6:00 am: The iPod station starts playing and lifts me gently from the land of dreams.
“… Don’t run away the time is now the place is here …”
Sasha’s swinging voice finally makes me cautiously open my eyes: another sunny day in Mountain View. The weather gadget on my iPod informs me that the temperature is currently 11 degree Celsuis, probably rising to a comfortable 21 throughout the day. I realize that I still don’t know how to convert Celsius to Farenheit without accessing the Internet.

6:40 am: Armed with a gbike and a helmet I finally leave the apartment, trying to get warmed up for my workout on the 3 mile ride to work. While I pass the sporadic early jogger I can see the first rays of sunlight painting the landscape in warm colors. Pushing the pedals gets my pulse up to 150. Sweet.

6:55 am: The gym is wonderfully empty at this time of the day. With just a handful of Googlers around me I enjoy a quite workout. Today I’m torturing my upper body.

7:45 am: I end my workout with an easy 50 minute run along Mountain View’s beautiful shoreline. Squirrels pass my way while two chatting women overtake me. I realize that I’ve got a long way to go before I will become a decent runner. Well, at least I can program computers.

8:50 am: Breakfast time. I get myself some freshly made scrambled eggs with crispy bacon, two chocolate croissants, some healthy orange juice and a steaming cup of coffee. Throughout the next view minutes some of my colleagues from the build tools team arrive, and a discussion about espresso machines, barbecue grills or why we don’t want to discuss Agile evolves. The day can come.

9:10 am: Time to do some work! And, no, that doesn’t involve foosball. Or ping pong. I’m actually writing code. Unfortunately I am not allowed to chat about what we do, or even how we do it. So just imagine me typing. And talking to people. And typing again. More talking. More typing. You get the idea.

12:10 pm: The hardest question at lunch time is which cafe to choose. I just run with the crowd of people working next to me. Today we’re heading over to Pintxo. One thing that constantly surprises me about food at Google is that I actually like the dessert. Chocolate cookies, sliced fruit, hot brownies, some chocolate cream topped with strawberries. Take your pick.

1:00 pm: Work, work, work. Getting some coffee. Work, work, work. More coffee. Work, work, work. Grabbing a snack, which leads to some discussion about pair programming and the state of the world in general. Work, work, work.

7:30 pm: Going to Charlie’s to get my usual treat for the evening: a self-designed burger and a coke. This certainly feels like America. I meet Nicolai and his friend, who doesn’t work for Google. I learn that we’re allowed to bring visitors to dinner one or two times a month. We talk about real estate prices and I realize that living here is even more expensive than Munich. Dang!

8:15 pm: I finally arrive at the apartment. I kill half an hour by starting Yet Another Blog Post. I want to write something about unit test size that features some modestly comical adult references (go figure). After some time I realize that I don’t have enough high energy content for this entry. I’ll finish it eventually. Blogger’s shortest joke.

9:00 pm: A new episode of House starts. For some strange reason the ability to watch a show that doesn’t run in Germany yet makes me feel childishly happy. This probably reveals things about my personality I don’t even want to think about.

10:00 pm: The favorite part of my day is talking to my wife. And this is PRIVATE! …

10:30 pm: Another day at Google passed. I do some reading and eventually fall asleep. Just for the reference: my dreams are private, too. Just in case you’d hoped for something. Good night!

Now that I’m back home I get lost in the information that I missed in just two weeks. I’ve got some IEEE magazines and journals, some GI resources and the extreme programming group which clogs my Gmail account – and I don’t want to miss any of it.

This week the extreme programming group features some nice discussions about “good code”, the IEEE software engineering journal features an article about pair programming and an other interesting story on theory usage in software development. The IEEE spectrum contains an article on a guy who implanted two RFID chips in his hands.

After spending some hours reading today I caught up on extreme programming and finally realized that my colinux networking still totally sucks.

I finally found out how to use colinux with my Intel 2200BG adapter: It’s simply a matter of setting the adapter to non-promiscuous mode and add the adapters MAC address to the configuration:

eth1=pcap-bridge,"Connection Name",,nopromisc

Now I can set an ip address in linux and happily access the network. Unfortunately this is not a very mobile setup for a laptop. If you are at home in varying wireless and wired networks you usually just want to use dhcp and use whatever ips the network provides.

If I use dhcp in linux and windows on a bridged wireless adapter, both windows and linux will get the same ip (since I must specify the same MAC address – otherwise the WLAN router won’t accept my packages). This leads to an unusable network (again). Of course I could just specify a fixed ip but then again I have to change configuration when roaming wireless networks.

The next requirement is that I want to be able to have some linux services accessible via my broadband router when I’m at home. Therefore I need to know an ip to configure some port forwardings. And I want to be able to use the same configuration regardless if I boot into windows and start colinux or if I boot into linux directly.

Now I came up with a configuration that allows me to do all this: I use slirp for external networking and a tuntap device for windows to linux networking (tuntap is faster than slirp). I configured some port forwarding into slirp and forward the required ports from my broadband router to the ip of my laptop’s wireless network device.

Then I configured my kubuntu desktop to use network manager (basically by throwing everything away in /etc/network/interfaces) and to use the same MAC address for the wired and wireless interfaces. This way I can really plug and play without loosing any port forwardings from my broadband router. Neat. This whole configuration is quite complicated, so I should probably post a blog entry about the configuration before I forget it.

For all of you celebrating: Happy Easter!