A year and a half ago I decided to take a bit of a risk and try something new. I passed up the opportunity to work for Apple's Java team, where I'd been an intern for two years, and instead moved to Seattle to work on the Rotor project at Microsoft. On the Rotor team, I worked with a small group of incredibly talented people who managed to ship a product that many people thought could never come out of Microsoft. In the process, I learned a lot about software engineering, a lot about Unix, and a lot about working at Microsoft.
At the same time, though, I missed California. The weather was definitely a factor -- after five years at Stanford, I came to appreciate 70-degree days in November -- but more importantly, most of my friends were still there. I also missed the feeling of Apple's small teams and small company (in comparison to Microsoft, at least). There's also a certain appeal to working to improve the products that you use every day, and that's much easier for me to do at Apple than at Microsoft.
When the opportunity recently arose to return to Apple, I decided to take it. I'll probably be at Microsoft for another three weeks, and then I'll move to California and start working at Apple by the end of January. It's a somewhat strange transition to make -- relatively few people have worked for both Apple and Microsoft, and I'm sure far fewer have moved between the companies twice -- but it's one I'm very excited about, and I'm confident it's the right choice.
Orson Scott Card points to a really interesting Harvard study -- the Dialect Survey. Much like the Pop vs. Soda page but on a greater scale, the Dialect Survey is attempting to plot American English dialects by geographic region. Take a few minutes and fill out the survey to see just how weird -- or how normal -- you are.
It seems I'm a lot like other Philadelphians, though I definitely stood out on one question. On "What is your general term for a big road that you drive relatively fast on," I checked the "a freeway is free; a highway isn't" box. That's true for me -- I grew up on the East Coast, where highways have tolls, and have since moved to the West Coast, where freeways don't have tolls. I now tend to switch terms based on which side of the country I'm on and on whether the road is tolled. The results for that question say I'm like a whopping 0.46% of the respondents. Oh, well. I stand by my answer, weird as it is.
The New York Times included an article this weekend that's a miniature biography of Trent Lott, with a focus on his segregationist background.
It's incredibly strange to read this story and realize that not only is most of it about events from the past forty years, but many of the people involved are still in politics and public life. Perhaps it's the bias of growing up in the 1980s and 1990s and outside of the Deep South, but the details of this story would seem inconceivable to me if they weren't true. In politics, while you might not always agree with your opponent, you can often understand their viewpoint. The views expressed in this article, though, are ones I simply can't comprehend. They're completely absurd.