marriage for several months, but it didn't feel right until a few weeks ago. Something changed, and we both quickly became confident that it was the right decision. We were talking one night a few weeks ago, and realized that we were going to get married. We never had a conversation early on where we decided that we were officially dating; we both just naturally knew that we were. Similarly, there was no official proposal when we decided that we were going to get married; we just naturally knew that we were.

I had no idea that wedding planning was so much work (or so expensive!), but it will all be over in five weeks, and then my wonderful girlfriend (and now wonderful fiancée) will become my wonderful wife! :)

Bug report

My roommate went to an Apple Store a few days ago to have them fix his Mac laptop, and he received poor service. In response, I submitted this bug report to Apple's internal bug tracking system:

Title: Customer was turned away for being eight minutes late
Component: Apple Store

Description:
03-Jun-2009 10:30 PM Bruce Christensen :
* SUMMARY
My roommate Brian was turned away from his Genius Bar appointment for being eight minutes late. Count them: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7... 8!

* STEPS TO REPRODUCE
0. Have a MacBook whose optical drive makes funny noises, like it has indigestion or something.
1. In an effort to fix your optical drive, set up an appointment with the friendly neighborhood Apple Store Genius Bar.
2. Arrive for your appointment eight minutes late.

* RESULTS
Apple Genius stated that there is a five minute grace period for appointments. Since the grace period had been exceeded by approximately 180 seconds (which is less time than some [admittedly very dentally hygenic] people spend brushing their teeth), he offered several options:
1. Wait an hour for the next appointment.
2. Ship the system to AppleCare for service.
3. Schedule an appointment for a different time.

Expected results:
An Apple Genius provides service as soon as possible, or at least apologizes.

* REGRESSION
Occurred in a largely-empty store, when Apple Genius appeared to have no other customers to serve. He was already booked for the hour, after all.

Scope of this defect is unknown. It was observed only at Stanford Shopping Center location, but may be more widespread.

It is unknown if the root cause of this defect is policy or autonomous Apple Genius action.

* NOTES
None of the Apple Genius-suggested options was acceptable.

Brian's generally favorable impression of Apple has been degraded by 20%.

The optical drive of the MacBook in question still makes interesting noises.

This retail experience exhibits several indications of suckiness:
1. Service was refused despite apparent ability to provide service.
2. Apple representative turned away customer for being three minutes later than protocol dictated. What are we, robots?
3. No apology was offered. Can't we at least be nice jerks if we're going to be jerks?

(For an example of how to be a nice jerk, see item 9 at http://blog.moosejaw.com/2009/03/30/clothing-donation-for-discount-promotion-announced-by-moosejaw-mountaineering/: "Sorry to be so mean about it, but you’ll have to pay for shipping your donation off to us.")

Whoever got the bug report apparently didn't have a sense of humor, because she just sent the ticket back to me with a note saying to contact someone else for help.

I made this

Cool, huh?

And for all of the complainers who say you can't use third-party headphones, chill out: the shuffle starts playing automatically when you turn it on.

The new iPod Nano

Yesterday Apple held a media event to announce its latest iPod products, and I proudly wore my iPod Engineering shirt in celebration. I don't usually care too much about media events, but this one was exciting for me because Steve Jobs announced a product that I worked on during my internship this summer: the new iPod Nano.

It's exciting to see the launch of a product that I worked on, and it's pretty satisfying to have played a part in making a well known product that everyone likes. When I was traveling in Europe this summer, every time I saw an iPod, or an iPod ad, I thought, "I'm part of the team that made that. Even all the way over here on the other side of the world, they love the products that my team in California made."

One of the downsides of working at Apple is that the company is ridiculously fanatical about secrecy, both inside and outside of the company. When friends asked about what I worked on, all I could say was "iPods". When they asked what the new iPods were like, all I could say was "they're cool". When friends asked when they were coming out, all I could say was "in the future".

Well, now you can see the coolness, and the future finally came.

First week at Apple

My first week in California has been a good one. I've been getting up to speed at work, and I've settled into my apartment a little more. My roommate arrived last night, so I'll have some company for the rest of the summer.

My first week at Apple has gone well. The first couple of days were filled with the typical boring new job drill: new employee orientation, getting a badge, installing software on my computer, and setting up various accounts. After that, I started doing my actual work, and things got a lot more interesting. I'm developing software (firmware, really) for a next-generation iPod. I like my team, and I like the work I'm doing. About my only complaint is that my cube is pretty small, and I have to share it. Despite that, I think it's going to be a good internship.

I've been to the store a few times this week to buy things to make my apartment a little more of a home. Chief among my purchases was the meager beginnings of a cereal collection:


I discovered this week that a box lasts me about three days, so I have a little over a month's worth of breakfast stashed above the cabinet. Maybe I should buy stock in General Mills.

I'm in California

My Apple internship starts at 8:15 a.m. tomorrow morning. I was in Utah yesterday morning, and my internship is in California. To fix the disparity, I drove from Utah to California through northern Nevada yesterday. As I drove on I-80, I saw:

• Salt flats in the Utah desert (which are cool!)
  
• A whole lot of nothing in Nevada
• Winnemucca
• Reno (which, surprisingly, isn't as ugly and barren as the rest of Nevada)
• Lake Tahoe (which is beautiful)

I pulled off the road for a minute and drove around on the Bonneville Salt Flats. They're hard and flat areas of salt-crusted dirt. In fact, they're so hard and flat that they have been the site of many land speed records.

Three summers ago, I drove from Utah to California through southern Nevada on US 6 on the way to climb Mt. Whitney. Northern Nevada is pretty desolate, but it doesn't have anything on southern Nevada. If you want to see a whole lot of nothing, stick with US 6.

On the way I listened to a pretty good chunck of A Thousand Splendid Suns (by the same author as The Kite Runner) in audiobook format. The book follows the lives of two Afghan women whose lives intertwine. It kept me from getting super bored on the drive, and it also opened my eyes to the horror of being a woman in a country under fundamentalist Islamic sharia law. I knew it was bad, but not that bad. I haven't done any research to compare the book's fictional account with reality, but if it's anything close to the truth, the truth is horrible.

I filled up my gas tank only once during the trip, in Winnemucca. That's actually not quite true, though. I overestimated my gas mileage (thanks to some unexpected mountains I had to cross), and the gas light turned on a while before I got to Winnemucca. As the needle on the gas gauge plummeted, so did my stomache. The middle of the barren, desolate, and relatively uninhabited Nevada desert didn't strike me as a particularly great place to run out of gas.

As the needle sunk lower and lower, I kept my eyes peeled for somewhere—anywhere—that had a gas station. Over the course of half an hour, the only exit I passed was a rest area. I finally reached a town that had one of those blue signs that said "FOOD GAS LODGING"—except that the GAS part was blanked out, like they used to have a gas station but didn't anymore. Just my luck.

The situation was dire enough that I decided to pull off the freeway anyway. I found myself in the podunk mining town of Golconda, which looked like it had definitely seen better days. I slowly got off the freeway and started looking for somewhere or someone that looked like it might have some gas. A quick scan of the skyline (which means I looked above the roofs of the houses) didn't turn up any signs for gas stations. In fact, it didn't turn up any signs at all.

I slowly drove down the road, wondering what to do, when I spotted a couple of people moving at a house not too far away. I pulled into their yard and got out of my car. A man and his wife were unloading their pickup from a trip to town. I explained my predicament and asked if there was anywhere in town to get gas. "There was a gas station here in 1935", the man said. I was apparently 75 years too late. "We just barely got back from town, though, and we got some gas while we were there", he said.

I asked if I could give him some money for a gallon or so of gas, and he grabbed a big gas can from the back of his truck and started walking to my car. While he was pouring, he told me that he helps a lot of bikers who get stranded in the area without enough gas. When he was done, I tried to give him $10, but he wouldn't take it. I feel blessed that this man whose name I don't even know was in my path. He's an example of what's right with the world.


I'm living in Palo Alto for the summer, and working in Cupertino, about 15 miles away. Housing here costs several time what my apartment in Provo did, but I guess that you have to pay for the nice weather. :) I'll be living with my old roommate Hyrum for the summer, who also has an internship at a tech company in the area.

I live about a mile down the road from Stanford, and I actually go to church right across the street from the university at the Stanford LDS Institute building. I have some old friends here, and I'm excited to meet some new ones.

Apple

It's official: I'll be an intern at Apple in the Bay Area this summer, working the iPod engineering team. I'm pretty excited about working at Apple and living in Silicon Valley.

I got internship offers from Google and Apple in early January, and I've spent the last two weeks thinking about which one I want to take. It hasn't been an easy decision. Google offered me an internship on the Android team working on their new mobile phone platform; Apple offered me a spot working on the iPod. Both were projects that I wanted to work on, and both were at great companies.

I had two primary focuses when looking for an internship for this summer:

• I wanted to work in Colorado or California, since those are places that I might want to live when I get a full-time job.
• I wanted to do embedded systems or hardware development since I've never done that type of work professionally.
  

My goal with internships has been to gain broad experience with companies, locations, and types of work so that I'll have a good idea of what I want when I choose a full-time job. It's hard to jump around to different jobs after you graduate, but internships offer a good opportunity to "try before you buy".

I waffled back and forth several times in the last two weeks about which offer I wanted to take. The job at Apple offers more experience with embedded systems, but the job at Google was on an exciting new project that I'm really interested in. The iPod is cool, but Android is poised to start a long-needed shakeup of the wireless handset market. Apple is a new company to work for, but I really liked what I saw at Google last summer. In the end, I went with Apple because the type of work there was a little closer to what I was looking for, and because I thought it would be good to see how another company works. I felt bad turning down Google's offer, but I think I made a good choice.

I'll miss Google's amazing free food this summer, but I'm excited to work in a fun place on a cool product at a company that's doing amazing things. It should be a fun ride.