We Are Not the Phone Number You Are Looking For

When Forrest and I signed up for our DSL service, we had to get a landline too. This is fine, since it means we have a cool rotary phone and a "throw away" number we don't mind putting down on forms. And we do occasionally get telemarketers. But what's unusual is the number of plain ol' wrong numbers we get.

Please, Peoples of Telephonic World, double-check your number! We are not the phone number you are looking for. For example:

• We are not Jason.
• We are not Carrie of United Airlines.
• We are not Farm Supply.

If we got a larger percentage of Farm Supply wrong numbers (we're only one digit off), we would consider answering the landline phone as "Hello, Not Farm Supply." But we also have to contend with being Not Jason and Not Carrie/Not United Airlines. Ah, the dilemmas in life.

Racism

My family is pretty political, so any family gatherings often end up talking about politics and values related to it.

I walked into the living room to hear my youngest sister declaring that there's nothing wrong with racism, that it's human nature. After being taken aback by this, I thought that it must just be a semantic thing. So I said racism isn't just distinguishing race, but having overgeneralized opinions about a large group of people (based on race, in the case of racism) where no amount of contrary data will change your mind.

I was absolutely shocked that she went right ahead with her position: "I'm proud to be racist. I don't like Mexicans." Even now, I still don't quite know how to phrase my reaction. What?? How??

I tried to point out that, sure, she didn't like the particular individual Mexicans she had met, but she'd only met a certain subset that probably wasn't representative of all subsets of Mexicans everywhere. She didn't care about such arguments. She doesn't like Mexicans.

How can an intelligent, educated person think that way? How can believing such a generalization seem acceptable? How can it not be clear that this is classic us-vs-them psychology — which, while human nature, we are capable of overcoming.

I know my family reads my blog, but I'm just so flabbergasted by my sister's opinion that I have to write about it. I wish my sister good, varied life experiences in the future, so that her opinion might grow.

Categories: politics, family

Fall 2006 Denny's Run

Jerry Caught Red-Handed

Disclaimer: The bulk of the text in this blog post is shamelessly stolen from my descriptions of each photo I've posted to Flickr. Edited here for better seamlessness. You only need to read this post, or the descriptions of each Flickr photo, but not both.

Among my group of friends, there is a tradition of going to Denny's the weekend before finals week. It must be post-midnight. We normally go to the "good" Denny's by the Madonna Plaza, but that block just happened to lose power last night. The "bad" Denny's, further down the road, recently closed (due to being the "bad" Denny's, I'm sure), so that wasn't an option, either. The next closest Denny's was in Pismo, so to Pismo we went.

Near the end of dinner, people with desserts started giving them "up for grabs" — and of course there were no shortage of takers. Mostly things went calmly, until Joe offered up his strawberry cheesecake.

There was much flailing of arms, which ended up with Forrest and someone else (Asian Ben?) playing tug-o-war on either side of Joe's plate, hovering it above the table. Jerry wanted some too, and the most obvious solution was to simply grab the remaining piece of cheesecake directly off the plate with his fingers. (See photo.)

Strawberry Blood

Joe's knife had been innocently sitting on the cheesecake plate before The Cheesecake Conflict erupted. We discovered after the indignation to Jerry's solution died down that the knife had flown into Ilona's dessert, the cowpie. (See last photo.)

After the first knife photo-op documenting its travels across the table, we — being the mature college students that we are — wanted Joe to pose with the butter knife slitting his wrists. We plopped a bit of strawberry jam on his wrist for effect.

It was shaping up to be a good snapshot, until we added some liquidy strawberry sauce to Joe's arm. He jumped, not expecting the cold sugary liquid to suddenly be running down his arm. (See second photo for what I actually got to take a picture of.)

Cowpie Dessert and Lots of Ketchup

Ilona ordered the chocolate brownie dessert, which looked yummy although she says it wasn't actually. (Thus its only partially-eaten state.) Asian Ben began referring to it as "the cowpie," and the name stuck (as previously mentioned).

Also starring in this photo are the four ketchup bottles given to us by our awesome waiter, Jarrett. We were a party of 13? 14? so they initially brought us three ketchup bottles. But then we discovered that not only were they sticky on the outside, they were all mostly empty on the inside.

There are also photos on my Flickr account of all of us sitting around the table. However, they are marked as "friends & family only" photos because they have people's faces in them. (Jerry has said he doesn't care if his likeness is put online, so those photos are still public.) If the rest of you would like to be able to see those photos, get in touch with me so I can make you a "friend" contact on Flickr.

Edamame Grossness

Unassuming pot, right? So you might think!

While I was gone for a week of interviews, Forrest did no dishes. This means that when he made himself some steamed edamame, he let the leftovers hang out in the pot.

When I got home, he looked sheepish about the kitchen overflowing with dirty dishes and promised to do them soon. But while he was out doing errands today, I decided I wanted them done more than I wanted him to do them, so I just washed the sinkful of 'em. No big deal.

That is, no big deal until I lifted the bowl inside the pot to wash it. There I was greeted with — horror of horrors, grossness of grossnesses — fuzzy edamame. I left Forrest a note for when he comes home. ;)

Categories: humor, apartment

Interview Trip Update

Current status: two companies's "hire/no hire" decisions pending, one interview left to do, and one offer! As if I didn't already like BillMonk this much. :) Just a verbal offer right now and details may vary depending on how soon I can start, but the offer letter's forthcoming. Wootles!

(And here's me being embarrassed if the BillMonks actually know about my blog here and see me [virtually, anyway] hopping up and down. ;))

Categories: career

Ahhh! (Read: Busy)

This Week's Schedule

This would be why my life feels so crazy-stressful-hectic right now. I've got class (blue), homework (red), work (orange), and appointments/interviews (green) all vying for my time.

Thursday and Friday are deceptively empty -- I'm in San Francisco then for some job interviews. I don't know how much homework I'll be able to get done, but that's what I'll be spending a good chunk of my free time doing those days.

Note that I don't actually stop my day at midnight. I'm up until 2 or 3 (or sometimes 4) in the morning, usually homeworking. Then it's up at 9:30 and do it all over again!

Intuit Interview Questions

I thought to myself, "Self, it would be cool to document what interview questions you've been asked. For posterity or future interview-prepping or something." So, here's what I remember of my interview at Intuit.

(Interestingly, Forrest and I had the exact same three people interview us. Most likely because we were both interviewing for the Software Engineer position. And when we compared notes, it turns out that the people asked us variant questions, or, in the technical skills, different subsets. Forrest's resume mentioned his database experience, so he got some of those tech questions; I haven't done much DB work and didn't claim to, so she didn't even bring up the subject with me.)

Leadership & Team Skills

The first person I talked to, Paul of Payroll, was the "touchy-feely" guy (his words). He didn't ask me technical questions, but instead wanted to see what kind of leadership and team skills I had. His questions were more invitations to stories that demonstrated my abilities.

1. Tell me about a time that you took initiative on a team project.
2. Tell me about a time when you had some conflict with a team member. How did you resolve it?
3. How do you deal with things like relocating to a new area? How do you deal with being new to a team?

Design Skills

The next person I talked to, Arun the Architect, wanted me to discuss the design decisions and structure of some complex project I'd done at school or during an internship. Alas, the last truly complex project I worked on was two years ago, so I really don't remember the interfaces and inheritance hierarchies used.

I did remember a simpler project, so I went with that since I figured it would be better to talk about a simple project concretely than to talk about a complex project vaguely. It's no fun trying to describe a system while you're actively dredging up details at the same time. The describing goes faster than the remembering, and you end up stuck saying, "And I don't remember what happens next in the story of this design."

He asked me for a different example, and I asked him to clarify that the problem with my first example was its simplicity. I don't quite remember the next question or two, but then we changed subjects and discussed what subfield I was looking to get into. I told him I didn't want to be pigeonholed into one specialty yet, because I felt there were still areas I wanted to explore before settling on one. He seemed content with that answer.

1. Tell me about a system you designed.
2. In what area of software engineering to you see yourself in five years?

Object-Oriented Programming Skills

The last person I talked to, Bindu the Senior Software Engineer, focused on explicitly technical questions. However, I thought her questions were pretty straight-forward -- this considering the fact that I haven't actually used C++ in about two years.

The only one I didn't know was the applet question, but then I was very upfront with her and explained that I hadn't worked with applets before. The answer she was looking for involved the security differences between them and what access they had to the host computer running the program. I'm sure that if she'd prompted me with a question about security differences between applets and applications, I would have realized what she was looking for. But with the open-ended way she'd phrased it, I got blocked thinking, "Ack, I don't do applets!" Oh well. I got all the rest of her questions easily, so I think I did pretty well overall.

1. What methods do you get automatically in a C++ object?
2. What is a virtual function?
3. What is a pure virtual function?
4. What is a virtual destructor, and when would you want to use it?
5. What does it mean to have a static field? A static method?
6. What does it mean to have a final field? A final method? A final class?
7. What is the difference between an abstract class and an interface?
8. What is multiple inheritance and why should you avoi-- use it sparingly?
9. Is the return type part of a method signature?
10. What is the difference between a Java applet and an application?

Compared to Microsoft's technical questions, Intuit was easy. We were told to expect a phone call or email within the next two weeks to find out whether we're getting any employment offers. Waiting! :)

Categories: career

Shuttle to Intuit

Forrest and I got up early this morning -- that is, 10 -- so we could catch the shuttle to Mountain View. We both got interview offers at Intuit, so off we go.

Last year, when I interviewed for an internship position, we were driven up in a regular white van. This year it's a "campus shuttle" commuter van-bus thing. There's ten of us, presumably all CSC, but I only recognize one other person.

I'm a little nervous about this interview, because it's my first full-time position interview. I'd like it to go well, and I wouldn't mind having a job lined up for me after I graduate. I brought the Gang of Four (that is, the Design Patterns book), supposedly to read but really as more of a good luck talisman than anything.

I'm getting a slight carsick-type headache now, so I'm going to stop with the blogging now.

Interviewing for Full-Time Positions

Since I'm working on graduating this quarter (fingers crossed), I went to the career fair last month in a more serious mindset than in previous quarters. I still handed out my resume to just about anyone who wanted software engineeers, like I do every quarter there's a career fair, but this time I was really hoping one of them would actually pan out and line me up with a job upon graduation.

By the end of the career fair week, I had five interview requests: Microsoft, Intuit, Wells Fargo, Salesforce, and FactSet. The last, FactSet, I decided I wasn't all that interested in after all and thus declined their interview offer. (C'mon, when the company rep doesn't know that the term "client/server" describes his product's model, or doesn't know what X-forwarding is even in general terms -- well, let me say, not a strong selling point for "good, challenging place to work.")

Wells Fargo and Salesforce wanted on-campus HR screener interviews, which went well enough that they both are flying me up to San Francisco for on-site interviews at the end of this month. I'm working with their recruiters to combine the interview trips; I'd rather not miss more school than necessary, especially since I'm travelling to interview elsewhere too.

Neither Microsoft nor Intuit do on-campus interviews, or at least they didn't even ask to schedule one with me this year. I had interviewed for internships with them in previous years, though, so I guess that must still count. They just want to jump directly to the on-sites.

Plus, I have my current CustomFlix jobs, at least through this December. I don't know how my wandering in Mexico and then abandoning them in June or September will fly with them, but I'm still there for another month anyway.

So, all in all, I'm hoping at least one of these will provide me with a "real" income once I'm done graduating and catching my breath before I enter the Real World.

Categories: career

Planning My Second Trip to Mexico

Last winter break, I went to Mexico for three weeks by myself. Although Oaxaca is currently in political turmoil, I would recommend visiting the city once it's calmed down again.

The Travel Itch

So this winter break -- and college graduation! -- I've got the itch to get back to a Spanish-speaking country. Mexico's closest and thus cheapest.

Forrest and I had originally planned on driving down Baja California for the bulk of break, but this fell through for various reasons. Our winter break plans now involve visiting his family and mine, with side trips to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon. I'll drag Forrest into Mexico some other time. ;)

Viajando Con Mi Madre

But I still want to hablar español. So I called up my mom and invited her to travel to Mexico with me this January. To my surprise, she agreed to a week of vacationing with me! We first looked at Chiapas, Oaxaca's easternly neighbor, where language schools are cheaper than elsewhere in the country. The Zapatistas had supposedly settled down in recent years, but now they may be rustling again in sympathy to Oaxacans' protests.

My mom definitely didn't want to tango with any politically unsettled states, so I suggested San Miguel de Allende instead. With a large American expat community and lots of middle- and upper-class Mexican vacationers, it should be a pretty safe place. Added bonus for my mom: there should be more English-speakers there than in your average Mexican town. I count this as a mild negative, but I'll manage. :)

The school we're looking at is Habla Hispana. Their classes are a little large at up to ten students, but they are considerably cheaper than the local competition (which has comparable class sizes, surprisingly). Homestays through the school run $18 a day for a shared room; three meals daily included.

We're researching how much extra an open-ended return ticket will cost. If it's not outrageous, I'm hoping to arrive in Mexico without a firm return date. I would really like to stay in San Miguel as long as I want (and can afford), or have the flexibility to wander to other areas. We'll see how this aspect of the trip works out.

Open Invitation

If any of y'all wants to meet up with me in Mexico, I'd love to see you! You know you want to... :)