With the advent of our new office, a lot of people have been asking (via email or comments on the blog here) about jobs at the Kirkland office.  For a variety of reasons, I really can't do much on the recruiting side.  If I've worked with you and you don't work for Microsoft, feel free to drop me a line.  Otherwise, your best bet is to send email to jobs@google.com as specified here.  Even though Kirkland isn't listed there, I'm sure you can reference the office in any email you send. I wish I could be everybody's inside line, but I can't.

I've been super busy at work for the last few weeks.  We've been iterating on our stuff and have come up with some cool plans.  Hopefully we can turn those into reality and ship them.  I wish I could say more but I really can't.  I think that one of the reasons that Google is so reluctant to speak publicly about what they are doing is partly to surprise the competition and partly so that we have the freedom to try stuff without committing to deliver it.  There may be some stuff that never sees the light of day, but it is better than announcing it and then it never seeing the light of day.  I think that this probably makes it easier to pull the plug on projects that just aren't converging.

Besides work, some other things are going on that I think are pretty exciting.

First, I've been helping to port enblend to build and run natively under Windows.  Enblend is a cool tool to help in the blending stage of making digital panoramas.  My (limited) understanding of the mechanics is that it converts the images into the frequency domain to come up with an optimal blending mask.  Sometime soon I'd like to start delving into the hard parts (Math) and get a better understanding of what is going on.  Andrew (the guy who wrote enblend) just released version 2.1 out into the wild.  Let us know if you have any problems.

Second, I'm going to be missing the Google open house (a rockin' party scheduled for Thursday night) so that I can take a trip down to Page, Arizona to shoot slot canyons and other various rock formations.  I'm going to be doing a lot of panorama and digital mosaic work so look for some cool images soon.

One interesting photography note: I've had one of my large pano's printed up pretty large -- about 40" x 25" (100cm x 64cm, for those of you of the metric persuasion) and have it framed and hanging outside my office.  Even at that large size, the photo is tack sharp.  It is really a lot of fun to make images that large.

Oh yeah, and Halo 2.