Curie on Easy Living

 

“Life is not easy for any of us.
But what of that?
We must have perseverance.”

– Marie Curie (1867–1934)
French physicist and chemist
two-time Nobel Prize winner

Remember… We are The Economy.

Recovery depends on the work we do today… regardless of difficulty, regardless of political belief, regardless of what the media says. It’s our work (your work) that will get us there.

The US Navy SEALS have a creed they live by in their work. A few of my favorite lines are…

  • The lives of my teammates and the success of the mission depend on me… (individual accountability)
  • If knocked down, I will get back up, every time.
  • In the worst of conditions, the legacy of my teammates steadies my resolve and silently guides my every deed. (purpose)
  • By wearing the Trident I accept the responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life. It is a privilege that I must earn every day.

What if we all had a Trident for our work – something that says we truly accept the responsibility for our chosen profession – and we did it?

You up for it?

The SketchUp Halloween Challenge

With Halloween just a few weeks away, nerds here in the Google Boulder office are in a tizzy about their costumes. We take this particular holiday very seriously.

A haunted house I modeled years ago, with two pumpkins by IDW. He modeled them for SketchUp Island’s Pumpkin Patch collection on the 3D Warehouse.

 

This year, we thought it might be fun to host a SketchUp Halloween Challenge for folks who are looking for something to do in their spare time. The nitty gritty:

Categories

There are two: Use SketchUp to model either a jack-o’-lantern or a haunted house. Or both.

How to submit an entry

  1. Upload your model to the 3D Warehouse and make sure it’s publicly-downloadable.
  2. Upload between two and ten images of your model to a public photo sharing site like Picasaweb. You can use any photo sharing site you like, but make sure your images are grouped into an album by themselves. Images should be at least 1000 pixels wide or tall, depending on their orientation.
  3. Fill out the Challenge Submission Form, including links to both your model on the 3D Warehouse and your album of online images.

Judging

On Friday, October 28th, a group of us from the SketchUp team will get together to review the entries. We’ll be looking mostly at the images you submit; models will be examined when we’re picking the top three entries in each category. For an idea of what we’ll be looking for, consider these points:

  • Displays of SketchUp expertise are always impressive.
  • Anything that makes us say (out loud) “How’d he/she DO that?!!” is worth extra points.
  • We don’t want to see anything you wouldn’t show your grandma or your kids.
  • Beverages will almost certainly be involved in the judging process.

Multiple Entries

Submit as many models as you like, but fill out a separate entry form for each one. The more the ghastlier!

Rendering Rules

You can (if you like) include photo-rendered images of your model with the images you submit. You have to have at least one unrendered image, though; we’d like to see your work in its purest, SketchUp-only state.

Deadline

The deadline for submissions is 11:59 PM PST on Thursday, October 27th 2011.

Prizes

For fun little modeling challenges like this one, we prefer to keep things simple. Instead of prizes, we’ll publish our favorite entries right here on this blog, on October 31st. The best three models from each of the two categories (pumpkins and houses) will be featured in the November edition of the SketchUpdate newsletter, which goes to millions of people around the world.

Why no fancier prizes? When companies host big, international competitions, it takes months for their lawyers to figure everything out. On top of that, people from certain places (like Quebec and Brazil) end up being excluded because of specific laws that apply only to them. Ugh.

Other Stuff

If you’d like a blank pumpkin to start with, this collection contains a few. Other questions about the Challenge? Please ask ‘em in the Comments for this post.

Flagstaff Challenge in 3D

Most office rivalries rise to a boil at conference tables and water coolers. At Google’s Boulder office, our grudge matches play out across topo lines. Last week, our third annual “Flagstaff Challenge” blasted off up Flagstaff Road, Boulder, Colorado’s signature hill-climb. Over 1,500 feet of elevation gain, the Flagstaff Challenge (mapped below) attempts to answer our office’s ultimate water cooler question – what’s really faster: two wheels or two feet?

Bloggers in the office fired up Google’s KML Embed Gadget to cook up an embedded Google Earth course map (if the map below is not in 3D, try installing the Google Earth plug-in, then start embedding KML’s on your own site!).

 

As our route map shows, Flagstaff’s paved switchbacks criss-cross its running trail all the way up to the finish point, making this slice of topography perfect for an office grudge match between cyclists and runners.

While there was a good bit of trash-talking over GMail and in the halls leading up to the Challenge, Googlers generally prefer to let data speak for itself. Minutes after our team returned to the office, folks were already using Google Earth’s GPS tools to visualize tracks and dissect elevation profiles recorded on their My Tracks app or fitness units.

And yes, a few folks from the Docs team even fired up spreadsheets to run statistical analyses on the finish times. After accounting for outliers (those un-named Geo folks who actually got lost!), it turns out that there was no statistically significant difference between the cyclists and the runners. That just means our office feud will have to simmer for another year; enough time to sharpen our fitness and also the Geo tools we use to share and analyze our weekday warrior exploits!