It’s been a while since I noticed this but I hadn’t written a blog post about it yet. All around Ann Arbor, you can find a distinctly unique signature of “Duck” written on stuff. From mailboxes to walls to whatever. I think I first noticed it on a paper towel dispenser at BTB Cantina. I thought it was some kind of trap where once I read it, I had a second to actually “duck” or be hit on the head by a log or something… That obviously wasn’t the case (I didn’t duck).

Does anyone know what the deal is? Is Duck a gang? Can I join? Do I want to join? Is Duck involved in illegal activities? Does Duck fight crime? I wanna know.

Notes since the last post:

• Meijer is pronounced “Meyer” and not “Major.”
• Kroger is like identical to Smiths
• Dreyer’s ice cream is called Edy’s for some strange reason.
• Moving into an apartment from scratch requires buying a LOT OF SHIT!
• My new microwave is really high maintenance. Which is to say that it gets mad when I forget there’s hot food in it.
• The Michigan Football team sucks. Is this bizarro Ann Arbor!?
• I have to do laundry with coins now. So getting a quarter is about as ceremonious (and awesome) as getting a Shine in Mario.

More later, unless I forget the password to this blog.

My sister’s friend Juli was nice enough to pick me up from the airport and show me around the town the first day I was there. After that, I met up with Adam, another SI grad student who I met at visiting days. So me, Adam, and Adam’s wife sorta just wandered around for a few days.

Let’s see… I went to Pinball Pete’s and played some kind of light gun game in Japanese starring a bunch of cats shooting at ghosts… or something like that. It was really easy, which means it’s probably a kid’s game. I beat all of the levels and then it gave me a game over thing.

I walked around campus a lot. Saw stuff like the fish bowl and the cube, and other random stuff I didn’t see during visiting days. I also got my MCard, which is just the university student id card. I wore my red Google shirt, then realized I wore Ohio State colors!!! NOOOO! I might need to get them to replace it with me wearing a yellow shirt or something.

I went to the Hatcher Graduate Library to finish up all of the paperwork for my job with the university. Glad that’s over with. I had to sign something and get it “notorized.” Luckily, one of the people in the administrative offices is a notary public, so I just had her “witness” me sign the paper.

Of course, I also went to look at apartments. There were some pretty crappy ones and some nice ones. There was one that was super nice in the middle of Kerrytown right above a Smoothie King! But there wasn’t any parking nearby. I’m pretty sure that I’ll be going with the Nob Hill apartments, since they seem decent and they’re only about a mile away from campus. So they’re sort of a good compromise between price, distance, and quality.

One of the realty companies I went to look at apartments with, Varsity Management, seemed kind of creepy. Like we just went to apartments that still had people living in them, then we knocked on the door to see if they were home. And they weren’t so we just went in. I felt like I was in some kind of cop show or something. Like I was scared there’d be bodies or dead hookers, etc. Apparently it’s part of the lease agreement, but that seems like a pretty crappy lease agreement.

There’s an Ikea in Canton, which is like 20 minutes or so from Ann Arbor. We went twice. That’s how much I like Ikea. The second time we went, I even bought a few random office organization thingys. I’m probably going to Ikea again next week when I go visit my brother in California… and buy more random stuff.

We also hit some pretty cool restaurants. Like umm… well, the only one I can remember is Champion House, where they do that Japanese cooking thing in front of you. It was pretty neat. Way expensive, though. But tasty. I suspect that our cook was Chinese, though, and not Japanese. Which is cool either way.

And I guess that’s it. Overall, it was a pretty fun trip, though somewhat stressful due to the quality (or lack thereof) of apartments. I guess I should’ve prepared for crapiness, but still, seeing it in person is quite harsh.

I might check out other random attractions too, like Pinball Pete’s, which is apparently a huge ass arcade!

Luckily I’ll have something to do on the plane, since I just bought Pokemon Pearl yesterday. And if my batteries run out, I can practice showing people where Ann Arbor is in Michigan by pointing to my hand! I gotta get that down ASAP.

I saw on Valleywag that Google finally opened up their new office in Ann Arbor. This is kinda cool, since I’m going to school in Ann Arbor in the Fall and it’ll be interesting having a Google office so nearby. Not that I’m going to stalk it or anything. I’ll be too busy with school and work! Not that I would stalk it anyway… Moving on…

This office is only an Adwords office, which means that it’ll probably just be a bunch of sales people and not a lot of engineers, if any. Too bad. I’m sure they need engineers to run Adwords too, but who knows if they’ll put them in that office.

I also read this funny comparison about why you should work at Meetup instead of at Google. The document (made on Google Docs!) mainly tries to convince readers that working at Meetup is much cooler since it’s a startup. It seems like they push the “you’re a cog in the machine at Google” a bit too hard, though. There’s also the “Google infantilizes you” thing goin’ on too. Perhaps that’s true, but I for one welcome our Google parenting overlords!

I’m sure that document is all in good fun, anyway. At the end of the day, people are reminded of how awesome Google’s toilets are, and Meetup gets some free publicity.

After my Google Visit, I left early on Saturday morning to fly to Michigan. Michigan is my top (and sadly, only) school right now as far as graduate school possibilities go. It’s okay though, because I think Michigan would be my top school even if I was admitted to all the schools that I applied to.

I arrived to the school somewhat late. I missed the registration and about half of the introduction talk. I sat down at a table whose occupants were librarians. Pretty much everyone there was an LIS (library and information services) specialist. This wasn’t really a great first impression, since I applied under the HCI (human-computer interaction) specialization, and to be honest, libraries aren’t really my thing. Not to say that I don’t like them, but the people there just didn’t have the same interests as me.

After dinner, we broke into groups with current SI students leading the way. I went with the group that promised a song and dance routine, though unfortunately, they were only kidding. We went to Cafe Ambrosia, where I didn’t actually get anything. Instead, some random person walked up to me and said “hey, are you my room mate?”

Indeed, I was his room mate. I hadn’t met him before since I was totally late. Anyway, Adam and I started chatting about stuff outside the cafe while everyone else was talking inside the cafe. I guess we should’ve stayed inside, but whatever; we had a good chat.

The next day, we woke up to a crazy hell alarm! Like seriously, the alarm was very dissonant, and for a second, I thought I had woken up in some kind of hell. Adam thought it was scary, too. We went to get breakfast in the really snobby restaurant of the Bell Tower hotel. By snobby, I mean they played Canon in D without even thinking about it.

Then we went to the West Hall for some lectures. Like we had a few professors talk about what the program at SI was all about and some of the details of what we’d be expected to do at SI. Of special note was the PEP system, where each student is expected to do some “Practical Engagement” before he/she graduates.

After that, there were a few information sessions about the varying specializations. I chose to go to the HCI information session, then the introduction to the new MSI specializations, of which social computing is very interesting to me. I really wish the introductions to the new specializations would have lasted longer. It felt really rushed, and before we knew it, it was time for lunch.

For lunch, we walked to the Michigan League building and sat down at specified tables. We were paired up with faculty who had the same interests as us. Our table featured Thomas Finholt, a dean of research at the information school. We had some cool candid conversations regarding the new dean of the school of information. He also discussed the differences between the mentalities of the professors at Michigan vs. those at Carnegie Mellon, who both have very highly respected HCI programs but very different way of approaching it.

I also would have liked to talked to Paul Resnick, the faculty coordinator for the Social Computing specialization. I think I’ll email him separately with my questions on the subject.

After lunch we had a lot of lectures. I hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before, and I just had lunch, so it was really tough not sleeping through them. Not to say they weren’t full of useful information, but at that point I was kind of information’ed out. This is a School of Information, though, so I guess I should’ve expected it. There was a talk about career services (of which the SI actually has its own department), a panel of alumni and their experiences, and a presentation about financial aid opportunities.

Afterwards, we again broke off into groups, going to local eateries and whatnot. I followed the SAA around the whole night due to their excellent choice of venues. I probably should’ve gone with the HCI group, but I didn’t want to go to the Japanese place and have nothing to eat (seafood = gross!). The SAA people were nice too, though.

Finally, the next day I had time to attend the employment information fair over at the Michigan League. I had a chance to meet the people who had interviewed me for the ULA position over at the Public Health and Informatics Library. They seemed really nice and even tried drawing a map to the library for me until we decided I’d probably get lost and miss my flight. Hopefully I’ll be chosen for that position since it seems like a way cool opportunity to affect some real changes in a real life library.

Overall, my impressions of SI were sort of mixed, but still really positive. I knew coming in that the school was very interdisciplinary, but I didn’t realize the degree to which it was. There was a statistic thrown around that 100 people were visiting this weekend, and they represented around 50 undergraduate concentrations! I thought that for sure there would be more CS majors around, but I only ran into one or two.

In a way, I felt uncomfortable due to the lack of other CS people. Hardly anyone I had met had any experience with programming, and I think they had some misconceptions about programming and programmers in general. I guess I could say I also have misconceptions about librarians and archivists too, though. It didn’t really bother me that much, but I definitely felt as though I was in an intellectual minority as far as undergraduate interests went.

This kind of intellectual dissonance made me unsure as to whether or not the coursework at SI could really challenge me and if I would actually learn anything there. I have been slightly reassured by looking at the coursework. For example, the Design of Complex Websites course is offered in Ruby on Rails. It’s very cool that the school is able to give a course like this, even though I already know Ruby on Rails fairly well. Many of the other courses, like Recommender Systems and Game Theory sound very interesting as well.

I am a little worried that the courses might be too “soft” for me because of my CS background. I have a feeling that as long as I actively try to get as much out of a class as possible, I will learn something. Hopefully the professors can push me and I can push back. In the end, I’m probably just being a CS snob about it and I have a feeling my worries will go away quickly after taking a few classes. I wish we had a chance to attend a course or two to see what they were like, though that would’ve been pretty difficult to arrange, I imagine.

I think that more importantly, the people I met this past weekend were very cool. The faculty all seems very nice and intelligent. Apparently Judy and Gary Olson are superstars in the field of HCI. I also met some really cool potential peers who are very intelligent and show a lot of passion and potential in their interests.

I think that other intangibles will make Michigan a very worthwhile experience for me if I choose to attend. During the alumni panel, it was said that Michigan has the largest alumni base in the entire United States. Though it seems a bit unfair, a few alumni talked about how their job search replies were post-scripted with “Go Blue!” at the end. Being a Michigan alumni probably doesn’t mean instant employment anywhere you want, but I’m sure it helps at least a bit.

I’ll have to wait for a reply from Google and the ULA program before I make a final decision. I’m very happy that between my two choices, I see a huge deal of potential. I think either choice will be a good one for me; it’s definitely a win-win situation. Despite my few remaining reservations about the program, I am really stoked about possibly going to Michigan for grad school.