General impressions of the Boulder office.

• It's about as hip as you could be. Right above a coffee shop on the Pearl Street Mall. Which would be a great location if anybody ever needed to go outside the building for food. :-)
• The office is one giant space (on two floors). There are very few partitions. I guess the people here are used to it, but in the new office, they are planning to put in more standard cubicle walls. Like the rest of Google, the cubicles won't be individually-sized, they'll be shared among 4 or so people.
• They are very serious about recycling here. All kitchen trash, including the paper(?) plates and silverware(!), is composted. The forks, spoons, etc. look like plastic but supposedly they are made out of corn?! Also, paper towels from the bathroom are composted. There are blue bins everywhere for bottles & cans, and near each printer there's a secured bin for office paper.
  
• There's a pool table, some video games, and two electronic massage chairs (i.e., like you see in Sharper Image catalogs). They are the exact same chairs they have all over the MtV campus; Google must buy them by the truckload. In the new building, they are promising a foosball table, which makes me happy, and also a climing wall -- how Boulder-y can you get?
• There are two showers and a few lockers. Unfortunately, the lockers seem to be permanently occupied with people's crap that they probably never even use. I asked around and there doesn't seem to be a locker policy of any kind.
• We get free parking in the parking structure across the alley. It's pretty challenging getting my truck in and out of there.
• We get a free bus pass because we work in the downtown area. (This is a city of Boulder thing -- it doesn't cost Google anything.) Once I have my pass, I intend to take the "Hop" bus back and forth to the Y, so I don't have to hassle with working the truck in and out of the parking garage. Of course, once we're in the new building I'll be close enough to the Y to walk there.
  
• I rode to work last Friday, but Allison picked me up. I've yet to do a round-trip because it's too darned hot. Maybe tomorrow.

My computer setup would make any nerd drool:

• A dual-core workstation with 4GB of ram
• A 30" LCD monitor. That's right, 30 inches. That's bigger than a lot of televisions!
• A MacBook Pro 17" with dual-core cpu and 2GB of ram.

Okay, time to use all that computing horsepower...