What I've been up to? Studying hard at Emory and doing a summer intern at Google Mountain View campus for the 2010 summer. There has been great free food (I'm not using fantastic cuz the food does not differ too significantly from Emory/Yale dinning hall that I have been to) and decent pay (I'm not using fantastic again cuz Facebook is paying more, and Microsoft is giving interns free Windows 7 Phone while Google interns do not go home with any Android).
But the people there is simply AMAZING. As a intern in the economics team I got free access to a group of super-smart people, including the chief economist Hal Varian (who cost you ~$30 to have group breakfast/lunch with in Joint Statistical Meeting 2010). And reading industry news every evening, both inside and outside of the company, talking about them over lunch with the people, and going back inspired is just a very pleasant schedule embedded in the laid-back Californian work life.
Another thing I found is that internally Google is never shy of talking about making money. Just consider the $23B dollar advertisement business revenue in 2009 (if I remember the number correctly), and the mammoth size of searches going through the big big data centers ... hoho ... just now I re-visited my blogger controller panel and found it very convenient to set up the AdSense account to put advertisement on my Blog Spot. haha, I'm gonna post more blogs in the future to make money from my posts :)
