Editorial Control
Sketchy at best.
Democrats furious over GOP efforts to rewrite amendments.
My buddy Jason The Law Student checked the text of the bills in Lexis and, sure enough, the “rewritten” accounts are the ones in the official record.
Sigh.
New Scenery
I’m settling into my first week at the new job. As with any big change, this week has been taking care of the basics – getting my desktop system set up, meeting people, figuring out which systems are out there and getting accounts, etc. But things have been very positive so far. It’ll probably take me another week or two to just inventory things, then it’ll be time to start implementing my ideas. The good thing is that the company appears pretty willing to give me free reign over the systems and architecture. I’ll be working closely with the developers, but I think I’ll be able to help out pretty quickly.
I’m digging being on NC State’s Centennial Campus – our office is on the second floor, so I get to see sunshine and green things, instead of the basement office I was in before. I got some fresh air and exercise today by walking to the NC State main campus. And the commute’s about the same as heading downtown.
One big change with this job move was that I had to turn in the company cell phone I had at the old job for several years. I took this opportunity to get a new cell phone on Holly’s Verizon plan – a Motorola v710. Pretty slick – color screen, cameraphone, and it’s allegedly supported by iSync (we’ll see about that when the USB-to-Motorola cable I ordered comes in). Holly got a new phone, too, and we’ve been like kids in a candy store downloading ringtones and stuff. We’re living proof that you can’t give country folks new toys.
Opposable Thumbs
I was on the commode today, passing the time by playing solitaire on my iPod, when apparently I was hit by an attack of the “idiots” and instead of putting the iPod back in my pocket, dropped it straight into the water.
I’m an idiot. Holly cheerfully noted that I have the physical dexterity “of a sheep.”
Potential plusses: The iPod was in a case, and it’s still playing, though the LCD is going into fits. After it dries out, I may end up alright. Or, I may end up with a $300 urinal cake.
Sigh.
Gaijin Smash
My new favorite website of the moment is I am a Japanese school teacher, a pseudo-blog by an American guy living in Japan as an English teacher for middle schoolers.
It’s a very entertaining read (Holly can confirm the looks she was giving me as I’m snickering into my dinner one night reading it) as he reveals fascets of Japanese life that we’ve never heard of, such as the concept of “Kancho.”
Highly recommended.
Kiss My Ring
Is it just coincidence that, as white smoke is pouring from the chimney at the Sistine Chapel, I get this email?
Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2005 13:03:28 -0400 From: Gregorio Dodd <Seymour.Strickland@moose-mail.com> To: minter # lunenburg.org Subject: You’ve been selected Parts/Attachments: 1 Shown 39 lines Text 2 OK 22 KB Message, “original message before SpamAssassin” 2.1.1 Shown 2 lines Text 2.1.2 OK 287 lines Text 2.2 9.3 KB Image ———————————————————— Spam detection software, running on the system “bunning.skiltech.com”, has identified this incoming email as possible spam. The original message has been attached to this so you can view it (if it isn’t spam) or label similar future email. If you have any questions, see the administrator of that system for details. Content preview: lessee astrology doubleday evangelic. kelvin nero. arcade animism . . . lessee astrology doubleday evangelic. kelvin nero. arcade . To prevent future mailings [...]
My folks didn’t want me to move to California – wonder how they feel about Italy? Pope Lunenburg I has a nice ring to it. And if you can’t trust Cardinal Gregorio Dodd (aka “Seymour.Strickland”), who can you trust?
AC4 2005
The Atlantic Coast Comedy Conference Championship (AC4) improv tournament ran this weekend. Apart from me feeling less-than-prepared, most of which was an offshoot of the hectic nature of the past few months and my recent activites related to the job switch, I think the event ran smoothly and our guests had a good time. The biggest hangup at the end was uncertainty about which cities were going to show up – DC was supposed to be there until they stopped responding to emails a couple of weeks before showtime, so I had to scramble to switch the lineups around at the last minue. This was my second AC4 after taking over from Ross last year. I had big plans for new things to do this year, but was never really able to follow through. As a result, this year’s tournament was a lot like last year’s.
We ended up with three folks from Richmond (one scheduled person didn’t make the trip because her husband threw out his back – ouch), four from Chicago (two former Raleigh players now studying at ImprovOlympic, and a couple of their fellow students), and the big surprise of the weekend, Buffalo saying they were going to bring three but instead showing up with five. That was a welcome surprise.
Once the weekend got going, things ran without much of a hitch. Shows ran pretty much on schedule, people were there to help out and to watch and cheer the shows, food arrived when it was supposed to, and the shows were all very good. Audience size was alright – not wonderful, but not bad.
As far as the social interactions go, I think the Raleigh folks did a great job in making the guests feel comfortable, and that people managed to hang out with folks outside of their city’s group.
There were a few concerns among some Raleigh players about some lineup decisions I made, but we were able to discuss them and come to an understanding before the situation developed into problems.
On the whole, while this year’s tournament wasn’t as well-planned as I would have liked it to have been, I don’t think it affected the quality of the weekend – good help from folks like Larry, MattC, Jack, RiG, and JMatt were key in that regard. I’m looking forward to next year!
Reboot
Even a person who fears change has to face it sometime. This evening, I gave my notice of resignation to my employer of the past three and a half years, HCS Systems. As of late April or early May, I will be taking a new position as the Director of Information Technology for WebAssign.
I’m looking forward to the opportunity. My main responsibility will be management of the systems and infrastructure, with secondary responsibilities of doing some Perl coding for the application and helping out with the business end. It should be a good career move, as I’ve been looking to broaden my skillset away from exclusively hands-on sysadminning, and this should allow me to play with some application coding as well as some management stuff.
I have nothing but good things to say about HCS – Ray Honeycutt is an outstanding guy to work for, and HCS has top-notch talent across the board. I’m sad to leave, but I’d stagnated on my current project and there was no good opening for me to move into to get a change. WebAssign came across at the right time for me.
Other good things will be working at NC State’s Centennial Campus, which is a nice area and a good commute from my house, and the associated perks with being on that campus.
This should be a good move for me, and I’m very excited about it. So, yay me.
The Hours
Daylight Savings Time is here again. Aside from the normal couple of days of internal-clock confusion that I always get and the added bonus of Hayley sleeping until 9am, the world has not come to an end.
I’m amazed every year at how bent out of shape a lot of people, including a large percentage of my fellow geeks, get at Daylight Savings Time. They rail against it with the passion of the guy with a tin-foil hat railing against the government signals being beamed into his brain. I honestly don’t get it. I’ve tried to understand their angst. I have. But it’s as if a bunch of extremely smart, rational people have all of a sudden turned into cavemen, pointing at the sun and grunting.
Now, personally, I think DST is the bee’s knees. As the days get longer, I could care less that the sun is rising at 4am, as I’m still well into my sleep at that point in the day. But having daylight until 9pm is a big benefit for someone who works all day and would like to be able to play outdoors with his daughter when he comes home. So hell yeah, shift that daylight to the evening where it’s useful.
Unless you go to your clocks every day and reset them so that noon occurs when the Sun is at its zenith, you’re already participating in the fact that our time markings are arbitrary. There’s nothing magical or sacred about where we decided to set our clocks for “standard time,” and DST is just an extension of that concept. I find it hard to believe that people who can code up massive distributed software applications are suddenly struck blind with confusion when they have to swap some clocks twice a year. I don’t think they can all be paranoid nutjobs who see DST as an effort by the illuminati to keep us under the yoke of government oppression. And I don’t think any of them live in Indiana which, let’s face it, is already too far gone to help.
So I’m stumped as to what the big deal is. Oh well. While the next week or so will be filled with rants about how foolish DST is and how the world would be much better off if we just stuck with Standard Time all year because, by God, that’s the way Nature intended, you can find me outside after work, cooking on the grill and taking Hayley to the playground.
After all, that’s why we save the daylight in the first place.
So Close, Yet So Far
I guess I can talk about my adventure of the past couple of weeks now. A few weeks ago, I got cold-called by Google. They had some openings in their Site Reliability Engineering department, found an old application of mine, and were interested in my “mad skillz.” I went through their initial phone screen, and they liked it, so they set up a phone interview.
That went pretty well – I felt good after it was done, only having a little trouble on one of the 4-5 questions (sorting algorithms). A second phone interview followed a little over a week later. Didn’t feel too good about that one – they were probing into areas that are not my specalties, so a lot of my answers were vague. I tried to reason through it, but a common phrase I heard was “That’s interesting. It’s wrong, but it’s interesting.” So I was pretty sure that was the end of things.
However, a few days later, I got an email from Google saying that they wanted to fly me out to Mountain View, CA, for an onsite interview. Score! Obviously Google is a very desirable place to work, and I was almost to a point where I could consider it. Imagine – me, a kid from Kenbridge, VA, living in the Bay Area working for Google. Insane.
They flew me out from Raleigh, rented me a car, and put me up in a very nice hotel for two nights. I got to the Googleplex in plenty of time Wednesday morning for my interviews. The interviews themselves were rough, man. Extremely comprehensive. And tiring. One guy would drill me for 45 minutes, then switch out with another guy for 45 minutes. Repeat from 10am-4pm with a break for lunch. I was exhausted by the end. Seriously. That was a grilling and a half.
I wish I could say that the interviews went well, but that would be a lie. Even moreso than the phone interview, they dug into my weak areas (particularly low-level networking) and pretty much picked them apart. I had about two of seven people that I felt I did a decent job with, the rest of them were of sub-par to bad results. Even in areas that I’m generally strong in such as Perl and Regexps, I felt like I struggled and just couldn’t get things together. Partly from not knowing what they were asking, and partly from being worn out and not thinking well on the stuff I did know, I came out of it thinking that I had done about as well as on the second phone interview. And I made it past that one, so who knows, right?
Well, I knew soon enough. The next day, during my layover back to Raleigh in Chicago, I turned on my phone to find a voicemail. It was Google, saying “Thanks for your time, but we aren’t going to make you an offer. We don’t think you’re strong enough technically for the position.” Ouch. That one hurt. I have a fair degree of confidence in my abilities, but the interviews and subsequent rejection kind of beat that confidence down. It wasn’t so much a “We had a lot of qualified people, but we couldn’t take everyone,” instead it was more of a “You didn’t measure up to our minimum standards of quality.” That was a tough one to digest. I’m still working on it.
Aside from not getting the job, though, I was very impressed with Google’s operations. They obviously treated me quite well during my trip out there, with the plane ticket, car, and nice hotel. Everyone I met during the process was very pleasant and extremely smart. The taste of the culture I got out there was infectious – they appear to have grown large without becoming bueraucratic and cynical, unlike say Red Hat. There are also some other positive things I can take from the experience. I’ve quite apparently identified some weak points in my skillset, so I can take steps to shore up my knowledge there. I probably made it further than a lot of people who apply for jobs there. And while I may not be able to hang with the big dogs, I made it to the final stages of the process, which is much better than I originially thought I would do.
So I’m disappointed, but things move on. I won’t have to worry about the Bay Area housing market at least. Hopefully I can take the good from the trip and enjoy it, and take the bad and learn for it. And possibly be better prepared if there’s a “next time.” So thanks, Google, I appreciate getting to be a part of the process. It was fun.
Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers
Our nearly four-year run of good luck has ended, as the farmer who owns the pasture land behind our subdivision has sold out, and a new subdivision of $250k+ houses will be going in shortly. It’s a shame – we loved seeing the cows out the back window, but they haven’t found a patch of grass around here they don’t want to put houses on. Now our view is of newly-planted trees. The new subdivision people went along their border of our subdivision and planted trees about five feet apart. The idea being, I assume, that the big-money folks won’t want their gaze sullied by our mere $130,000 houses. I may have to put my truck on cinderblocks out back just out of spite.
The big problem is going to be traffic – we live on a dead-end road and, unless this new subdivision extends a road a ways away from their property to connect to a different road, all the traffic from this new place will funnel out into the crappy intersection onto US 401. It does look like they’re going to build a connector road from our subdivision into the new one, though, which should at least help out with trick or treaters.
Farewell, country living, we hardly knew ye.