Life Stories: August 2006 Archives
I'm back from my trip to DC and regular posting should resume shortly. I'm completely exhausted from my trip -- on top of the recent move and everything else -- and I really just want to relax at home and be with my wife, but alas. At least being at work is a little more low-key than traveling these days.
The trip itself was very good, and it was great to see my family from both coasts again. I also got to see my grandmother, probably for the last time, and that was both enjoyable and bittersweet. I've been blessed to have very few family members die yet during my lifetime (only my paternal grandfather), but my grandmother Mani is my last remaining grandparent (by blood). Once she's gone, I'll be in the second-oldest generation alive in my family, though I'm one of the youngest members.
In light of the ongoing terror warnings, Jessica and I have decided to cancel our trip to Washington DC later this week. We're really disappointed about it -- especially because I miss my family a lot after having moved to St. Louis -- but it just doesn't seem smart to travel to the capital when the threat level is at Orange.
The chances of anything bad happening to us are probably one in thousands or millions, but despite the fact that air travel is safer than driving, it can be more dangerous at some times than others, and this is one of those times. It was a hard decision, but so it goes. Live to fly another day.
In light of the recent terror threat in the UK, what does everyone think about the trip my wife and I are planning next week that will fly us from St. Louis (STL) to Baltimore (BWI) on Southwest? Any new danger that wasn't there before? Should we make the trip, or cancel it?
"Argh!" isn't the invective I'm really thinking....
So we're largely moved in to our new home, and yesterday evening we started working a bit on the outdoors. The exterior of the house is very nice, but during the six months the property sat on the market the ivy in the flower beds got way out of control. I'm not sure why anyone would purposefully plant ivy, but now Jessica and I are on a mission to eradicate it all.
I did a 2' x 8' section last night in about an hour, but I left tons of roots behind because I just couldn't get them out of the ground. Pulling by hand sucks, and we're thinking of hiring a crew to pull all the ivy out. However, I'd really prefer a chemical solution, possibly in combination with a roto-tiller machine if I can find an appropriate one.
Does anyone have any good ivy-elimination tips? Here's what I've found so far:
Now we've really moved in because I got the internet working! Yay! I had to run a phone line and move some stuff around, but now we've got a sweet office right off the kitchen, so I can be close to my baby while she's cooking and cleaning!
Our furniture and boxes are all moved in to the house we just closed on yesterday... yay! After the debacle with the last house it's a real relief to finally have a home. We're at the hotel again tonight because not everything is hooked up at the house yet, but by tomorrow night we should really be in business. We won't get DISH for a few days, but everything else should be working.
"DISH", you say? Indeed. Despite my having been with DirecTV for something like six years, the company couldn't find a way to send an installer to our new house in less than three weeks time. I told them that was unacceptable, but they wouldn't budge! So, the Williams are jumping ship to DISH. We'll see how it works out.
I've been meaning to mention this for a few weeks but hadn't found the time or energy; however, now that I'm settled in my new, awesome, job I'd like to take a minute to say that the people I spoke with while interviewing with Google were rude, arrogant, condescending, and not nearly as clever as they thought themselves to be. I wasn't offered a position with them, but after doing several phone interviews I wasn't at all interested in working with the company.
The people I spoke with appeared not to have even read my resume. I got sick of explaining to them what programming languages I know, what technologies I've used, and what kinds of projects I've worked on. That's what resumes are for. The questions they asked were designed for entry-level employees and rarely captured any relevant information about my work experience and education.
Despite the direct applicability of my PhD research to the problems Google professes to be interested in, the interviewers seemed incapable of compehending my work and were uninterested in discussing it or hearing about its importance. Instead they focused almost exclusively on first-year computer science algorithm questions about sorting arrays and writing for-loops. I suppose they're eager to hire people with decent programming skills, but those people are a dime a dozen and I wasn't interested in that sort of job.
When I questioned the interviewers about their approach and tried to explain how my research could fit into the company vision in a way that wasn't really being captured by their freshman CS questions I was rebuffed. Each interviewer mock-patiently explained how important their questions were and told me Google hires only "the best of the best". Of what, code monkeys?
In any event, after my experience I don't think I'd ever want to work for Google and I will heartily denigrate the company to anyone I know who considers applying there. A company that wants to attract the best and brightest should find a way to treat their applicants as individuals, and should tailor their interview regimen towards discovering talent and intelligence, not just textbook coding ability. Unless, I suppose, that's all Google wants.
