I quit my job on Monday. My last day is August 3. I start at Symantec on August 13.
I’m looking for apartments in and around Roseville so my commute will be kept short, perhaps even bikable. Any suggestions? What else should I know before moving to the North Star State?
Fun Fact: The woman who sits in the cube next to mine is leaving Red Prairie the same day I am.
I wrote last time about my interview at Red Prairie. I got the job. For six months, I’ll have an hourly wage as a contract employee with Tek Systems, a placement agency that got me the job, and Red Prairie is the client. After that period, Red Prairie may offer my a full-time position.
I’ll be writing software in the transportation-management project. My job starts Monday.
I had a job interview at Red Prairie today. I think it went pretty well. During the interview, I talked about data structures, and one of the people asked me to describe the algorithm for finding the successor of a node in an ordered binary tree. After that, he had me write out the code. Here’s what I wrote:
I was relieved to be talking about binary trees. I’m pretty comfortable with them. In my interview with Google last week, the interviewer had me describing a data structure for caching Web sites. When we were finished, we’d designed something that pretty much runs in constant time for lookups and insertions. That just seems too good. I’m sure I missed something. Oh well. I don’t have high hopes to work for Google, but Red Prairie’s looking pretty promising.
Fun Fact: All beverages hydrate, according to the bottom of a Cherry Coke 12-pack in my basement.
The semester is just about over, and I read a lot of papers in connection with my intelligent-user-interfaces class. Among the many papers, though, was not a certain one by Doug Zongker of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. It was published last fall in the Annals of Improbable Research. He presented the paper recently. Take a look:
Fun Fact: I have a job interview in a half hour with the senior vice president of Corporate Technology Solutions. Despite the company being just a mile away from me, it is a phone interview.
In my user-interface class yesterday, we were discussing input devices. This morning, one of my classmates sent a link to a video from last year’s TED conference. It features a pressure-sensitive device that accepts input from multiple fingers at once, allowing for some really cool ways of interacting with the computer.
Sarah took me to La Merenda for lunch yesterday. She works there, but she was unfamiliar with the lunch menu, which shortens the “cold” and “hot” sections of the menu to make room for some sandwiches. To start, we had the tostones, or fried plantains. I tried the club sandwich, which is made with aioli sauce, and she had the grilled cheese sandwich, which includes avocado and caramelized onions. She raved about it, and although the bite I had was very good, I managed to avoid most of the avocado and onion.
Next, we had spinach and cheese toasted ravioli, which was really good. I didn’t expect to like it since I’m not a fan of spinach, but it was my favorite dish of the afternoon. We also had empanadas de pollo, which is chicken and mashed potatoes stuffed in pastry. Also very good.
For dessert, we had a piece of very thick chocolate cake and a piece of pineapple tres leches cake. The sensation of pineapple and mint leaves was very interesting.
Even without her discount, the price wasn’t too bad, and all the food was delicious. I’m looking forward to going there again someday.
I feel like I’m living in the Bizarro World. Stupid things are happening, and it’s not just isolated stupid things, but things done stupidly as a matter of policy. Exhibit A comes to me from Editor & Publisher via Heads Up, a story in which the U.S. military deleted photos taken by Associated Press photographers in connection with a suicide bombing in Afghanistan. Here’s the quote from Col. Victor Petrenko that’s making all the rounds:
When untrained people take photographs or video, there is a very real risk that the images or videography will capture visual details that are not as they originally were. … If such visual media are subsequently used as part of the public record to document an event like this, then public conclusions about such a serious event can be falsely made.
Remember, these are professional news photographers. Petrenko also said this:
Investigative integrity is one circumstance when civil and military authorities will reluctantly exercise the right to control what a journalist is permitted to document.
First, investigative integrity is not a circumstance. It’s a quality present or not present during a given investigation. Second, what a civilian journalist does or doesn’t document should have no effect on the integrity of a military investigation. Taking a photograph from outside a secured area is a passive activity and cannot disturb the conclusions of the investigation. It’s only a non-passive activity if cameras are really the soul-stealing tools of the white man. If our military investigators believe that, then there are bigger threats to investigative integrity than journalists.
Exhibit B comes from the Legal Times via Language Log. A U.S. attorney from Arizona was fired because of problems in “the policy category”; he was “taping confessions in contravention of department policy.” In other words, it is against federal policy to tape interrogations and confessions of criminal suspects. What the hell?
Fun Fact: Printers are down all over campus today. Word is, the cause is related to daylight-saving time.
In my network class this week, I overheard some of my former-students-turned-classmates talking about the Web comic Xkcd. I checked it out. There are a few I don’t get. For instance, I’ll bet the 12th comic is a lot funnier to the people who know what a poisson distribution is. Overall, I like it.
I’m afraid that one particular comic may come to mind sometimes while visiting a certain subset of my friends.
Fun Fact: I have an exam due in approximately 12 hours.
I signed up for my cap and gown today. I thought it was a little weird that to fill out the form for my UW–Milwaukee graduation, I wore a University of Wollongong shirt, used an Alverno College pen, and put it on my credit card that has a picture of UW–Madison’s Bucky Badger on it.
They said that ordering the cap and gown was supposed to make graduation seem “more real,” but not really. The thing that will make graduation real for me is knowing that I’ve completed all my degree requirements. There’s nothing in my degree requirements about dressing up in a big black robe and a funny hat. (Man, I wish there were — I could totally ace that class.)
Fun Fact: The hood color for engineering and computer science master’s students at UW–Milwaukee is orange.
The Onion hits a little close to home this week. From the article:
“[New Editor-In-Chief] Casey [Aclin] has been a real disappointment,” Bartell said. “In a story last Monday, instead of saying ‘Dean of Students Charles Baker,’ it just said ‘Dean Baker.’ That’s a blatant disregard of Free Press style rules that never would have flown on my watch.”
Later on:
“At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire student body began ignoring the news content all together, and only picked up the Free Press to do the crossword puzzle,” Bartell said.
Have I ever mentioned how disappointed I am that of the two campus papers at UWM that print with any sort of regularity, only one has any puzzles or games? Suck it, Leader!
Fun Fact: As an alumnus of the Computer Science Department at UW–Madison, I get free e-mail and free Web hosting at cs.wisc.edu. I also get a 250 MB file quota, which is more space than I get from all four of the accounts I have at UWM combined.
I went down to the basement and got myself a Pepsi earlier tonight. Halfway through the can, I noticed that it’s actually lime-flavored Pepsi. Sure fooled me. It tastes the same as normal Pepsi.
On the other hand, I’m now sitting here drinking a glass of apple cherry juice. Very tasty!
Fun Fact: Online passwords for Nicholas Funds must be a “minimum of 7 and a maximum of 8 digits, all numeric.” Despite strong temptations, mine is not my phone number.
I was on my way home tonight when I almost got hit by a car. I had just gotten off the 15 bus at the corner of Humboldt and Brady. The light turned green and I began walking west across Humboldt when an east-bound car turned left onto Humboldt, straight into my path.
The driver wasn’t paying any attention to me. He was more concerned about the bus I had just exited because he knew the bus had the right of way; it was continuing straight west on Brady. I scurried forward, just past where the car was going to go, and then started yelling at the driver. He paused, made some sort of face and hand gesture as though he was sorry, and we continued on our ways.
He didn’t make it very far before he had to stop again. At that moment, the 10 bus was coming south down Humboldt. There were cars parked on either side of the street, and with the bus coming through, there wasn’t room for the asshole to fit his car.
