Xiaofan Jiang :: Fred

This summer’s internship at Google is almost coming to an end. There isn’t much to be said about the work I’ve done for Google - not to say I haven’t done any work, but rather I’m bounded by my NDA not to say anything Fortunately, the project is actually interesting. And if everything works out (fingers crossed), this project might have a huge impact.
Overall, it was an amazingly fun internship - attempted to surf (and failed) with three other Googlers in Santa Cruz, followed by ultimate frizbee (and won) under a bright sky lit up by illegal fireworks on the night of July 4th; jumped out of an airplane from 13000 ft (first victim of my plane of 6 Googlers) with nothing more than a parachute (plus a trainer for legal purposes); survived to last two men (in this case 1 man and 1 woman) standing (of my table of 10) at the Google poker tournament (and then lost to that girl with a pair of 2’s).
But perhaps the most exciting (and the thing that I wasted most of my time on) was organizing the first (as far as I know) Google badminton tournament http://www.undefinedinput.com/googlebadminton.

Somehow I’m keeping breaking things lately. The lastest achievement is my Motorola L7 SLVR cellphone (you know, that iTune one).

After successfully loading the Chinese language pack and a bunch of Java games to the phone, I had to do what every nerd would be hot for: reprogramming the operating system. What I did not know was that there were two different version of the bootloader… and it’s just my luck, or lack thereof, that I picked the wrong one. And there goes my phone.

The only way to fix it is to cut open the metal plate to the processor with a Dremel and short one of the testpoints to ground (as seen in here). This is somewhat nerve wracking since there is a good chance I might cut the wrong thing. But since I got nothing to loose anyways (I don’t think Cingular covers reflashing OS under their warranty), I decided to give it a try. The testpointing worked since I was able to erase the bootloader. But it still won’t boot any OS!! Perhaps it’s time to sent it to that motomodder guy with the expensive reflashing machine…

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It was a sad day for my Blade CX. I decided to fly it a little higher than usual (read 3 floors) and a gash of wind blew it out of balance… Both axies broke after a hard landing. Now it’s sitting in my cabinet again, probably for a long time.

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