I gotta say, it's pretty damn sweet. The thing that bothers me the most is probably how confidentiality-happy they are. drheld mentioned that in a previous post, and I feel similarly. People ask me what I'm working on, what I'm doing, etc. and I have to be careful not to be too specific, which I'm totally not used to.
But I'm definitely enjoying the work I'm doing. This week I've been doing a lot of hacking in Ruby, which I didn't really expect at all. But so far I've been enjoying it; I like how you can define mutator members to essentially override '=', and its syntax is terse while still being relatively clean.
One of the things that's been hard to get used to is the scale of it all. Google is bigger than any other company I've worked for, by orders of magnitude. And it's apparent everywhere; many things are more bureaucratic, and there's a kind of "lushness" to it all, from the food to the on-site gym to the massages and car washes, it all just seems a bit surreal at the moment.
Life
I've borrowed a pretty sweet road bike for while I'm here, and I've used it to cycle to work a few times. I even have the clip-in shoes (alright I'll admit it; I did fall once the first time I used them :) I've never had a road bike and it's pretty cool. You sure can go pretty damn fast; I was doing 60 the other day for a while. The downside, of course, is that you really can only use the thing on roads. Gravel of any kind is a serious no-no, so I can't go explore any bike trails near here unless I borrow somebody else's bike.
Got a bank account the other day, without a social security number! Take that, homeland security! That brings the number of countries in which I have accounts to 5.. I should really close some of the ones I don't use sometime. It has a whopping $20 USD in it right now, but at least I can in theory get paid. I'm thinking Monday will be "get social security number day" (or rather, "apply for SSN day"), a process that is apparently not much fun.
Rio Karma
So, I had the damn thing for about a week, and then the other day the disk went and died on me. So now I have to go and try to get it fixed or replaced, and I'm obviously wondering whether it was a good decision in the first place.. sigh. I didn't want to go iPod because of the whole Ogg thing, but at least iPods work. I guess I'll get it fixed and see how it goes, but I don't think I can really recommend it any more...
Update: So I Googled around a bit tonight about the problem I was having with my Karma. Apparently some people had managed to make previously-busted Karmas work again by smacking them against blunt objects. I figured I didn't really have anything to lose, so I tried it, and it worked. My Karma now starts up again and appears to be working normally. The only thing is.. maybe I should have left it broken so I could have gotten it replaced. Now I feel like I have to break it again to be able to send it in.
But if smacking it against stuff fixes it.. how the block do I break it??