Category: life

Psst, wanna buy a house?

I found your resume on Dice and believe based on your background you would be a good fit for the Jr. Technical Project Manager/XML Position on a government project with one of our Fortune 100 partners in Crystal City, VA. This position is critical and we are seeking to fill thisimmediately.

Heh, I’m pretty sure this is my job, or at least the part of it that I have been hoping to pawn off on some Jr. Technical PM/XML type.

My lackadaisical job hunt continues, with the following results so far:

• Motorola was promising, but ultimately it was too tech supporty and not programmy enough
• No reply from the tech shop on the same street as my apartment
• There are a boatload of J2EE/SQL jobs. Too bad that is boring as hell.
• Too many defense/gov’t jobs. Ick. No, I do not want to be sponsored to work for NSA.
• There aren’t that many “work from home hacking on the kernel” jobs.
• Stop calling me, recruiters. Please let me ignore you via email.

I’m still being super-picky, obviously. Unless you have a “work from home hacking on the kernel” opening…

My wife is officially a permanent US resident, yay!! Also, I am officially a Marylander. As I was sitting in the DMV the other day getting plates, they had this moronic LED ticker thing going. With earth-shattering up-to-the-minute news such as: “Did you know? The moon is the Earth’s only natural satellite. There is no life on the moon. The moon is the brightest object in the night sky — however it does not give off its own light. The moon reflects the sun’s light.”

Meanwhile, I’d like to take a second to thank the internets for finally updating neomail, and for fixing ‘In-Reply-To’, adding S/MIME, and being able to handle user-defined folders. Now I can realize my dream of replying to mailing list stuff (filtered by procmail into separate mboxes) from work without breaking the threading like a noob.

RIP 4th Amendment, it was good while we pretended it existed. I, for one, will not rest, will not be distracted by — oooh iPhone, shiny!

I spent last weekend in San Francisco for a convention. Nope, not WWDC, or JavaOne. Angeline was giving a presentation at the American Diabetes Association conference, and I stole along. Here’s the breakdown:

day 1:
Landed in SF about noon localtime after many hours of flight. Took BART to the hotel, checked in and headed to the conference for registration. Then off to the Mission district for lunch at Tacqueria Can-cun, where the burritos are excellent. Too full and tired for dinner, we went to bed early.

day 2:
Walked around the city a lot, saw a 15-person “parade” in Chinatown. Homeless guy said of me, “I can tell, that guy is law enforcement.” Met DA for lunch at Mo’s grill, then chilled in the park. Homeless guy tried to sell us his “book” — aka stapled sheets of paper — of poetry. Saw several random people on the street not wearing clothes, and ballet dancers. Got a nasty sunburn.

Went to Sultan’s for Indian food – not bad, but the place was empty. Cheaper place next door, Naan & Curry, had all the business.

day 3:
Hopped on BART this morning, then took Caltrain to Mountain View. There, in the drab, continuous office park that is Silicon Valley, just a few blocks south of the Googleplex, is the Computer History Museum. Wandered through it taking pictures of computers from my childhood, and saw a demonstration of a Babbage difference engine.

Went to R&G Lounge in Chinatown for dinner with Ange, her sister, and a third doctor. Food was great but the staff was a little bit racist. (They are only serving the red bean soup to persons of East Asian descent now? And, “Fried noodles are crunchy. I recommend the soft noodles for you [, white guy].” WTF.)

day 4:
Met up with more doctors for lunch in the mall near the conference center. Quite good for food court.

Ange had her presentation at 5pm. I sneaked in with her sister’s badge, which I had to flash at Security. Thankfully, they didn’t ask why I had a girl’s name. Angeline gave an excellent talk though all way over my head.

Had dinner at Ame, very expensive but possibly the best food we’ve ever had. Sashimi, potato soup, black cod, braised pork cheeks, chocolate cake and rhubarb-strawberry pie were consumed.

day 5:
Sitting here on the plane back. Not writing complete sentences.

Some photos of computers are on my flickr stream.

We’re in San Francisco this weekend through Tuesday. If anyone else is, or has suggestions of locations to visit, drop me a line.

I’ve been a slacker, so here’s the 10 second update:

Iron man was good. You knew that two weeks ago.

Ange and I had our immigration interview for her green card. We’re on tenterhooks right now hoping that we get an affirmative answer quickly. (Fun fact: a tenter was used to stretch cloth in the 14th century and the tenterhooks were, I guess, hooks on it. Isn’t history fun!)

We also watched LOTR all week. Still awesome.

Nerd-cool stuff I’m playing with lately:

• UML – user mode linux, I hope to get this up and running so I can script git-bisect
• coLinux – like UML for windows, which I want to use for a distcc compile farm setup at home. Alternately, someone on lazyweb can port distcc for me?
• oprofile – profile your whole box, great for ‘why is X using 90% cpu’ and ‘did ath5k_rx_tasklet ever get called?’
• ccache – Java needs this

Angeline is way smarter than me. Congrats on her chapter full of words I do not understand!

I updated my resume today. I’m still not sold on the “Other Experience” section, but on the other hand, I surely learned a lot more doing that stuff than doing the job that pays the bills. It could use a better title at least.

My brother-in-law was visiting this weekend, helping Ange study for an upcoming difficult medicine exam. So I had lots of time to kill. I released a new version of OMFS for kernel 2.6.25, and finished up the man-eating panda kite. (He enjoys human flesh, I assure you.)

And, I welcomed a new tool into the fold: a Steinel temperature controlled heat gun. This is ostensibly for pulling the tile off the wall in my bathroom, but I’m sure I can find additional uses for a hair dryer that hits 1200 degrees. I only got to spend a few minutes testing it on thinset adhesive in my bathroom, but they were an exciting few minutes. I look forward to a day or two of salvaging components from junk PCBs when I next get some free time.

My Nokia 6230 apparently bit the dust last week, so if you called me, I didn’t get it. The phone no longer turns on, even with a freshly charged battery and with a new memory card. Darn. I have a crappy $40 unlocked phone on the way in the mail to tide me over until I can get something decent or fix this busted one. Anyone know when an android-capable phone is going to hit the market? Maybe it’s time to sign up with grand central…