Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Day 07: Wednesday, 8 March 2006: Macquarie University

We went to Kam Fook at the Chatswood suburb to have Yum Cha for breakfast. The waiters walked all around the restaurant pushing Dim Sum carts. If you like the food, you just take it. Despite the many foods that we took, I find it relatively cheap, a bargain indeed. Oh, and the food was really great.

We circled around Chatswood, buying some very (too) sweet doughnuts. About 12.30PM we headed to the apartment of Dita's friend, Fany; whom we would go together with to their school, Macquarie University.

We spent almost 2 hours around the campus, visiting the library, the canteen, stores, etc. There were lots of messages posted on the wall about sharing an apartment, selling books, etc. One nice thing about these messages was the contact number was provided in easy to tear pieces. Nice idea.

At around 4PM, we were back at home. Dita arrived home at around 6PM. We then had dinner at nearby bar/tavern, the St. Leonards Tavern (???). The bar was equipped with a billiard table. I had steak (t-bone) for dinner. It was a pretty cheap steak, $7.

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Day 06: Tuesday, 7 March 2006: P&O

Dita went to school again today (up to around 12.30PM) so we were again on our own way. Seriously, we felt like we'd explored all around Sydney and there were not much more to do/see. We started the day by walking around the TownHall, the Queen Victoria Building, and its surrounding neighborhood. Dita were supposed to join us for lunch after school, however something bad happened. She lost her cellphone at the toilet of her school. That explained why we hadn't been able to contact her in the last hour. Anyway we then decided to have our own lunch, a yummy fried noodle.

We then went to 160 Sussex Street, where P&O Ports office was located. This was just in front of Four Points Sheraton, where I had my interview. I should have been here last Friday to see Sean as he wanted me to pick up something for Wara. However I was wearing sandals that day, so I felt it was inappropriate to come there then. The P&O building was some gray colored building. I talked to the receptionist who informed me Sean was in New Zealand, but he'd prepared this envelope that I was supposed to pick up.

It was around 5PM when we got back home. Dita was at home. My wife cooked us bakmoy for dinner. Well, we had too many times going out for dinner already, so we preferred to just have dinner at home then. Dita showed us some minor blister that she got working at McDonald's. She wanted us to take pictures to be shown to her mom in Indonesia. We even took a video of her describing the blisters in detail.

Monday, March 06, 2006

Day 05: Monday, 6 March 2006: The Rocks and Sydney Tower

Dita had a school today up to 5PM, so we decided to walk on our way. This was the first time I had to go out bringing a map with me. Our first stop was The Rocks. We took a train to Wynyard, then to Circular Quay. The Rocks itself was said to be the oldest village in town. There wasn't really much to see here IMO. We ended up having lunch at the Pancake on the Rocks where we ordered Aussie Sunrise. The pancake was delicious, although IMO the one in IHOP (in US) was yummier. We then continued walking until we came beneath the harbor bridge. There was a tour here to climb and go to the topmost point of the bridge.

Our next stop would be the Sydney Tower. Since we had nothing to do, we decided to take a walk all along the George Street. It was quite a long walk, the day was really hot, so we made several stops during the way. On one interesting point, we came across a man who was selling a ballpoint to passing-by people in order to make a living. He was nicely dressed and didn't look like a beggar at all. We also stumbled upon some homeless people; some looked very young and good-looking, that if they had come to Indonesia, they might have been a famous and adored actor/celebrity.

We had to find our way to find the entrance to Sydney Tower. But looking at other high buildings around it (that seemed to block the view), we were rather skeptical to be able to really see anything when we went up there. Curiously, we found two kinds of entrance; the first one was to a 360 degree (floor revolving?) restaurant, which would be quite an awesome dining experience. The second one was to a viewing platform and OzTrek (a cinema). It was like A$23.5. There was other attraction for the adventurous, the SkyWalk, where you would go out to open-air, with proper safety of course.

While around the Sydney Tower, I found a novel book left on a seat. There was this label on the book: "I'm not lost, see www.bookcrossings.com" and some book ID. It was an interesting concept to share a book, where you released and registered a found book on the website and you could see who and where this book had traveled.

It was about 5PM when we got back to home. We then went out with Dita to had dinner. This time it was a Japanese restaurant, Koh-Ya Yakiniku. Meals were self-barbequed. We ordered a buffet and the food was really great, highly recommended. The ox tongue (my first time eating one) was so tasty that we ordered like 3 or 4 plates. This was my favorite meal during our stay in Sydney.

Sunday, March 05, 2006

Day 04: Sunday, 5 March 2006: Chinatown

Sisca had to fly to the Netherlands today to see our grandmother's sister which was having some heart-attack. Our best wish for her. Dita would be our tour leader from this day onward. Yet Dita was assigned an early morning work-shift at McDonald's (the pay at weekend was 1.5 times higher), so we had basically nothing to do and just waited at the apartment until Dita's shift ended at 3.30PM. Being employed by McDonald's, Dita could buy everything at half-price and in some circumstances could even bring home some free foods. At which that day, Dita brought home some nuggets and French fries (French fries were called "chips" here) for lunch.

The adventure started by visiting Chinatown again. I said "the adventure" because Dita was like more spontaneous in leading our tour, without a very well planned path, map reading, etc. So we sometimes had to wonder here and there about which way to take :-). However it was completely ok because with Sisca, we were practically in safe-arms and need not know anything. With Dita, there comes the chaos :-).

We first tried to find a book store because Dita needed to buy a text-book. Eventually at 4.30PM we finally found the store, but it was closed already at 4PM. Just one example of how spontaneous she was. However next to it was UTS, so we took some pictures there.

We then walked back to Chinatown to have "dinner"; it was still around 5PM, and was like 2PM in Surabaya with sun still high above us. It was in Thainatown, a Thai restaurant. We had kwee-tiauw (thick ride noodle), fried noodle, and a soup noodle. Prices were pretty much a perfect fit for our budget. Whereas Sisca's style was of an executive level dining experience, Dita's style was more of a student-style dining experience :-).

In Chinatown, we visited a mall, the Market City. Exactly underneath it was Paddy's market; but it was closed already. We planned to go back to Paddy's next week because you would find a bargain here for almost anything. Tired wondering around, we ate some ice-cream.

An unexpected thing happened then. Dita went to the toilet, left the t-shirt that she'd just bought on some bin, and forgot to take it back afterward. We realized it after about 15 minutes. We got back to the toilet, the bag was there, but nothing was inside. How awful! This explained why we saw so many "Shoplifting will be prosecuted" signs and security cameras all around Sydney. Never leave your belonging unattended!

Anyway, we then walked along George Street. This street was a main road, like Jalan Tunjungan, that went all the way from North to South.

It was about 8PM when we got back to home. Dita did some cleaning stuff, while I relaxed and enjoyed some TV :-).

Saturday, March 04, 2006

Day 03: Saturday, 4 March 2006: Coogee, Bondi, Kings Cross

The day started, again, around 10AM. Dita had a work-shift at McDonald's, so we went with Dan and Sisca to the Coogee beach. We had our first western-style breakfast there: bacon, egg, and toast (Turkish-style). I think I prefer some normal toast rather than this Turkish one. Btw, I forgot to take any pictures.

We then strolled along coast-line. Some people were playing games on the beach; there were also lots of people on the nearby park. We hiked the rocky area to some remote, not-too-many people, spot. The view here was awesome, the Pacific Ocean view if I'm not mistaken. We spent about one hour around the area. The only thing I didn't like was it was really hot and I think we managed to get our skin burnt. Siska told us that if we followed the walkway, we would reach the famous Bondi beach in about an hour. Thank God, we decided not to walk, and instead took Dan's car to Bondi.

On our way to Bondi, we passed by a cemetery; a really nice one actually, it had a nice beach view. It was about 1PM when we reached Bondi beach. This was the most famous beach in Sydney and I think it was much larger and more crowded than Coogee. Dan dropped us here as he wanted to play tennis. Compared to Kuta, um, in some ways Kuta might be more beautiful, but the sand here felt much softer and smoother. We sat in some hidden-from-sun spot; I was busy digging a deep hole :) while Sisca and my wife chatted and shared stories.

It was almost 3PM when we decided to go back home. We headed to the nearby Bondi Junction, where we saw a mall, Westfield, which was like the largest mall in Sydney, because they were two separated buildings connected via some bridge. Yet, it was relatively small compared to Tunjungan Plaza (I couldn't believe that I couldn't find any website for this largest plaza in Surabaya). Things were pretty much different here (and in the US) compared to what we had in Indonesia. There were not many big malls or plazas here, but there were lots of shops, cafes, restaurants, along the roads everywhere. Of course this was due to the fact that pedwalks were pretty much more enjoyable, more pleasurable weather (no need for air conditioning), and less polluted air. If you know Kuta Square in Bali, that's how it looked like everywhere here.

Around 6PM, we (with Dita) went to Kings Cross suburb for dinner. It was, for the fourth time, another Malay restaurant, except that this one had some kind of romantic atmosphere. We had fish, and I forgot what else we had (and forgot to take pictures), but it was really plenty. My wife thought that this was the best dinner we ever had in Sydney. After dinner, we walked around the area. There were many backpackers' hotel around this area, lots of adult-show places, and tons of shops/restaurants.

Afterward, around 9PM, we rode on Dan's car and proceeded to Star City, the biggest gambling site in Sydney. Unfortunately I couldn't take any pictures here as I thought it was disallowed. It was Saturday night and this place was packed with lots of people. We initially had some problems finding a place to park. To enter the place we had to show our IDs (Indonesia's KTP was ok) to prove that you were of enough age (18+?). This place was huge and you would find many different sorts of gambling here, from poker, blackjack, roulette, the old-fashioned slot machine (well, it wasn't really old-fashioned, because they were all digital machines, with screens and digital buttons), and many other games that I had no idea. The roulette was also interesting because it was also provided in digital format, where you could play singly against a machine (no real tables, no real roulette wheel); this was like playing some kind of computer game actually, except real money was in stake. There was also this semi-digital format where a real roulette wheel was played with real people, but instead of placing your bet on the table, well, the table was "digitalized" and you placed your bet digitally via the screen; this format could accommodate much more people than the old-fashioned style. I didn't really notice the odd of winning any gambling game here, but I noticed there was this one person who won quite lots of tokens playing roulette. It must be his lucky night. We also spent some time watching people playing blackjack (because this was the only game I was most familiar with). No, we didn't play any game. We simply thought $10/$25/$50 was too much money to be placed on bet :). But seriously, there was also this slot machine with only 1c of bets if you just wanted to test your luck. The problem was I didn't know how this slot machine worked; there were simply too many unfamiliar buttons. It was like 10PM when we decided to leave the place. And once again, we had problem finding where Dan parked his car, because Sisca forgot what floor the car was parked on. The night ended when we found the car and returned home.

Friday, March 03, 2006

Day 02: Friday, 3 March 2006 - Opera House, Chinatown, Luna Park

Due to some jet-lag and exhausting experience yesterday, it was like 11AM already when I woke up. I took a quick shower and was ready to explore Sydney. Our first destination was the famous Opera House. But before we went there, Sisca wanted to treat us for a lunch. We took a CityRail again from St. Leonards to TownHall (or was it Wynyard?), where we then proceeded to yet another Malaysian restaurant. We ordered Hokkien fried noodle and laksa. Well, I had to admit that meal portion was huge, just like in America. One plate of typical meal was comparable to two in Indonesia. After lunch, Siska went back to work, and we (I, my wife, and Dita) walked to the nearby Opera House.

Opera House was located near the harbor (Circular Quay). There you would also have a great view of the famous Sydney Harbour Bridge, which connected the southern part of Sydney (main city/CBD/downtown) and its northern part. The walkway here was very nice and clean.

We encountered lots of street performers, one of which was pretty funny and attracted quite a lot of people. He was doing some sort of sword juggling. It was quite entertaining as he involved the spectators and threw some funny jokes to passing-by people while performing his act, such as "Watch out mom, you have two strangers following you", "Hey lady, do you find me attractive?", "That man, carrying a large bag, is a professional shoplifter".

We kept walking 'till we ended up at the Opera House itself. The unique architecture of the building was what made it interesting. There were lots of tourists here. We walked around the building and took lots of pictures here. There were no activity inside the building and it was closed, so we could not go inside the building. I think we spent about one hour here.

We then took a Sydney bus to the Chinatown. Bus fare was calculated based on section length, and you could pay the bus on board to the driver or you could buy a pre-paid card (which was cheaper, of course). It was Friday evening and there was this night market, so it was pretty crowded there. IMO, the Chinatown here was a little bit bigger than the one in LA, but smaller than the one in SF. Dita bumped into her friend, Etha, here. All of us then went to have a nice chocolate at Max Brenner. Make sure you ordered the Suckao.

It was about 6PM already, so we headed back home because Sisca planned to take us for a dinner. We then went to yet another Malaysian restaurant, Kuali, for dinner, where Sisca had waited there as she went directly from work. Weird, huh? I just realized that 3 out of the 4 meals we'd had during our first 2 days in Sydney were Malay food. But this time, it was a really huge dinner. We had crabs as our main course, and many various entrees and desert as well. Dan, Sisca's boyfriend, joined us shortly afterward as his apartment was just around the area.

Dan brought a car and night was still pretty young, so Dan & Sisca took us to the lower part of Milsons point. There we had a great night view of downtown Sydney and the harbor bridge. Just around the corner was the Luna Park. This amusement park was closed already though. At around 11PM, we decided to return home.

Thursday, March 02, 2006

Interview with Microsoft

I arrived at the hotel at 1:45PM, asked the receptionist where the Microsoft interview was, and told to wait at the lobby as she was busy with something else. I waited for about 5 minutes before asking again and was directed to the 10th floor. On my way up, I met two other persons who were also here for the interview. I went to the room, and there I met another 3 persons, so there were a total of six persons for that interview session.

There were no MS people anywhere in-sight. Maybe they had just finished their previous interview session and were having lunch. All six of us waited in that room, where the bed had been taken out and there was this big table with these Geomag toys, wooden blocks puzzle, Seattle magazine, Microsoft SDE/SDET brochure, plenty of coffee and tea to keep all of us from getting bored I guess. Only shortly afterwards, a MS guy, the HR maybe, came in. He welcomed and briefed us about what the interview might look like. Basically we would meet at least 3 people, 45 minutes each, and if deemed necessary, we might meet one more people. There were six interviewers; each would go one-on-one with each interviewee. After each 45 minutes, we were supposed to return to this room, and waited to be called for the next one.

My first interview was with a PM in the Exchange group. He was a really nice guy, smiley guy, I liked him. First he introduced himself, his work, his team, that he had been involved in Exchange since it was nothing 'till now where Exchange had a huge installation base. It was amazing. Then he asked about why I wanted to work in MS, what my interests were, some work I had done, etc. Then it proceeded to the exciting stuff where he asked me to write codes on paper (no whiteboard). I was asked to write a function findNth(int n, Node* root), which would return the n-th node of the given tree if the tree were traversed in-order. But instead of traversing the whole tree, I was supposed to traverse directly to the requested node, without doing any backtracking, etc. For example, given this tree:

E
/ \
/ \
C H
/ \ / \
A D G I
whose in-order traversal returns: ACDEGHI. If n equals 3, then I'm supposed to return node D (directly traversing E->C->D). I won't post any answer here, but I think I did well for this task. Btw, during the interview we were allowed to ask any clarifications, which I think we should. And I also tried to verbalize my thought as much as possible.

My second interview was with an SDE in the mailbox team. He first asked me to introduce myself, tell him a little bit about myself, etc. Then it went to the technical stuff again. He wanted me to write a function hexStr2Int that takes a string (pointer to array of chars) representing a hexadecimal string and returns it as an integer value. I think I did well too here, including identifying any possible pitfalls, etc. He then gave me a second problem, where assumed I was given a line-drawing algorithm on a cartesian coordinate of (-N, -N) up to (N, N) and I was supposed to write test cases for this algorithm. What kind of input test cases would I write? All in all, I feel like I did well for this task too.

Third interview was with another SDE. After some initial introduction, he asked me to find a contiguous subset given an array containing positive and negative values where the subset sum would be maximized. For example, given this array: [2, -1, 3, -5, 7], the maximum subset would be [7]. No, brute force was not allowed, in fact he wanted an O(n) algorithm. Somehow I totally screwed myself up this time. I was unable to come-up with an O(n) algorithm. My mind was somehow fixed to an O(n^2) solution (maybe, I didn't pursue further). Until the end of the interview, I could not come up with a good solution. I did really bad and felt down. Later that night, I found out that I should have known about this because I learnt about this some time long ago.

When we all gathered back at the waiting room, we were wondering if there would be a fourth interview. Apparently there was, my fourth one was with the HR guy. The interview wasn't too technical in nature. It was more about my interests, my background, what I would do for Microsoft (my vision) if I were Bill Gates. This last question was particularly interesting: imagine you were Bill Gates, what would you do? Although there were no right/wrong answers, I didn't feel like I had answered well though. After the discussion, he presented me with some problem solving, the famous Microsoft riddles. My first riddle was like this. Two old friends came to meet each other while they were sitting on a bench waiting for a bus. The first man asked, "How old are your daughters?" The second man answered, "Well, I have 3 daughters, the product of their ages is 36; the sum of their ages is equal to the address of that house across the street". The first man replied, "I still don't have enough clues". The second man added, "My oldest daughter has a red hair". And the first man said, "Oh, I see. I know their ages now". So do you know their ages? After several discussions, I managed to find the answers. It was really an interesting riddle. Then he presented me another riddle: there were three jars in front of you. Each was labeled: apples, oranges, apples + oranges, respectively. But all those labels were wrong and misplaced. You could not see what inside each jar was. You were only allowed to reach-in into one of the jar, picked exactly one of the fruit, and decided which label should go to which jar. I managed to find the answer for this riddle as well.

Four interviews and I thought those were all. Apparently I was wrong and I again had my fifth interview. This time it was with Matt, who had interviewed me before via the phone, before I came to Sydney. I was really glad to finally be able to meet him. He was the one who decided that I be invited for this on-site interview after all. Matt seemed like a nice, cool, and relax guy. He just wore a short. After several short introductions, what my interests, what I didn't like to do, my backgrounds, some work I had done, he asked me to write this function which would "fix" a URI like: http://www.microsoft.com/office/../sp2/../sp2a/ into http://www.microsoft.com/sp2a/. No STL string, no CString, just pure #include <string.h>. It was the longest code I wrote among all interviews, I spent like 3 pieces of paper, but I managed to finish it all. I think there could be some syntax error here and there though.

After that, I returned to the waiting room. Shortly afterwards, two of the candidates (one was named Sun Jae, the other Rony) joined me in the room. We waited until about 7PM when a MS guy, the first guy that we met earlier, came in and told us that the interview had ended. We would receive the decision the following week. He then collected our transcript, passport, and bachelor certificate, which we had been instructed to bring copies before. Oh btw, I didn't see the other three candidates that were initially with us. I was told later that those three guys had only four interviews instead of five. This could mean a good sign or a bad sign. A bad sign for me because these three guys were good enough that they didn't need the fifth one whereas I might not have impressed them yet; or a good sign for me because these three guys were simply not good whereas I still might not have impressed them. Both were probably signaling the same thing, they could not achieve a unanimous vote on whether I was good enough to work for MS. I kept my fingers crossed for the result. In fact, the next few days would make me really nervous waiting for the result as I didn't feel like I had done well enough. Whatever the result would be, this had been a worthwhile experience.

Day 01: Thursday, 2 March 2006 - Arriving in Sydney

We arrived at Kingsford Smith airport at about 9AM local time. Sydney is 4 hours ahead of Surabaya (DST in effect), so it was about 5AM in Surabaya. My first impression of the airport was, well, just like most airports. On our way to the customs, there were lots of signs about the obligation to declare stuff, such as food, meat, etc, that you brought into the country; otherwise you might be considered breaking the law and could be fined. After all the immigration stuff, we queued at the "Things to declare" line because I brought in some food for my cousin in-law who was studying here in Sydney. Well, it was a really long queue. Everybody seemed to have something to declare. Not a surprise since if you noticed the declaration form, it asked you to declare almost anything like food, meat, animal, soil (or sporting equipment with soils contamination); it even suggested that if you are really not sure, you'd better be safe by declaring it.

When my luggage was checked, the officer seized my "abon" (side-dish: meat fibers) and banana crackers. They were not allowed because they were considered some kind of meat or processed food. If they had been in some kind of canned form with a clear and professional wrapping, they would have been ok. Unfortunately they were home-made and wrapped simply with a plastic bag with no label or anything like that (no expiry date, no nutrion facts), so I had to let them go. Other stuff, such as cracker, snacks, etc, was allowed.

It took us about one hour before we could finally get out to the arrival hall where our cousin, Dita, had waited for almost two hours. She took us to her apartment by taxi. The taxi cost was about A$50. It would have cost us approximately the same if all three of us took a train instead, not to mention that train would take more time. The roads were big, clean, and nice, like most advanced countries have. Despite being summer, temperature was about 25 degree Celsius, so it was pretty comfortable although our taxi had no air conditioning.

My cousin had a pretty cozy apartment. It was a one main room apartment, plus one study room (which was used for a bedroom as well). I think the size was approximately 7 meters wide, 10 meters length. One other cool thing was about its security. One could not just go to any floor easily, instead, if you had an apartment at floor 36, for example, your swipe card could only activate button 36 of the elevator. If a guest (without a swipe card) wished to pay a visit, she should first call the corresponding apartment number using the panel at the front of the building, and only after the owner granted the permission (by pushing some switch in the room) that she could go up to the appropriate floor. The apartment also provided a swimming pool (not the one in the picture!) and a gym, free for the residence, nice.

We rested and freshened ourselves for about 1 hour. At 2 PM I would have to be in Four Points Sheraton, Sussex Street, where my interview with Microsoft was going to be held. My cousin took us there via the CityRail train. A round-trip ticket from her apartment to downtown cost about $3.40 per pax. We got off at the TownHall station (Queen Victoria Building), took a really quick lunch at a Malaysian Laksa restaurant, and walked for about 10 minutes to get to the hotel.

I'll write about my interview later. To summarize, it was 5 hours long. Despite the demanding time, it was really exciting, fun, and challenging actually. Meanwhile, my wife and her cousin, Dita, explored the surrounding area, the Darling Harbor. When I had finished my interview, it was about 7PM already, but somehow it felt like 4PM because you could still see the sun. We returned home, bought a grilled chicken at Oporto underneath the apartment, and had dinner at home.

Dita