From the Mind of Trevor Stone

I have a photographic memory. When I look at a photograph, I remember where I took it.

I got a handheld GPS device in early 2009 and keep it in my camera bag, so all my photos in the last ten years are geotagged. At the beginning of this year I started migrating all 15 years of my photos to a modern hosting platform. I made the, in retrospect, questionable decision to manually[1] geotag the remaining 5 years of photos, starting when I bought a point-and-shoot camera in August, 2003.

This took five to ten times longer than I anticipated. I considered giving up several times, but the existence of a definite time bound and the thought "I didn't take that many pictures that year" kept me going. But now I'm done tagging and will soon be able to announce my new (but still too cluttered) gallery. And it'll have pins all over the map!

[1] And by "manual" I mean "Point Google Earth to the location and then tell GraphicConverter to set EXIF data from Earth."

November 30th was my 8th Googleversary. 8 years is longer than my direct involvement with any other institution, beating my 7½ years at CU and 6 years at Uni Hill. In that time, the Boulder office has grown from around 150 people to more than 700 and my team has grown from a couple rows of cubicles of folks working on the "Google Docs document list" to more than 150 people working on Google Drive in Boulder, plus folks in Los Angeles and New York, and taking a whole floor of the new Pearl Place office. In that time I've worked on adding video support, a server for file viewing, a pipeline to make corpus stats queryable, the new web UI and server, adoption of a new Google framework that standardizes server development and production, migrating and turning down a legacy server, and a not-yet-announced feature to help certain enterprise business processes. "Ask Trevor, he knows everything" has been said by at least one colleague. This isn't the first time I've had wide breadth of impact: I got a "Many hats (literal and figurative)" award when I was an RA in college and I had a hand in almost all pieces of our software products at Tyler-Eagle.

This also marks close to 14 years working on, broadly, enterprise file and content management. While I enjoy helping organizations be more efficient and like wrangling and organizing lots of data (see also: my family's bookshelves), there are other software domains that I'd like to focus on. When I joined Google I figured I'd work on my project for a couple years and then switch to something else and learn something new, ideally working with maps or natural language. The Boulder office has had a geo team since Google first acquired SketchUp yet the team hasn't grown much until now. As of the beginning of 2018 I'll be working with the Street View team to help organize knowledge of the physical world.

When I was sick in 2016, one of the goals I set for my healthy self was to spend more time reading books and making maps. My dissatisfaction with the American political process meant that I ended up shifting my hobby focus from cartography to conversations about climate change and systemic risk. Moving to a geo team at work helps me keep that make-maps promise to myself. And the Street View team is a nice fit given my years spent carefully geotagging all the photos I take while exploring the world. I'm excited about the opportunity to learn geographic data models, image processing, mobile development, and user experience thinking for people navigating the world.

There's an amusing wrinkle in the timing of this team switch. The new Pearl Place campus opened at the beginning of December, so I packed up and moved to the 3rd floor with the rest of the Drive team. The geo team will be on the 2nd floor of the building, which isn't finished yet (as is often the case, Google's growth outpaced expectations when we were planning the building project). So this week I moved back to the old building again with the other left behinds and will move once more in February. Four desks in the span of three months: now that's agile.

The new building is a great place for googling. The desk areas are very open, which I like since it allows for quick collaboration and "hallway conversations." The building also has a lot of areas where folks can retreat for more quiet and focus, including a library with a great view, a nook behind a Hobbit door, and a "hanging lounge." There are also a lot of good social spaces out of earshot of folks' desks and spaces to switch mental gears including a rock climbing cave, a bike workshop, a music room, a giant Google Earth display, and a couple pinball and video game machines. The café on the fourth floor faces the mountains with floor-to-ceiling windows, meaning the kitchen staff get the best view in the place. This is pretty unique: in most buildings, the kitchen has no view whatsoever or maybe has a small window to an alley.

Have a happy new year and may you find your own opportunities for personal growth in 2018!

When you write a story down, it only happens one way.
When you adapt a book to film, the characters have specific appearances.
When you draw shapes on a map, a smeared spectrum becomes four crisp colors.

I want to expound more on these ideas in a blog post, but starting the year with an intellectual all-nighter wouldn't be very auspicious.

Google Earth has some pretty cool ways to view buildings in 3D, but like any great technology, after a while it seems ordinary. So it was a big "Whoa" moment when I saw what Baidu, China's largest search engine, is doing with their SimCity-style building layer:

Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, Zoom in on Mao's portrait
Shanghai too
Sprawling Guangzhou and the second tallest building in the world, the Canton Tower
Apartment buildings in Shenzhen Even the highway interchanges are 3D.

My mom fetched a large roll of wrapping paper from the basement. After trying to remove some of it, she discovered that it was actually a wrapped cardboard tube. On the end, there was a tag, addressed to my uncle, from my mom. This implies that on Christmas at least two decades ago, this present was camouflaged and forgotten, then subsequently consistently mistaken for a normal roll of wrapping paper.

Rather chuffed at her discovery, my mom gave me the present, a large map of Colorado. Is it re-gifting if the intended recipient never got the gift in the first place?

This is the funniest thing I've seen in weeks. From vsmallarray, the charts and graph project of Dorothy Gambrel, artist for catandgirl and donationderby.

Update February, 2011: Somehow this post has become the most popular one on my journal for comment spam, so I've disabled comments.

Someone in Long Island City has a creative way to pop the question. (Be sure to close the info balloon to see what's up.)

Thanks to polonius for the discovery.