Mike and Carrie

Stardate 60080.3
Congratulations to Mike and Carrie on their engagement. I hope they have as good a marriage as I have had, and hope to continue.

Last week we put the van in the shop to repair the damage from when I hit the deer. I got a rental, a Mitsubishi Infiniti. Nice car, but it felt like you were getting into the cockpit of a fighter plane, as in really small. I did like the way the dashboard lit up with a soft orange.

I had a phone interview Friday. It didn’t go well. The guy asked a few odd questions, such as how would I go about programming a maze, like the ones kids have to find a path through on children’s restaurant menus. I told him I’d Google for a solution. A former manager used to ask candidates how they would know if the sun in a picture of one of the conference rooms was rising or setting. He wanted to find out how they think. He was looking for something along the lines of finding out the name of the picture, which would give you the clue. This interviewer was evidently not looking for that type of answer. He also asked about arrays, linked lists, hash tables, and binary trees. I was not prepared for such a CS-101 interrogation.

I also found out I was probably a number 2 choice for another job. The deciding factor was that I did not have enough knowledge of .NET and C#. So I had the notion to hit the books again and try to get a certification. The problem is I can’t find the C# Web Applications book. It’s huge, over a thousand pages and big as a phone book. What really irritates me is that it came with a CD. The CD had a testing program, source code, and the COMPLETE contents of the book in a PDF file. I didn’t need to be lugging the tome around.

I did load Apache Tomcat on the desktop, and have been playing with Java Server Pages from a book I got at the library. I’ve got Eclipse (a Java IDE) loaded as well, and I think I’ll get JBoss going. Java positions are far more prevalent right now, and J2EE technology does have some interesting things.

MSN has launched Windows Live Spaces. I got a number of Welcome messages. I have, or had, an MSN Spaces account although I never used it. I think sometimes of integrating it to use as my blog, but I’d have to find some way of putting in 200+ past entries, and backdating them. It would give me an automatic RSS feed. It’s something to look at.

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