Right before I left for Biking Across Kansas, I applied to Google’s Summer of Code. For those of you unfamiliar with the program, the basic idea is Google will be sponsoring 410 students to work on various open source projects over the summer, and, if they complete their project, they will be paid $4500. Sounded like a good deal to me, and I felt that I was well matched to one of the projects that Gaim had listed.

The results were to be announced on the 24th, and as could be seen in the forum, there were many of us eagerly awaiting the results. A post from Chris DiBona (one of two people at Google in charge of the project) confirmed our worst fears: the results would not be sent out until late that day, probably not until midnight. Since Google is based in California, that put the deadline at 2am my time. I figured, hey, to find out if I’m getting $4500, sure I can stay up till 2am! 2am came and went with no emails. The anticipation on the forum reached a fever pitch. 45 minutes later, Chris posted a note reminding us that Google was in fact a global company and there was still plenty of time before midnight was reached at their Hawaii offices. That’s cheating! I was starting to get tired, but I figured I’d feel really silly if I went to sleep now and they emailed them 5 minutes later. One hour of continual page refreshing later, Chris posted the mysterious message “The 3rd prime over 400,” which one of the members on the forum quickly discovered to be 419. A few minutes later, Chris hinted that the number referred to the number of applicants accepted. Then, a half hour later, Greg Stein (the other guy at Google) posted that Chris had gone to sleep and he was the only one left working on it. I figured this meant the results had to be sent out soon, so I continued to wait.

I should mention that during this time, I wasn’t just sitting around doing nothing, I was also coding on TOME and helping one of my friends with a Perl-related project of his own. It was funny to watch my coding abilities quickly degrade as the night wore on. What started as a productive evening ended up in hour long frustrations caused by my inability to read the documentation of some modules I was using correctly.

Anyway, at 5am I decided that enough was enough and went to bed. Turned out to be a good decision because when I woke up around 10am (couldn’t sleep in when I knew I probably had email waiting for me!), I found that the notices had not been sent until around 9:30am my time. And the result? ::Drumroll:: Not accepted. Somewhat disappointing. There were something like 8700 total applications, 859 of which were for Gaim. Gaim was only allocated 15 students to sponsor, and for whatever reason, I did not make the list. It would have been a lot of fun to do, and getting $4500 certainly would have been great, but I’m not too upset. Not being accepted will give me more time to work on Phoenix, TOME, and Freya, things I worried I would not be able to focus on enough if I had been accepted.

I mention working on Freya. Not surprisingly, it has come to our attention that Freya has a number of defects that need to be corrected over the summer. The first one we’re going to tackle is replacing the water pump because it’s leaking coolant (no coolant = melted engine = bad). As you can tell from the linked site, this is not a trivial operation, but Abu (who started work at Mid-Western Aircraft Systems in Wichita on Friday) came up and gave us a hand on Saturday. We’ve got it down to where we can pull the old pump off and are waiting on the new one to arrive in the mail. While it’s in the shop, I also plan to replace some dash cluster capacitors, install a new stereo, take a look at the problem with the electric locking system, and maybe a few other minor things.