My name is Victoria Kirst, and I am a software engineer at Google. This is my personal website where you can find my professional information like my resume and a list of my projects. It is also home to my blog, where I document my more frivolous matters.
I have other homes on the internet as well! See me on: LinkedIn, Youtube, Pandora, and Amazon. Enjoy your stay!
If laptops are gendered, macbooks are obviously 100% female. THEY HAVE SO MANY ACCESSORIES just for everyday computing! Dongles, impractically shaped ridiculously short power cord, extension cord for the impractically shaped ridiculously short power cord… I think I need to buy my macbook a purse to hold it all.
This weekend I ran on Google’s team for the Ragnar Relay Race! The Ragnar Relay is this 12 person, 188 mile relay where each person runs three 3-8 mile legs of varying difficulty. The teams split up in 2 vans for runners 1-6 and 7-12 and your van follows you and cheers you on when you’re running. When no one in your van is running, you eat and try to get some sleep 
Google had two teams, Google FeetBurner and Google Street View, and I was runner 4 for Street View (easiest legs yahoo!). It was actually really really fun! I have to admit, at 4am on Friday morning when I was getting up to last-minute pack before driving to Google, I was having some second thoughts on this… but it turned out to be a blast. The weather was great and the people were great and it was fun to travel and support our team!
It was also surprisingly not too difficult to run 3 legs. Granted, I was running the 3 easiest legs, but they definitely felt like 3 distinct, independent races than like a drawn-out half marathon. It’s surprising how rested one feels fueled by the combination of a couple hours of sleep, clif bars, and adrenaline. The third leg was the only leg where I actually felt some pain, but overall very doable! ALSO, allegedly I ran ~8:30 min miles on the 2nd leg and ~8 min miles on the 3rd leg. The more I think about it, the more I am skeptical that this actually happened… I ran cross country in high school and I could barely go sub-10 on one 5k. I think in a few days, I am actually going to time myself going a fast 3 miles and see how I do. Not that I’m not going to tell people that I can run 8-8.5 min miles for long distances, but I want to see how much of a lie it is when I do tell people that! 
(But if I really can go that fast, I AM THE FASTEST PERSON IN THE ENTIRE WORLD.)
Licorice tea is DELICIOUS. It has a mild spicy taste as you’re drinking it, then it has this light sweet magic aftertaste that’s not like filmy candy sugar but is instead a perfect natural hint of sweet.
Also, strawberries on sale at U Village QFC for $1/lb. WHAT
I finished season 1 of Futurama last night before going to bed. Then I had a dream about Ally McBeal (a show I never actually watched before) and all I remember is that I looked at her skirt and thought “that’s not that short” (it wasn’t).
Cookbooks for young women:
Cookbooks for young men:
Snoop Dogg concert!!!! Was actually really, really fun! I don’t go to too many shows so it’s fun to compare how the crowd is like for different atmospheres. At JT it was teeny girls dancing and screaming, in lil Seattle 2cool4skool shows it’s like hipsters standing or bumping into each other on purpose (the male-est form of “dancing” I swear to god), at Snoop it was hands in the air and bouncing to the rhythm and repeat-after-me! So fun!!
Honest review: Ice Cube was legitimately a really awesome performance. Great beats and delivery and stage presence! Pretty much every song was my jam. Snoop Dogg…. he’s a good rapper and he’s adorable, but he mostly just sang parts of the many, many pop songs in which he appeared over the last few years. But let’s take a step back – that’s seriously amazing. Rap is all about self-aggrandizement, like “you should be honored by my lateness” and “I can sell a mill sayin nothin on the track”, but I feel like Snoop is one of the few stars for which this is really true. He doesn’t need a new album, he doesn’t even really need to have a great performance, and he can still be the headliner of a concert for 1000 people in hipster Seattle just because he is Snoop Dogg. In all fairness, Ice Cube had a much better performance. But I ended up buying a Snoop Dogg T-shirt. I tip my hat to you, sir!
OKAY KIDS how come I have just now started watching Futurama. It is so good and cute??? BRB ordering the rest of the series…! With 2-day shipping through Amazon Prime. Thanks, cs.washington.edu! :’)
At this rate I feel like I’m going to wake up one day and be like OMG GUYS DID YOU KNOW star trek is my ~lyfe~. We’ll see though!
This weekend I am dogsitting the most adorable little doggie named Toby. He is SUCH a nice and good doggie, and so little! He is really friendly toward strangers and very well potty trained, and most of the day he is content to just sleep on my bed.
BUT… he has serious separation anxiety!!! He goes crazy when I’m about to leave him home, barking super loud and chewing on my feet and literally wrapping his lil legs around mine haha. Right now he’s just crawled in my lap to fall asleep so that he’ll know the second I get up to leave. OK, it’s adorable, but I’m hungryyyyyyyy!
Edit: Successfully left him at home, but omg he was soooo mad haha. And I noticed my white flats were soggy when I came home … but he is a sweetie and I get sad when I think that I am going to have to return him tomorrow!
Today I went to a BBQ with some new friends I met at Google. It was so much fun!! The people there were all great and I was really happy to be invited. We played frisbee a little bit, hung out in the hot tub, played Taboo, and launched some early 4th of July fireworks (meaning, I watched other people light fireworks haha, too scary!!). We also ate deliciously of course, since it was a BBQ! What’s awesome is one of the friends is an actual chef so he cooked us an amazing dinner + dessert!
I really love parties like these where it’s a pretty small (8-10ish) group of friends just relaxing and doing fun things together, as opposed to, say, the college notion of a party. If this is the social life for young grown-ups, then life is going to be awesome!
PS: Weather report for this week looks AMAZING!!! 80 on Tues, 84 on Wed, 85 on Thur, 86 on Fri!! Come on weather, don’t let us down!!
I’m calling this a ML fail since there’s just no way that could be a human error…!
Also it is a bad sign for a learning algorithm if it cannot get my musical tastes right; I am so predictable. For instance, this decision tree can predict whether I’ll like a singer/band with about 99% accuracy:
