I have made a few small changes to the site lately.  First off, I got rid of the “Home” page; the blog is now the default page when you come to my site.  Secondly, I replaced the “Contact” page with an “About” page, where I plan to put more information that could be useful to a new visitor to my site (not that I expect many of those).

But the big thing, that I just finished, is the triumphant return of the music page.  For over a year the page has said “I really do plan on putting something here someday.”  Well that day is today!  I found a Flash mp3 player, so that you won’t have to download the tracks to play them, since you probably don’t feel like doing that anyway.  I still need to do some work on the page—hey, did you guys know some scientists in a bunker in New Mexico invented something called CSS that can totally help your webpages look nicer??  I need to hit up some of that on my music page!  Also, none of the text there has been spell-checked, I’d prefer that you let me know privately if you find any mistakes or anything (as opposed to, let’s say, putting all my typos in the comments).  Lastly, look for the lost lyrics to “Why Me?”  Anthropologists have been searching for them for years, but they never looked in my brain.  I just did.

why me why always me

I recently was asked to come into work on a Saturday at my place of employ.  I have no problem with coming in to work on a Saturday if my work requires that I come in to finish something that has not fully been completed during normal business hours.  However, this day was a mandatory work day for the entire company, and the area in which I work had nothing pressing to accomplish that day.  Instead, the upstairs lab came in to work solely to clean the lab from top to bottom.  True, it needed this scrub down terribly, but still not badly enough to make us come in on a Saturday.  And that isn’t even the worst of the situation.  We were required to come into work at 5:30 am!!!  On a normal day I don’t go into work until 7:30 am, but on mandatory Saturday workdays, we have to go in two hours earlier, to clean.  We were also in no way compensated for coming into work that day.  Normally I would expect to receive time off back in place for this extra time we were putting in, but no that didn’t happen.  Also, if I decided not to come in on Saturday, they would take a day of vacation from me, even though I already put forty full hours that week.

There were about three other problems I had with coming to work this particular Saturday.  Shall I tell you about them??   I think I will even if you don’t like it.  The first being that I acquired a small chemical burn from the chemical cleaner that we were using to clean the lab.  I accidentally sprayed some of the cleaner on my forearm and about thirty minutes later, I had four or five nickel sized whelps on my arm.  They are now just a few red spots on my arm, but it has been over a week since it happened.  The second thing I had a problem with was that one of the other people I work with somehow managed to do practically no cleaning at all in a full eight hours.  He spent most of the day sitting at his desk chatting with everyone else in the lab while they cleaned around him.  When our bosses came back up to the lab, he continues to simply talk to them instead of clean while the rest of us cleaned our little tooshies off.  Well, needless to say, we cleaned and cleaned and he got the credit for it.  He has made procrastination a true art form.

I know this wasn’t exactly a fun or exciting post, but hey, at least I finally got around to making one!!!  Have a great day!!

Last week we went to visit Stephanie’s older sister Emily and her family, including our seven-month-old niece, in Tampa, Florida.  A few things to mention:

Riley loves the ukulele!  She was completely fascinated by it.  She would just stare at it when I played, looking back and forth trying to figure out which hand she wanted to look at.  I tried to let her play, and she would kind of strum, but she mainly wanted to grab the strings and pull on them.  Fortunately this was a ukulele, which has nylon strings, so she can’t really hurt herself doing that.  If it were a guitar, I’d be afraid she’d cut her hands pulling like that on the smaller strings.

We went to Busch Gardens, where we rode The Sheikra.  I’ve built this type of roller coaster in Roller Coaster Tycoon, but I had never been to a real park that had one until this weekend.  This has to be one of the coolest rides I’ve ever ridden.  At the top of that hill they stop the car, facing nearly straight down.  Then you drop on the track that is straight down.  It was the most intense feeling I’ve ever felt on a roller coaster.  Later on there is another hill like that, although it’s not as tall and they don’t bring you to a complete stop before dropping you.  I would highly recommend this ride to anyone who likes roller coasters.

I put up a collection of photos from our trip, if you’re interested.

While I was on vacation the other week I was talking to my father-in-law, who works for a company that makes transmissions that go in transfer trucks.  He mentioned that he always asks people this question when they are interviewing for a designer position (i.e. mechanical engineer):  How much do you work on your own car?  I thought this was a pretty good question.  If someone is a mechanical engineer, but never spends any time working with their own car, they probably aren’t going to design things as well.  They may design things that work from a technical standpoint and meet specifications, but they’ll have lots of quirks because they simply aren’t thinking about how it will be used.  For instance, they may put some bolts in a place that would require an extra two hours of labor to get to, when they could have just as easily been somewhere accessible by just opening the hood. That may not be the best example, since I’m not a mechanical engineer, but you get the gist.

I was thinking that if I am ever interviewing programmers, I might ask a similar question.  The most obvious modification, “how much time do you spend working on your own computer,” doesn’t really apply to a programming position.  Sure lots of programmers take their computers apart and tinker with them, but so do a lot of people who think a hash table is something you smoke.

I came up with two alterations that I think would work:

1. In an industry where some say fifty percent of what you know is obsolete in five years, what do you do to stay current?
2. How much code do you write in your spare time?

I’m not saying by any means that a hiring decision should be based on either of these questions, but I do think a candidate’s responses would be telling.  I think it would also be pretty simple to identify whether you are getting BS or a legitimate response.  I think the first question is especially important, because most of the people I know who I don’t think are very good programmers probably have no idea what Ruby or AJAX are.  They’ve barely heard of C#.  You’re lucky if they’ve heard of Firefox.  True, they don’t work in web development, but that’s not the point.  Most good programmers I know tend to follow geek news and they are familiar with the “latest and greatest” technologies, even if they aren’t using them.  You may have been a pretty good COBOL programmer back in the day, but if you didn’t try to keep up with newer stuff, you’re not going to make a good Java programmer.  You’ll be stuck maintaining thirty-year-old COBOL code.  And if you are stuck working on thirty-year-old COBOL code, that’s your own fault.  In the last ten years the internet tubes have been filling up with tons of information:  you don’t have to subscribe to trade magazines or anything like that.  Just reading Slashdot or Digg or Endgadget from time to time goes a long way.  Of course, you’d have to watch out for the person who has heard of Ruby (for example), and lists it as a skill, when all they’ve really done is read the Wikipedia page on it.  I think one of the best pieces of resume advice anyone told me was to separate languages you have a strong proficiency in from those you just have a little experience with or haven’t used in years (thanks Peter).  If someone lists fifty programming languages, they are probably only proficient in maybe three or four of them.  And there are also those who memorize lots of buzzwords and sound smart but really aren’t.  You would need to have a pretty good BS detector.  But I think that is a prerequisite for conducting interviews anyway.

As for the second question, most of the people I would consider to be good programmers can’t just work on code at work.  Most of them have side-projects or a website or something sort of code related that they spend some of their spare time on.  The thing I don’t like about the question (at least the way I phrased it) is that it is too leading.  A candidate might think “uh oh, they want someone who writes Linux kernels for fun” and might give a BS response, even if they don’t intend to.  Incidentally, if you find someone who writes Linux kernels for fun, and they are telling the truth, you should probably hire them even if they drop racial slurs and/or their pants during the interview.

So whadda y’all think?  Good idea/bad idea?  Am I way off-base?  I’ve only been on the interviewee side of an interview before, so I don’t really know what I’m talking about here.  In any case, I think these are better questions than “What is your greatest weakness?”

PS: If they answer, “I’m a perfectionist,” they are probably lying.

There is an annoying thing that happens this time of year.  Over the weekend I washed my car, and within a few hours it was covered in plant sperm:

Coca-Cola has recently changed the packaging for Cherry Coke, or Coca-Cola Cherry as it is now called (the “adjective-first” standard usually employed by English speakers is so unsophisticated).  I’m not sure who this is supposed to appeal to, but I don’t think it is men.  I mean, the color is somewhere between purple and pink.  It looks really fruity, in multiple senses of the word.  It looks like it would taste like grape soda mixed with red Kool-Aid.

Anyone else have a similar reaction to this new packaging?

I was killing wasting time on Google Maps today, trying to find the Sears Tower without knowing what it looked like or where in Chicago it was.  You know, the kind of thing that’s fun to waste company time and bandwidth on.  Anyway, I came across a place where the satellite images are stitched together in a very interesting manner.  You can’t see the seams, but there are at least three different satellite photos represented here.  The various angles of the buildings reveal the relative position of the satellite when the photos were taken.  You can see the south and east sides of some buildings, the north and east sides of others, and the south and west side on some others.  What it results in is a cool M. C. Escher look to the buildings: