Zathras' Great Machine

"The Force is with you, young Skywalker! ...But you are not a Jedi yet."

Wow. After several days of ho-hum and routine, today has been quite a whirlwind!

My application with Geeks on Call continues -- this morning, I had my third telephone test, a total of fifty questions, out of which I had to get at least forty right. I was nervous as hell, but the guy who interviewed me said I did very well. Unfortunately, he was behind schedule on testing and couldn't give me my actual results, but I'm reasonably confident that I passed. Now I just have to wait...

The interview was pretty entertaining in a lot of ways, too.

Interviewer: You boot your computer and receive a "CMOS Checksum Error" message. What is the most likely cause of the problem?

[Glad I reviewed my A+ textbook last night -- if I hadn't, I'd have had no clue on this one.]

Me: Hmm... that's a tough one. Offhand, my first guess would be that... umm, probably the CMOS battery is dying.

Interviewer [smiling -- did you know you can hear in someone's voice when they're smiling?]: Good guess.

There were also a number of questions on wireless networking, which definitely made me glad that I decided, a couple of months ago, to install WiFi in my apartment and study it. If I hadn't done that, I probably would have failed the exam this morning.

There was one harrowing moment, when we were about halfway thru or so, when we got disconnected. Not good for one's nerves. Fortunately, the interviewer called me back and said it was just a glitch, and we continued. I hope to hear from them soon with my results... if I don't hear from them by Wednesday afternoon or so, I'll give them a call.

So anyway. I finished my exam this morning and got to the office to a nice backlog of work, since I'd also been out on Friday. Fortunately, I was feeling positive and energetic, and I got everything taken care of. The fun part was when I went downstairs to the concierge desk to reserve an LCD projector for a conference we're doing on Thursday and discovered that the conference center had, for some reason, given the entire conference center to another group for the entire day. Not good -- we've got close to two hundred people for this thing. The company is now in a mad scramble to try to either get the conference center reservation reconfirmed or find a new location for the conference. Not my problem, fortunately. (I wonder what the hell would have happened if I hadn't found out about this little snafu...)

So after getting on top of everything at the office and restoring my entire desk to normal, I returned home to sort thru my personal email, which I hadn't had a chance to do all day. In addition to the usual items, I received a very pleasant surprise. Some time back, I participated in an online survey for eWeek about High Performance Computing. All those participating in the survey were entered in a drawing for five hundred dollars. Yours truly, as it happens, won the cash! Ahh, yes... that will be a nice little boost in the ol' checking account.

Other than that, the last few days have been relatively uneventful. *chuckle* But I guess Monday is more than enough!

I saw "Kill Bill" on Saturday afternoon, and it's so-so. Tarantino is a good director, but he's also rather pretentious and self-indulgent. If you're into that kind of thing, go ahead and see the film.

And that's the latest from ParrishWorld... further bulletins as events warrant.

Posted by Zathras at October 20, 2003 08:29 PM