I turned twenty today. Jeni made me cupcakes 🙂 It was kindof creepy because I had actually thought about making some myself this weekend, and then wiring a bunch of LEDs to candles for festivity since lighting flames in the ECB would probably be frowned upon. Needless to say I didn’t get around to that, but I still got cupcakes out of the deal, which was awesome! CAE’s network alternated today between completely down and “router trouble”, a.k.a. dropping 999 out of every 1000 packets across the wire, and was no better during the Enlight meeting tonight. So, we packed up and went out to eat for my birthday instead. We went to Dotty Dumplings, which was a really good time, culminated by the first (hopefully last?) time I have ever seen a TI-89 employed in figuring out a restaurant bill. lol. Thanks guys, I had a great night.

In other news, I’ll be working for Microsoft this summer, pending a phone call tomorrow morning to my recruiter. I also had really great job offers from Intuit and Heartland Business Systems, but after weighing various factors and waiting a whlie for my subconcious to make the best choice, I’ve decided to head out to Redmond, WA.

In still other news yet, I finished Knife of Dreams, which was excellent. Having completed the book, though, I expect my productivity to rise on the order of 10x.

Finally, an interesting memory came to light this weekend, when one of my birthday cards had been modified from the Hallmark original to read, “Happy ‘Golden’ Birthday.” Now, I seriously don’t think that I have even thought the phrase “golden birthday” since elementary school. I can clearly remember, in fact, walking into the Forest Glen Elementary school cafeteria line one day, oh-so-many years ago, and being jealous of a friend (I don’t remember who) who was having their golden birthday. I distinctly remember thinking to myself how much it sucked that so-and-so got to have their golden birthday now, when I wouldn’t get mine until I was really old.

So I guess that makes me really old. Dad, what does that make you?

I talked to Kevin (who is studying to be a pilot, for those who don’t know him) tonight and I’ve been reassured that airplanes, even those flown for bankrupt airlines, are safe. Just don’t crash in them. Or at least, plan on dying in the event of a crash, to spare yourself the experience of trying to get out of a crash-landed plane. One travel tip: when the stewardess tells you to locate the nearest exit row, keeping in mind that the nearest exit may be behind you, you are wasting the effort unless you also count the number of rows you have to travel to get there. Trust Kevin on that one, or ask him for the reason. It’s… comforting.

I thought I’d share that with you in light of the recent air travel I’ve been doing, as well as Tim’s trip home tomorrow from Hawaii, and because I like planes.

In other news since two weeks ago, I had an interview trip to Microsoft last week. Getting my homework done so I could fly out last Thursday kept me from posting that week, and general laziness (and a bit of embarassment over a computer issue) kept me from blogging this week. More details and some pictures to come on the interview trip and the computer issue in a future post, when I have time (mid-week?). In summary: It was the hardest interview I’ve ever had or even dreamt possible, but it went well, was actually fun in a cognitively-stimulating way, and, most importantly, resulted in a job offer. By Tuesday I’ll have to be able to tell you whether I’m working for Heartland Business Systems, Intuit, or Microsoft this summer, and consequently where I will be located (Little Chute, WI; Mountain View, CA; or Redmond, WA; respectively), because that’s the deadline on Microsoft’s offer. All three positions sound really cool as summer jobs, and all have some definite advantages, so it’s not a decision I want to make. I hate having to make choices when there’s multiple good, mutually-exclusive options.

Hm. Other than that, this week was Spring Break, which gave me time to do some spring cleaning of my computers and one of Jared’s, though unfortunately I didn’t spend nearly as much time on schoolwork as I had planned. I blame that on the unfortunate decision to start reading Knife of Dreams, the 11th book in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. I’ve read about 2/3 of it, and though I’m really enjoying reading it, it is nevertheless consuming my free time. I don’t know how I ever read those books in 4 or 5 days each the first time through (junior year of high school). I also finally bought a copy of The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup, which fortunately I didn’t need for my Microsoft interview. (Though it would have helped had I read it before my Intuit interview… who knew that virtual meant, essentially, “turn on polymorphism”? I sure didn’t.)

I think I need to stop writing now, because I think I’m babbling. Stay tuned for updates on why you should not ask me to clean your computer as well as details on my trip to Seattle.

One day René Descartes walks into a bar.
The bartender says, “Can I get you a drink?”
René replies, “I think not,” and instantly disappears.

Well, it took me a week to get around to it, but here, finally, is a post about my interview trip to Intuit in San Jose, CA. The interviews themselves went pretty well. Out of five timeslots, I had three interviews. One purely technical, writing some code, answering some questions about C++ and Java, designing test cases for a function. Then I had one that was behavioral, but all the questions were really tough; Tell me about a time when you failed to meet the expectations of a project. Tell me about troubles working with a team member. Tell me about a time when you did your best but the result wasn’t good enough. I mean, wow. Tough. The last interview I don’t know what to make of. I basically just explained the Maquina project in detail for 20 minutes, and then asked questions about Intuit. I have no idea what the recruiter was looking for, or what I presented of myself. So we’ll see how the interviews went.

The coolest part though, was just being in Silicon Valley. We stayed at the Cupertino Inn, which was literally three blocks from Apple’s corporate headquarters. Check it out: (The inn is actually the quadrilateral building just southwest of Google’s green marker, the one with the weird angle due to the on-ramp)

Wow. Awesome.

The first major clue of this good fortune was walking over the overpass on the direction of the shuttle driver to find something to eat for lunch. Going around a strange corner in the sidewalk, we encountered this:

Turning to look across the street, we see this:

There it is: Apple’s corporate headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA.

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to visit any closer, needing to get some food, take a shower, iron clothes, and catch the shuttle to Intuit, but it was still awesome to be right across the street from Apple.

Later in the day, some unfortunate miscommunications that caused the hotel to have to call us a taxi to get to Intuit… half an hour late, so we missed the CTO’s presentation. On the upshot though, the taxi drivers had no idea where they were going, so instead of taking us to building 11 on the Intuit campus, they drove us right through the Intuit campus and into Google’s. So in one trip we saw Apple, Intuit and Google. Silicon Valley is awesome!

Of course, the one downside to having a trip to California last Monday is that we arrived in the middle of a storm. Now granted, 60-degree weather is nothing for me to complain about, but its a bit harder enjoy a stay in an open-air hotel when the weather looks like this, and when an outdoor picnic table blew over in front of my eyes during my final interview:

And finally, just because I love flying and the view was awesome, here’s a lame attempt at photographing the Rocky Mountains through double-paned plastic airplane windows on the way from San Jose to Tim’s house. I thought about trying to photograph as much of Denver as possible, as well, just to see if I could get Tim’s actual house by any chance, but they had already said to turn off and stow all electronic carry-on items. Boo.

I think that’s all for the Intuit trip. Since then I’ve had 3 midterms and another job interview, this time at WPS, where I worked last summer. Next Friday is my final job interview, onsite with Microsoft. I hope that goes well, but unfortunately if I get any more job offers (I have only one right now, from Heartland Business Systems), then I’ll actually have to make a choice, and I’m horribly slow at making choices.

That’s it for the time being. Now I have to decide if I’m going to try and get some decent sleep tonight, or stay up anyway… it’s a tough call because I have no homework to feel guilty about not doing, which usually sends me to sleep earlier. At least, I don’t remember any homework that I should be doing, which is pretty much the same thing.

Tolkien is awesome.

For those who didn’t hear, I broke my awesome Bose Triport headphones. They were in my laptop, which i set on the couch. I then stood up, the laptop clattered to the floor, and the headphone plug took the brunt of the fall. So I was left with a scratch in my PowerBook and a cock-eyed headphone plug that was touchy… if I didn’t touch it while playing audio, I got monaureal sound that was severely lacking in mid to high frequencies. That was no good. So that’s the story. Happy to provide you someone to laugh at. Anyway, I emailed Bose support to ask what my options were forgetting them fixed. Despite me saying that I broke them in the email, Bose offered to replace them free of charge (which is Awesome).

They arrived today. There was much rejoicing. Yea.

Anyway, for the visual learners, here’s the story in pictures:

The old headphones, after my best efforts to repair (straighten) the plug with two sets of pliers failed.

The new headphones, like magic.

Size comparison: sleek new Bose Triport vs. my old beloved Aiwa headphones, which, though bulky, survived 4 years of intense use at the mixing board at my high school. I brought them back from home as backup until Bose shipped the new headphones to me. I loved those headphones; I wore out the head strap part to the point that it broke once a week, and I stripped out the screws from taking the headphones apart and fixing them.

And a bonus picture that Scott pointed out to me. See here: Microsoft Software Piracy Protection

In other news, Jeni and I took Flash 2 from the software training for students program at DoIT tonight. Let me just say that Flash is the most convoluted “development environment” (not sure what else to call it) that I have ever worked in. Yes, even more convoluted than PicPro. Imagine PicPro, but for every wire you wanted to draw, you had to make obscure clicks on 3 different panels or modify settings in hidden panes. On the upshot, it has a really good undo feature, with a pretty long history, which beats PicPro by a factor of 1/0. The only downside to the Undo is that it didn’t undo the changes I made to my ActionScript. …wha…? It will undo my every mouse click but not the changes I made that completely hosed my ActionScript? Or maybe I just missed something…. In any case, Flash is messed up, and the antithesis of every accessability, usability, and compatability standard ever created. But it was kind of fun to make one of those “Loading…” screens for a change. I even figured out how to get a caption that tells you what percentage is complete, though I didn’t have time to convert the 15+ digit decimal into a nice round percentage, and it only updated the percent after the completion of each animation loop.

I’m safely back from California, as of 1:30 this afternoon. In short, the interview went pretty well, but I didn’t sleep or eat nearly enough. Now I’m playing catchup, with a midterm today and two on Thursday. I’d love to write more about the whole experience, but it’s taken me almost 15 minutes to write this; I’m completely exhausted.

Tidbit for the moment, though, is that we got to experience some… “interesting” yaw effects on our descent into San Jose. I’m not going to claim to be some super-experienced flier or anything, but that was without doubt the roughest landing I’ve ever had. I’m fine with turbulence that bounces the plane up and down (pitch, Kevin says), and the kind that tips the wings side to side (roll). The kind I was not much familiar with and am not a huge fan of, is turbulence that screws with yaw, which involves the nose of the plane being pushed left or right so that it no longer points in the direction the plane is travelling. Kind of like fishtailing a car, but in an airplane, way up above the ground. Reference this video of an extreme example by Boeing and Airbus test pilots that Kevin found for me. So that was a little nervous. Other than that though, all the flights went well, and I enjoyed them very much, despite having to study on a couple of them.

Have a good Monday and Tuesday, everyone. I’m up at this delightful hour, just about to leave for the airport for an interview in San Jose, CA. The good news: I get to fly, and I love airports and planes. The bad news: 100% chance of rain in San Jose today, and a high of only 61.

English.

I got this in my email twoday:

We in University Housing continue to strife to provide a safe and inclusive community that supports your academic goals and personal achievements.

It annoys me grately that people right like this. I mean, that’s reely not even close. What’s more, that came from the Director of University Housing. I don’t think thiers a hole lot more to be said about that.

So it wasn’t actually a robin; it turned out to be a finch when I finally located it at the top of the tree by the construction “staging” area across from ERB, but it was still pretty cool to hear as I walked to my interview yesterday. It was at least 30 degrees, and it felt wonderful. Add that to the finch chirping to itself and it’s starting to feel like spring again!

This weekend I’m headed home to Green Bay, with a stop for a job interview in Little Chute on the way home. Hopefully I’ll finally be able to give my sister her Christmas present: we’re going to try and see Rent at the Fox Cities PAC, if it isn’t sold out. I’ll also get to see our newly-finished basement, and my dad’s new TV, which he bought while I was travelling back to Madison last time. So I’m pretty excited about that.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1