I really liked Barcelona. Of all the cities I traveled to on this trip, Barcelona had the most parks within the downtown area. Even most streets were lined with trees, which provide much-needed shade from the Mediterranean sun.

Highlights:

Segrada Familia Church

This Gaudi-designed churn is quite incredible. I had heard from someone that it is not worth the wait in line and the entrance fee but I definitely disagree. Construction started in 1882 and it’s no where near done, although it was labeled a basilica by the Catholic church in 2010. I think when I was in Barcelona there were either 5 or 7 construction cranes on the top of the structure. The exterior of the building is dark and gothic. I was surprised to see that the inside of the church is bright and light colored. There is a lot of stained glass of all different colors that project colorful images all over the inside of the church.

Parque Guell

Our hostel was near this park. Another Gaudi creation and it afforded a great view of the city with the sea on the horizon. Great place to have a beer or two.

La Rambla

The main street in Barcelona, also home to one of the few Starbucks I found in Europe! I couldn’t resist the urget to get a vanilla iced soy chai tea; yum. Unfortunately, the only Starbucks in Copenhagen is at the airport (there are 3 at the rather small airport) and the drink just mentioned is 10 bucks instead of 5 like in the states. Ouch. Back to Barcelona… My favorite part of La Rambla is the market to the west of the street. Similar to Pike Place market, minus all the flowers and with numerous of small vendors selling fruits, veggies, nuts and some crazy-looking seafood. Back out on the street, I got a stein-like glass of Sangria with fresh fruit floating in it- really good.

The Olympic Park and Nearby Castle

The Olympic Park was underwhelming but there was a really cool castle on the top of the hill that is free to get into. From the top of the hill you get a great 360 degree view over the whole city. The surrounding part would be a great place to go for runs if I was staying in barcelona for longer. On the back side of the castle there is a funny driving course with every sign and type of intersection imaginable, only on a small scale. I wonder if it was a driving instruction course for motorcycles, as cars surely wouldn’t fit on the miniature roads.

Beaches

Barcelona has great beaches. Nice sand, right downtown, topless women and immigrants to give 5 euro massages right on the beach and sell 1 euro bottles of water.

https://www.facebook.com/curtisjhowell?sk=photos

Before I set out on my trip, I heard from many people that Venice is very tourist-heavy and there is not much to do there so I did not have high expectations. I normally prefer more natural places that are important for reasons other than just entertainment. However, I stayed in a great hostel with nice people that ran it and met some fun people so I ended up having a great time! The hostel was only 5 minutes from the main train station so it was easily accessible but not near the main attractions.

When I arrived on the 7^th, I needed to do my laundry. There was a local laundry mat so I took my dirty laundry there. It cost around 20 USD to do a load of laundry. Ouch. That night I decided to eat dinner at the hostel. The girlfriend of the hostel manager makes dinner every night for 5 euros and it’s a good place to meet other people staying in the hostel so I went for it. Food wasn’t too great but I met some nice people and we all walked outside for about half an hour.

In the morning after a nice breakfast at the hostel, 5 of us from the hostel decided to go on a walking tour with the manager and his girlfriend. It’s a free tour and tips are greatly accepted. They knew some interesting facts about Venice and were a lot of fun. We walked by a shop that takes old 1.5L water bottles, washes them, then sells wine in them. It had at least 15 varieties of wine and we decided to try it out. In Europe it is ok to drink alcohol in public. We drank wine out of plastic water bottles walking down the streets of Venice- pretty strange experience!

All the streets are very skinny and there are no cars. There are all types of boats in the canals. Some of us were speculating whether couriers delivered packages via the streets or the canals. About five minutes later we saw a boat with UPS painted on the rutter.

The main square of Venice is very old and has lots of designer stores. The hostel manager told us that one of the columns facing the water on the government mansion on the corner of the main square is closer to the edge than the rest. If you look at the spacing between the columns and the foundation you can see it’s true. This signified the pole that criminals would be tied to and punished with lashings. He also told us that it is not possible walk on the ledge between the column and the water with toes facing the water and not holding the column. I tried and failed. If you are ever in Venice, give it a shot.

We learned that Venetian cuisine is heavy on seafood so a few of us decided to go out to eat and try some local food. I got a mixed grilled seafood plate. The fish was OK and the waitress was quite rude.

I am quite sure Cinque Terre is the most naturally beautiful place I’ve ever been. It was definitely my favorite place on my trip so far. If you are not familiar with it, Cinque Terre is 5 small Italian towns on the Mediterranean and they are connected by hiking trails. Most tourists only hike on the trail that links the 5 cities near the sea, but there are many more trails up in the hills that are amazing. Several of them wind through vineyards and all have awesome views of the hills, cities and sea.

The first night I stayed in Riomaggiore, the first town from the east. After I checked into the hostel I met someone from Philadelphia and we decided to go for a hike. We hiked to Manarola and then all the way up the hill to the park boundary, then back to Riomaggiore. The Cinque Terre national park is surrounded by an electric fence to keep the wild boars out so we purposely chose trails within the park as we were unsure whether the wild boars like to eat grapes or humans. At the top of the park we found a few summer homes with amazing views. We talked to a lady that lived in one and she told us they though the original structure was medieval and was built to watch for African pirates. We sampled a couple grapes as we walked through the vineyards and they were all really good! We found some interesting vines that had both red and green grapes in the same bunch.

The next two nights I slept in Corniglia, the middle town, so I decided it would be fun to hike with my backpack instead of taking the train. Unfortunately, the coastal trail between Manarola and Corniglia (2^nd and 3^rd towns) was closed indefinitely due to a landslide. So I had to hike via one of the inland trails which was quite a workout with my pack. I locked my backpack up at my hostel and decided to continue along the trail to Vernazza and Monterosso, the 4^th and 5^th towns.

The last day I started from Corniglia and hiked to Vernazza via the coastal trail, then took an inland trail to Monterosso. Once I got to Monterosso I decided to continue hiking along the coast to Sant’ Antoni (or Antonio, I went swimming with my map in my pocket so it’s pretty hard to read). From this point, I could see an amazing view of all 5 cities.

After both full days of hiking, I ended in Monterosso and went swimming. Monterosso is the most touristy and largest cities of the Cinque terre and has 2 large beaches. Most of the beach is covered with beach chairs and sun umbrellas for which you have to pay to use but I found the free beaches to be just fine. The sea in Monterosso is very salty, similarly to how it was in Greece, so I was very buoyant and swimming was easy. However, the water was much colder than in Greece. Focaccia bread is very popular in Cinque Terre. In Monterosso, there was always a very long line coming out of the focaccia bakery. They served it with various toppings, such as olives or pesto. I tried it with olives and it was very good.

Food

One day for lunch I ate a Cinque Terre specialty pizza called frutti di mare, or fruit of the sea. This was the best pizza I have ever had and included clams, mussels, calamari and shrimp. I decided to de-shell the animals and empty the meat onto the pizza and it turned out nicely.

For my last night in Cinque Terre, I met up with someone I live with and 2 girls he is traveling with. It was a coincidence that we both ended up in Cinque Terre at the same time and our reunion can be attributed to none other than Facebook. We met in Monterosso and went to a restaurant recommended by Rick Steves. We got the dish that Rick recommends, a seafood stew with many types of creatures including shrimp, mussels, clams, squid, mini lobsters and some other animals I didn’t recognize. It comes in an enormous bowl in the middle of the table. As Mr. Steves suggested, the stew and a plate of pasta is plenty of food for four.

Also called out in the Rick Steves Italy guidebook was a winery in the town where I stayed, Corniglia. A local 3 Euro glass of wine is served in a purin, which aerates the wine to give it more kick. I didn’t get a video but I’ll be happy to demonstrate the technique if anyone is interested. It’s a little messy at first but I started to get the hang of it toward the end of my glass of wine. A purin will most definitely be on my list of items to acquire when I return to the states.

On my last day, a forest fire (vineyard fire?) lit somewhere in the hills between Riomaggiore and Manarola. I first noticed it when I was past Monterosso and was first a bit concerned that I wouldn’t’ be able to get back to Corniglia if it spread quickly but luckily the Italian fire fighters got the fire under control. Because the hills are so steep and there are not many roads, They fought the fire with a seaplane that scooped up water from the sea and dumped it on the fire. I’ve seen pictures of these planes but I’ve never seen one in action. It was pretty impressive. They also had a helicopter that was dangling a bucket on a cable to do the same thing but the airplane was much more effective. By the next morning, there was no more smoke and the plane was not dumping water on the hills so I assume they put out the fire. Hopefully the grape farmers have insurance, as it seems like a fire could wipe out a livelihood pretty quickly because most of the vines are quite thick, so I assume they have been in the ground for a long time.

The Start

My day started in the recruiting building (111) at 9:00 but I didn’t see my recruiter until around 9:45. This gave me enough time to fill a water bottle, check out their modern furniture and play some Kinect. The recruit candidates all wait in this lobby until a recruiter calls each recruit’s name. We went into a small conference room for around 10 minutes where we talked about the general interview process. It was then that I learned I was interviewing for the Office group, which means I would be on an “Office Loop”. At Microsoft, recruits interview with employees who have worked at Microsoft for a while (my four interviewers had been at Microsoft a minimum of seven years). The interviewers always work together on the same interview team, such that the same set of employees interview candidates together. This gives them a general sense of what the other interviewers have asked or will ask so there is not much overalp in the questions they ask. Each interviewer had one or two interview questions for me, after which I was asked if I had any questions. The biggest question I had in terms of my curiosity was since Microsoft Office has a seeming monopoly on productivity software, how do they continue to push themselves to be better, and what are the overarching goals and aims of the Office suite for the long term? I learned they are pushing Office to be more collaborative and to increase the communication capabilities (logical), and their strongest competitor is previous versions of Office because many organnizations do not immediately upgrade to the newest versions as they are released (I had not thought about this before- interesting).

Getting Around

The most impressive system at Microsoft that I saw was the transportation on campus. Microsoft has a fleet of Prius hybrids with drivers who have memorized the location of every building- and that’s a lot. When I needed to move between buildings, I would tell the receptionist where I needed to go and within three minutes a driver would come get me. It is my understanding that I had priority access to the cars because I was a recruit, but I believe all employees can use the service.

Interview Questions

I had a lot of fun answering the interview questions that were presented to me. They were certainly unique to the Program Manager position. I was expecting (as per Microsoft’s website) to be asked to code solutions to some questions but this was not the case for me. I had one data structure/algorithm question where my interviewer asked me to simply talk about my solution. Generally, I would pre presented with a skeleton of a problem and I was required to ask more questions to flesh out the details and gain more understanding of the problem I was asked to solve. The following are the questions I was asked in the order they were asked:

Convict’s Ransom Note

A convict needs to write ransom notes using letters out of newspaper clippings. He wants to know if a given magazine contains the letters he needs to write a certain note. Given the inputs of the note and magazine in text form, what is the best way to return whether or not the magazine contains the necessary letters and what is the algorithm’s runtime?

Variation A: The convict wants to use words out of the magazine instead of letters to write the note.

Variation B: The convict is okay using homophones in the note. You are allowed to design the API of the object that knows the homophones of words in the dictionary.

Solution

Design a Movie Theater Kiosk

Then I was asked to design the UI one of those electronic kiosks at movie theaters that allow you to purchase movie tickets without interacting with the human at the ticket window.

Remote Control for Children

After lunch in one of the Microsoft cafeterias, my next design question was to design a remote control that would allow a 3-8 year olds to watch their favorite TV channels with no help from a parent.

Talk About a Technology System

My next question was the most open ended of them all. My interviewer asked me to begin talking about any technology I wanted, and then we have a conversation about the technology behind it. She told me I could talk about a well known system such as how a search engine works, or I could tell her about the details of a project I have worked on in the past.

Learning Game for Kids

To end my third interview, I was asked to design a game that would be a smashing hit to 5 year olds with the goal of teaching them how to order a set of four double digit numbers. Thus far, this was the most difficult question for me because I do not play computer or video games. This forced me to really be creative, as I could not borrow many elements from other games as I imagine other candidates would be able to do. I started with some simple counting lessons to improve game players’s “number sense” and allow them to be able to compare two numbers and determine with is larger. Then I moved into a sorting algorithm in which I designed the game to teach kids bubble sort.

Japanese Characters

This question started my fourth and final interview. In Japan, there are two character sets- Kanji and Hiragana. Hiragana characters represent sounds and there are 46 characters in the alphabet, so they are represented by one byte. Kanji characters, on the other hand, represent an entire word and are intermingled with the Hiragana characters in documents. There are many Kanjis, such that they require 2 bytes to represent each character. To distinguish between these characters electronically, the most significant bit of a Hiragana character is a 0 and the most significant bit of the first byte of a Kanji character is a 1 (the second byte can start with either a 1 or 0). The challenge with this scheme is that it is not trivial to distinguish the bytes when not starting at the beginning of the document. The question presented to me was how do you optimally delete the last character of a document. I needed some help with this problem, as my brain was tired by this time and I did not immediately recognize the pattern.

Solution

Describe an Interesting Project

To wrap up my final interview, my interviewer asked me to describe an interesting project I have worked on. After I described the project, he asked me if I utilized any frameworks and I explained that no framework I was aware of was appropriate to what I was doing.

Wrapping Up

After my fourth interview was complete, I caught a Prius back to the recruiting building where I played some more Kinect and then met my recruiter. He told me that a hiring manager wanted to have a quick phone call with me. After finding a conference room with a phone, we got the manager on the line and he informed me that he was from the Office.com group and that I was being offered the position! By this time I was exhausted and certainly relieved and ecstatic that the day had been a success. Finally, my recruiter gave me a sweet t-shirt and I headed home. The end.

Convict’s Ransom Note

The solution I came up with was to create an array of length 26 that will represent counts of letters in the ransom note. For example, if the note contains 4 letter ‘a’s, index 0 will be set to 4. My solution was certainly influenced by UW CSE143′s Letter Inventory assignment. In addition to the array, I used a counter to represent the sum of the values of the array. After setting up this array and counter, I traversed through the magazine. To compare our note’s needs with the magazine’s letters. Here’s some pseudo code:

counter = 0
loop through letters of note{
increment corresponding index of the current letter by 1 and increment counter by 1
}end loop

loop through letters of magazine{

if value of corresponding index is greater than 0{

decrement value of corresponding index and counter, each by 1

if counter is 0, return true

}

}end loop

return false //did not find enough needed letters in magazine

Variation A- words instead of letters:

replace array with a Map with strings for keys and Integers for values

Variation B- allow homophones:

Create an interface that returns possible homophones when given a word.

in the algorithm, repalce

“if value of corresponding index is greater than 0{”

with

“get homophones for current word

loop through possible set of homophones and if the map contains one of them as a key, perform operation using that word”

Japanese Characters

The key to this problem is, starting from the end of the document and working backwards, to find the first position where you know a character ends. The correct way to do this is to find the first byte that starts with a 0 (ignoring the last byte), because a byte that begins with a 0 is either a one byte character or the last byte of a 2 byte character. From there, you can work backwards and discover if the last character is represented by 1 or 2 bytes.

The optimization comes from knowing that ignoring the last byte, all bytes before the key byte starting with a 0 start with a 1. Therefore, the number of bytes you looked over to get to the first byte that begins with a 0 determines whether the final character occupies 1 or 2 bytes.