My parents’ Siamese, back when he was young and didn’t weigh 15 pounds.

Got a call from a recruiter yesterday, apparently WeDoBanking wants to do an in person interview with me on Thursday. This is a good thing. I guess I’ll see how that goes.

Trivia last night. We didn’t win, we came in second. There’s a tentative plan for most of us to get together at Zach’s for lunch on Saturday, then play Rock Band. This could be interesting, it’s like Guitar Hero with multiple players.

This part of the site is now running WordPress 2.5.1, which is apparently better than the previous 2.3.n versions. 2.5.0 has a serious security flaw, which is a major reason why you never install the .0 release of anything.

An old, old scribble. I must’ve scanned this almost ten years ago.

This year, I’ve been trying to get at least one book of a type that I don’t usually read from the library every time I go. So yesterday, I got Serving the Word by Vincent Crapanzano, a study of literalism in fundamentalist thought and legal thought. It’s relatively intellectual—usually a good thing. I think it’s one of the few books I’ve ever read where the author uses the word “adumbrate” (which is apparently a synonym for “summarize”.) Ah well, never use a long word when a diminutive one will do. The introduction was full of academic jargon, and I barely got through it. The first chapter was a heck of a lot more accessible and interesting.

A brief quote from the introduction on page 22:

[Americans] have no political idiom: we talk a lot about politics, but talk of politics is not the same as articulating our experience of the world and our position in it in political terms.

Could someone who is more familiar with soft science jargon explain what the heck that means? Also, there seem to be a vocal minority of people on the Net who cast everything in political terms. For these people, every minor policy decision or political utterance is greeted with “OMG teh LIBERALS are wasting our tax dollars building landing strips for gay Martians!” or “OMG teh CONSERVATIVES are killing fluffy bunnies and spotted owls!”. Maybe Vincent C. meant something different.

Another interesting quote from chapter 1, page 41:

Billy Sunday’s theology was slim: his basic message, according to William Martin, was that being a good Christian was “adhering to dominant political and economic orthodoxies and upholding the moral standards of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle class.”

This was in the 1920s. Wow, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

While I was getting groceries yesterday, I saw an old minivan with an enthusiastic and non-conventional paint job. The base color seemed to be green. There were amateur paintings of a mermaid, a T-Rex, a duck riding on top of a T-Rex, a lamp, seemingly random words including “vacuum” and “crow”, and strange mishmashes of stuff. It looked a bit like the picture above in terms of general style, although all the colors were much brighter on the minivan. The technical quality of the art wasn’t great. I could paint better pictures than some of the things on that van, and I’m not a very good painter. But the van was several hundred times more awesome than the BMW 5-series parked next to it.

I’m sure that the van’s owner’s neighbors complain that the van lowers their property values. However, I’d love to do something like this at some point. Most cars are really, really boring. A custom paint job may make a car unsellable, but it also increases the excellence of everywhere the car goes.

Last night, I had a fair amount of a leftover chicken and rice dish which I’d made days earlier available in a plastic container in the fridge. I also had in my cabinets and freezer ingredients sufficient to make tuna noodle casserole, pork chops with applesauce and mashed potatoes, or New Orleans-style dirty rice. There were also several microwave dinners in the freezer. With all that, why did I decide to make a pot of cheap ramen, with additional vegetables and meat added? I don’t know for sure, but that’s what I wanted. When I was in college, I ate ramen at least once a week, and even when I got a real job with a real paycheck, I ate it relatively often.

I guess this is a half-assed version of the Stockholm Syndrome, or something. The trouble with ramen is that it’s full of saturated fat, and is somewhat difficult to scale up if you have more than a couple of people to feed.

There aren’t enough people practicing the ancient art of chainsaw balancing today.

Fuzzball attempted to wake me up at 5 am again. Like lots of cats, she gets up with the sun and doesn’t pay any attention to alarm clocks.

I don’t have any caffeine in the house at all right now. This may have been a bad idea, but I’ll try going without it for a day or two and see how it works. If it doesn’t work, then the store-brand caffeinated diet pop at Kroger is about $5 for a 24-pack.

An old sketchbook entry that was never quite finished.

A recruiter from WeMakeChips e-mailed me yesterday. He had a contract position available doing some stuff that I’m totally qualified to do. I replied and said I was interested–what else could I do? I have no actual job offers yet, so almost everything I see is worth pursuing.  Nothing else to report.

Yesterday, I did a very stupid thing, leaving the house without my spare car keys. So when I got to Steve’s house, the first thing I did was to lock my keys in my car. So my car was inaccessible and since my house key was on the same keyring as my car key, so was my house. Was it a problem? Yes. Was it insoluble? Oh heck no. After we ate a tasty fajita dinner with Steve’s family, we got in Steve’s car and drove to my place. It was locked. That actually wasn’t a huge problem, because [[ details elided. ]] It only took a few minutes for me to retrieve the spare house key, get in, and get my spare car key.

And then everything was cool, and we went back to Steve’s house. We’d just wasted 40 minutes driving back and forth. Then we discussed GTK+, Gdk, all the interesting things you can do with gdb, and other assorted programming and open-source topics.

Also saw a bumper sticker last night that said, “There is no such thing as Mad Tofu Disease”. Fair enough, but let me know when there is such a thing as tofu that tastes like bacon.

Where would the world of computing be without Adventure and Zork? Text adventure games stopped being commercially viable as soon as graphics got partially decent in the late 1980s. I think part of the problem was also that the puzzles in games like “Sorcerer” were really difficult, and most people are too lazy and too strapped for time to deal with difficult games.

Trivia: We won (again!) which was nice. The prize for “funniest team name” went to some people who had “UFOs seen over Phoenix, Sheriff Joe proposes Sky Fence.” There were apparently some strange lights in the sky over Phoenix last night. I didn’t see them; long years of living in central Michigan has conditioned me to not bother to look at the sky at night. 75% of the time, it’ll be too cloudy there to see anything. The UFOs are probably experimental aircraft from test facilities in Nevada. Or they could be saucers full of lizard people who want to eat all of Earth’s hamsters and enslave humanity.

Not a whole lot else to report.

Kitteh from the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats dispenses 2500-year-old advice.

Interview yesterday wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I turned down the wrong street and spend 15 minutes wondering where the heck 77th street was. Fortunately, I’d allowed some extra time in case of traffic or getting lost. The company president, a senior programmer, and a regular programmer did the interview. I was the most formally dressed person in the room (always a strange thing). They asked me about a whole bunch of stuff related to programming and system administration. They also said, “So you’ve done Java and PHP and Ruby coding at home, but you haven’t listed those things on your resume. You should do that! Put them in a ‘Hobbies’ section or something.” “Yeah, I know those things to some extent, but I’m not an expert in them. And I was trying to keep my resume short,” I replied. I also haven’t managed a huge mission-critical multinational giant machine cluster with thousands of users. But they liked it that the last time the power went out for longer than the UPS lasted, all I had to do was turn each machine back on, and everything Just Worked.

I’m the first person they interviewed for this. This could be a good thing or a bad thing. They also wanted a code sample, which I gave them. They might not like it. On the other hand, I gave a similar sample to Suzanne’s boss years ago when I was considering a job at the bank where she worked. Her boss thought it was pretty good. They won’t know anything until next week. Here’s hoping.

Trivia tonight. I think I’ll eat dinner at home and just get a pint at the pub. Gotta save money after all.

This cartoon was relevant in 2000. Now, they’re rolling out fiber to the curb in some places. Like the steady state of disks is “full”, the steady state of bandwidth is “not enough”.

Interview this morning. I have not one, but 3 code samples ready for them: One complete GTK+ C program, one almost-complete Swing Java program, and one pretty half-assed GTK+ C graphics demo. The Java program implements 5-card-draw poker, but anteing, betting, calling, and raising were things that I knew I couldn’t get done in 24 hours. I verified that it works on multiple JREs, which is something that a lot of real-world Java programs are never checked on. Ah well. I’m semi-nervous. We’ll see what happens.

GTK+ apparently has some odd things going on in its memory allocation and deallocation routines. These things confuse ElectricFence and mcheck terribly, and to a lesser extent, they confuse valgrind. The thing that worked reasonably well is to export G_DEBUG=gc-friendly ; export G_SLICE=always-malloc, then to run valgrind. The program ran at a crawl, but running it for a while showed that there was only 1 memory leak that my code was responsible for. And I’m inclined to think it’s a false positive since I unset() everything right after the Glib routines return the data I want in that small section of code.