经过前一段时间的hiring freeze，公司又开始猛招人了，尤其是engineering，比如Software Engineer。

去年送走了湾区三个最最要好的朋友回国。

经过一个月深刻的思考，终于想清楚了自己要什么，决定回到Google Maps做一个新的项目。

From Space pics

自己想想都觉得很夸张。没办法，俺们家里实在太落后了，没有装网络，结果现在写这篇blog不得不用国际漫游的WAN card上网，先写到这里吧。

无论是国内的还是国外的朋友，俺在零下20多度的冰城哈尔滨祝大家新春快乐！ 

Just arrived in Hawaii，住在Waikiki beach一个36层的condo，吹着海风，面朝大海，春暖花开……

From 2nd Portrait

 

注：这不是我平时的样子。

给自己残留的童心放个假

As we know, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband visited Google yesterday.
In building 40 University Theater, I was lucky to help Brian gave a GEO demo to Secretary Rice and Secretary Miliband for about 7-8 minutes.
After a quick demo of street view, the rest of the demo was mainly focused on My Maps (our group's product) and its application in disasters.

First, Brian showed them how to create a "My Map" and put markers on it (search index will index the markers soon).
Then, he showed them the San Diego fire map, and talked about how this map was timely updated and got millions of views within a very short period of time and mentioned China Snow Storm map early this year.

Following that, we demoed the aggregated mapplet that was recently developed by Google China team.
http://ditu.google.com/maps/mpl?moduleurl=http://china-dizhen.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/mapplets/earthquake.xml
Tab 1: The most recent disaster info. There are three My Maps embedded in that tab:
Map1: http://ditu.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=103335311190703792834.00044d70e92741170f3d3
This map has the most recent requests and supplies info in the earthquake area, such as "xxx number people need food and fresh water at xxx location urgently", "xxx location need xxx number of tents urgently", "xxx people are still trapped in xxx location due to a sudden land slide, need urgent help"...

Map2: http://ditu.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=105498083399349668294.00044d0490f73e7f5c173
This map has the most recent news national wide. (Such as recovered highway and railway transportations. Telecommunication recovered and etc. It also has embedded photos and video links.)

Map3: http://ditu.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=100107433478716901192.000001133876555af0950&ie=UTF8&ll=31.604271,104.084473&spn=3.555276,2.296143&z=9&iwloc=00044da286e3e2d6f5ffb
This map has the series of earthquakes. The opened marker was around the epicenter (magnitude 7.8)
Tab 2 has all the hospitals information. (drop down menu allow you to choose a region first)
Tab 3 has the blood donation information national wide. (drop down menu allow you to choose a region first. You can also quick search.)
Tab 4 has Redcross societies information national wide. (drop down menu allow you to choose a region first. You can also quick search)
Tab 5 has related links. (such as websites where you can search relatives info or report safety to relatives, Google earth satellite images and etc)

In the end, Brian also demoed the Myanmar Cyclone Nargis mapplet and show the flooded area.
http://maps.google.com/ig/add?synd=mpl&pid=mpl&moduleurl=http://mw1.google.com/mw-earth-vectordb/myanmar20080507/maps/mapplet.xml

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband were very impressed by these my maps and the usage in the disasters by millions of people.

Google products demo yesterday includes four booths: Mobile, Google.org, Google ops and Geo. After the four booths, Rice and Miliband sat back and enjoyed Google earth demo projected on the big screen (3D city integrated with Street View, such as San Francisco) and tried the 3D mouse.

After all demos, Secretary Rice, Secretary Miliband, Sergey and other representatives sat down and discussed policy issue in this technology world.