"Anticipation"

Yes, I went to the interview today. It was an interview unlike any I have ever had before.

There were actually three stops along the way in this interview, and two other cnad

Okay I am going to interrupt my own blog to say I have some how broken my wireless keyboard. I don't know what I did but it just stops taking certain keys after a few words. Keys like delete, backspace and L. I  put in fresh batteries hoping that was the issue and it appeared to start working for a moment than it was right back to the issue. I also did the re-connect buttons on the keyboard and the receiver to end up with the same issue. I then uninstalled and re-installed the driver for the keyboard and it is happening. Actually on my last install of Windows 7 the keyboard and mouse actually showed up as a "microsoft keyboard and mouse" thanks to a driver found by windows update and I thought that happened this time as well but it just says HID Keyboard/mouse now so I don't really know what is going on. So I switched to a USB keyboard connected to my laptop to finish this post. Which is fine actually because this is pretty comfortable.


Okay now on with the blog. Where was i? Right. The interview had two other candidates there at the same time and there were three stops along this little interview "tour" or whatever. My first two stops were interviews with two sets of people each in two separate rooms. The first one I'm not actually sure how well I did. I just got the feeling I wasn't quite hitting all the right notes with the interviewers some how. The second stop with the two different people I thought I did much better but then one of these did things like ask me about the PC I had built for myself and ask if I play any games. The last stop was a more practical test that involved working out some pre-set issues with a motherboard laid out in front of me. The guy at this stop mentioned the issue would be a memory error but he wanted me to go through the steps and talk through all the troubleshooting thoughts I was having as I was having them. So I did this, checking each possiblity as it occured to me. Finally I removed the last remaining stick of memory and replaced it with another, powered on the motherboard and it booted to Windows. Obviously I'm skipping a rather large number of steps I took but I'm just cutting to the chase. I am some-what confident I actually finished that troubleshooting step faster than at least one of the other candidates.

So I'm fairly confident I scored relatively high on two of the three stops of the tour. I was actually supposed to find out by close of business today what the decision was but as I was actually expecting I was not called. I expect sometime between 8am and 12pm tomorrow I will receive the call informing me of good or bad news.

I'm actually getting a fair number of recruiter calls lately. In fact when I was walking to my car leaving the interview I turned my phone back on and I had a voice mail from another recruiter about another position.  And i got two calls yesterday. So ya, at least in theory, I have some options if I don't get this position I interviewed for today. In theory.

Also the weather was rather bad today. I mean i realize I'm just a California guy and weather is relatively mild compared to pretty much every place else in the world but the weather was just awful. I mean 40mph gusts, driving rains, seemingly horizontal rain which I don't see very often...it was just awful. Made the trip through the parking lot to the building where the interview was that much mroe difficult actually. And on the way home with all the torrential rain going up a hill my car was making an unusual sound. I don't particularly enjoy unusual sounds coming from my 230k mile car. I think it was just the water getting reflect up into the under side of the car...or something. Luckily it didn't stall or break down or anything. But i wasn't sure for a while there. I got behind some other cars and used their tracks through the rain to make sure I had good traction and that seemed to help a little why people would try to go 70mph in such horrible weather I have no idea. Just seems really bad some how.. In an unsafe-way I mean.

Tomorrow I actually have another generic meeting with another staffing place. I think I mentioned it in yesterday's post actually. Although if I get this job the meeting will be rather moot anyway. Not necessarily bad to keep my options open for whenever the next time is I am looking for a job. Which could very well be tomorrow. So there ya go then.

It seems as though I actually had something else to write out about. Not sure what it was now though. I could mention I've been kind of watching a show called Trueblood lately. Although I've found it's best to so NOT watch that right before going to sleep. Shows apparently affect my dreams lately. Which I haven't really noticed before some-what recently. So after one Trueblood I watch two ToS episodes, Diggnation and Hak5. Some hopefully there's not too much Trueblood floating around up there still so as to continue to cause bad dreams. Or perahps merely disturbing dreams as much as anything.

The show actually isn't that bad. Obviously nothing like Buffy which is an obvious comparison to make. And it's obviously aimed at an older audience than buffy. Probably the 21+ crowd if I had to guess where buffy was obviously aimed at high-school aged kids.

And they seemed to have gone out of their way to make differences. For instance in Buffy when a vampire is staked they just burst into dust while in Trueblood they explode in to a bloody mess. The complete opposite affect in other words. They vamps in Trueblood also seem to degrade into a burned up mess some-what slowly as opposed to just being turned to dust rather quickly like Buffy's universe. So ya, differences. And the whole premise is different anyway. The whole point of Trueblood is not to find and kill bad vampires. Not yet anyway.

I've watched up to the early episodes of the second season so far. And I still think it's too early to really say one way or another if it's going to be a truly great show. I think it shows some potential but I'm just not sure it is truely great yet. I keep waiting for the premise to be more obviously stated or some over-arching storyline to present itself. But I don't really see so much yet.

Oh one thing I did want to mention was an episode of ToS I saw today. I forget the exact episode name now, it was something like A taste of Armageddon. Something like that. Anyway the Enterprise was taking this diplomat to a planet to establish regular relations come hell or high water no-matter-what. The people of this planet told them to NOT come but they had no choice. So Kirk and team go down to investigate and find that the planet is at "war" with a neighboring planet.

But here's the twist: the war was like some kind of chess-by-mail kind of deal in that the two planets would send hypothetical weapons back and forth and the casulties woudl be calculated by a comptuer. If a particular citizen was flagged as a casualty that person had to show up to an instant-death type of booth to be killed (kind of like the "suicide booths" in Futurama actually). All the numbers were tracked and both planets kept track of the deaths. In this way all the cities of the planet along with the culture and infrastructure were kept intact. And this "war" had been going on for 500 years.

But then the real twist came up: a theoreitcal hit was registered on the orbiting Enterprise. Which meant all crew members had to be vaporized so their death could be recorded. This, the people of the planet argued, was necessary in order to avoid an actual war involving real devestating weapons being used by both planets.

So Kirk decides to issue "general order 24" that involves the enterprise wiping out all kinds of infrastructure and cities within two hours. And also he started destroying the vaporizing rooms.

Eventually Kirk actually destroyed the calculating computer that was connected to the other planet's equivelent computer. He did this because he knew neither planet actually wanted a real-life devestating war that would wipe out cities and cause slow agonizing death by starvation of millions of people. In other words the fear of devestating war was incentive enough to prevent war at all costs.

Ok this is a fairly obvious metaphor for the cold war of the 1960s. Having weapons pointed at each other and the credibility of both sides that both are willing to use them effectively neutralizes both sides and neither is willing to nuke the other.

But it also points out that taking the absolute horror and hell out of war so citizens can sit comfortably in their livig rooms relatively unaffected by it will only serve to remove any and all incentive to figure out a way to STOP the war. This almost seems like a lesson that could be applied to today now that I think about it...

I should also point out I actually left out several plot points so if you want to watch the episode it isn't completely spoiled for you.

Lastly about ToS I would say I'm starting to grow accustomed to it's 1960s nature. In the same way I grew accustomed to subtitles in foreign movies, the singing in certain musicals and possibly old English in various Shakespearean plays, I'm starting to grow accustomed to ToS's grossly outdated technology and style. And when I see episodes like that described above I really see how it's worth watching and start to realize just why this show is so beloved by so many.

Ok that's it for tonight.