Well, after waiting several days to hear from Geeks on Call, I gave them a call on Friday to find out the status of my application. I passed their final exam! Just barely... I needed to get forty questions right out of fifty, and that's what I got. Whuff.
So I went in on Saturday evening (!) to discuss the position with them further. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this place is going to be a good match for me... the hours are longer, the pay is lower, and I'd have to spend a lot of time on the road, so I'm going to have to pass. I do hope they call and offer me the job, though, just for the boost to my self-esteem. It would make me feel like a real IT professional... even though I know, intellectually, that I am one already, hearing it from somebody else would be a good boost.
Had dinner with Rob on Friday night -- as part of my ongoing quest to find a Thai restaurant closer to home that rivals Duangrat's, which is quite a distance from here, I suggested Bangkok Garden in Bethesda. The food was quite good -- not quite as good as Duangrat's, but close, and the prices there are quite good. We'll keep that one on our list.
After dinner, we went back to the house, which Rob has been doing a fair amount of work on. The fireplace is working again, now that he's fixed all the water leaks, and we had a nice fire with our hookahs. Rob is almost out of smoking supplies; I'll have to set him up with some more. He also regaled me with tales of his three-week trip to India, where, among other things, he met his girlfriend's parents. Surprisingly, they didn't nag him to marry her and start reproducing. *chuckle*
In other interesting news, I got an email the other day from a marketing firm. As part of my IT position, I subscribe to a lot of periodicals (both print and electronic) and I also participate in a lot of IT professional surveys. As an incentive to participate in the surveys, they usually offer a prize in a drawing. In this case, the survey was on high performance computing, and the prize was five hundred dollars. Yours truly won the cash. That was a nice, pleasant little boost for the week.
I took the company's old file server home a while back... after waiting a couple of weeks to be absolutely sure that no one would need anything else on it, I spent some time yesterday doing battle with the damned thing. I tried both Win ME and Win 2K Pro, but neither would install. Turns out this thing needs a proprietary driver for the SCSI drives, so I need to grab that and try again. For the time being, I'm just sticking with Windows, but I do want to try Linux in the near future... although I'm a little concerned about getting it to install, even though the Linux drivers are also available for download from the Compaq web site.
Rob surprised me a bit by telling me that he wants to buy my old iBook, so once I get that cleaned up, I'll unload it on him. He probably wants to study OS X, since Apple is finally starting to make some inroads into the enterprise.
Have to say again how much I love this PowerBook. *grin* It performs better, obviously, and the keyboard, in particular, just feels so much nicer than the iBook's. It's also smaller and lighter than the iBook. The only annoying thing is that Apple has just released G4-based iBooks at a significantly lower price than what I paid for the PowerBook. That always happens with computers, of course, but to have it happen only four or five weeks after they released this model is kind of annoying.
Hmm... actually, now that I think about it, I'll have to look into partitioning the hard drive on this notebook and trying out Yellow Dog Linux. I've read a few reviews of it, and they've been pretty positive.
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.
Just going thru my MP3 collection as I sit here thru this very quiet day at the office and found a nugget from an old episode of "The Simpsons", the one where Homer decides to quit drinking. He sings this little ditty to himself as he's getting all the beer from all over the house and pouring it out. (Sung to the tune of Frank Sinatra's "It Was a Very Good Year"):
When I was seventeen...
I drank some very good beer.
I drank some very good beer
I purchased with a fake ID...
My name was Brian McGee...
I stayed up listening to Queen...
When I was seventeen.
Seen on the Metro on my way home on Saturday afternoon: a man with a tattoo of a UPC bar code on the back of his left hand.
It's kind of hard to know what to think about this one. Did he do it thinking it was funny, or was he just trying to keep ahead of the curve? After all, with the way things are going in this country, it's probably not going to be too much longer before all of us really do have to have UPC bar codes tattooed on our bodies, just like the human prisoners had to in The Terminator.
I still can't get over watching old TV shows and movies and seeing people in either bit parts or other roles when they were much younger. Annie Hall is a great movie for that -- there are several people in there with bit parts who went on to become quite famous (e.g., Jeff Goldblum and Sigourney Weaver).
I mention this as I watch reruns of Classic Trek on the Skiffy Channel this morning and see Walter Koenig as Chekhov... it's so funny to see him as the young naive Russian ensign, so different from the cynical, sardonic Psi-cop that he plays on Babylon Five.
OK, who's the knucklehead who decided to wait until January damn sixth to release the fourth season of Babylon Five on DVD?! Apart from the fact that this breaks their previously-established pattern of releasing a season once every three or four months, it also means that they're going to completely miss sales for the holiday season. *grumble* Compared to all that, the inconvenience to me seems almost trivial. Almost.
Several items on eBay right now that are doing well, or were -- checked them again just now and discovered that eBay is having some kind of problem with their servers, and two of my items aren't showing up. Bad timing for that, too, since my auctions end today. I hope they get it straightened out, and soon -- this could be costing me money. It's also Sunday again, of course, which means that it's time to get the digital camera and list some more items. Whee. :^)
I brought the server home from the office yesterday and determined that everything is working fine... as I had suspected, though, it doesn't have a sounda card, so I bought one on eBay -- after which Denise reminded me that she could have tossed a spare my way. Oops. Sometimes I forget about her Big Pile O' Parts... I'll have to keep that in mind in the future.
Anyway, the server isn't much anymore by today's standards, of course -- it's a 1999 model -- but it should still be useful for various matters. In particular, it's got two hard drives, so I think I'm going to install Windows on one of them and Linux on the other.
Talked briefly to Denise yesterday about a column she's been reading in a local paper about a Mac worshipper... seems this guy is selling one of his old Macs and in the ad is calling it something like "the greatest appliance ever known in the history of the universe". Err, guy -- I agree that the Mac is a better OS, but jeez, c'mon -- it's a friggin' computer, not a religious relic toward which all the faithful must genuflect. And it's not as though the Mac OS is perfect, either... what the hell is up with my notebook not storing my WiFi password in my keychain anyway?
Shaggy's got a new job that he hates -- as a telemarketer, of all things. *snicker* Well, anything to keep the bills paid.
Haven't heard from Chad in a while. He said he was thinking about coming down for a weekend visit, but I guess that must have fallen thru. Well, between juggling school and a part-time job, I guess I can understand that. I hope he hasn't been laid off from his IT position at the newspaper. I'd hate to think he might consider going back to delivering pizzas for a living, especially since when he was doing that, he got robbed at gunpoint twice. Ugh.
And so begins a lazy Sunday morning... need to finish up this blog entry, get the coffee started (Blue Mountain coffee, this morning, not chai tea -- seems to be a Sunday thing for me) then work on some letters, starting with Denise, then some others who have been patiently waiting. :^)
So the notoriously anti-gun CDC have released a study saying that gun control laws don't do anything to prevent violence. Call "Sixty Minutes". Next they'll be saying that outlawing prostitution doesn't prevent hooking, either... when will people get that laws don't prevent illegal behavior, they just identify it as such? The CDC, predictably, are saying that this just means that the subject needs "more study". Translation: we don't like the results of this study, so we want to do more of them until we hear what we want to hear. (And no one, to my knowledge, has ever been able to address the question of why the CDC are involved in firearms studies in any event -- guns can certainly cause injury and death, of course, but they are not a disease, which is what the CDC are supposed to be involved with).
According to this morning's issue of "Express", two hikers in the mountains in Sweden arrived at a secluded location and found seventy pairs of shoes, all filled with butter. I don't even know where to start with that one.
I applied with Geeks on Call for a position as a field technician. They called me on Tuesday night and did a brief telephone interview, based on which they've decided to interview me. Fun stuff. The guy asked me a bit about my background, why I was job hunting, and so on, then he said, "I'm going to ask you two sample questions... based on how you respond, I may ask you more questions." He ended up asking five altogether, out of which I got four right. I hope I get this position.
Arnold won the election, of course, as we all know... I knew he would as soon as he announced he was running; I said all along that there was no way he could possibly lose. I'm really surprised at how many people there were who disagreed with me.
Denise and I are beginning to entertain ourselves with Commodore 64 emulators. Much to my surprise, she had never played, or even heard of, "Archon", which is, IMO, just about the best video game ever created. So, naturally, it was the first disk image I sent to her.
From today's Washington Times: an article about tests that are given to train airport screeners. Actual sample question on the test:
Why is it important to screen bags for IEDs (improvised explosive devices)?
a. The IED batteries could leak and damage other passengers' bags.
b. The wires in the IED could cause a short to the aircraft wires.
c. IEDs can cause loss of lives, property, and aircraft.
d. The ticking timer could worry other passengers.
I couldn't believe my eyes. These people have been hired, and are in training, to become airport screeners, and the TSA really feels the need to ask them why it's important to look for bombs in luggage?
And that's about all for now... further bulletins as events warrant.
I spent some time messing around a bit more with my USB key today, and I determined that its read speed is just fine -- it's only the write speed that's screwed up. With that, and having talked to the tech at Apple about it, I strongly suspect that there's something wrong with the key, not with the PowerBook. These are the same problems I had with my iBook, and neither the Apple tech nor a Google search revealed anyone else reporting a similar problem, so I don't think it's an OS X issue. I won't know for sure, of course, until I've had a chance to try another key with the notebook.
In other news, I tried the external display adapter this evening, and it worked marvelously. One of the neat things about the PowerBook that the iBook didn't have is that it can actually treat the two displays as separate displays, whereas the iBook treated them only as "mirrors" of each other. This means that I can arrange the displays to be side-by-side, or one on top of the other, or whatever, and when I move the cursor off the edge of the notebook's display, it appears on the monitor's display, or vice versa. A big plus. (Mirroring the displays is also an option in the System Preferences if for any reason you prefer to do it that way.) This has been a feature on Macs for quite a while now, at least as far back as 1994, but this is the first Mac I've ever owned that could actually do it, so I'm pretty excited. :^)
The testing of the new PowerBook is largely completed, then, and all things considered, I have to say that I'm very pleased. There are certain annoying quirks, such as occasional odd behavior with OS X not treating windows properly, and I need to investigate a bit further how to get it to treat "Classic" apps correctly. Overall, though, I'm quite happy with it -- certainly much more than I was with the iBook.
Apple, in keeping with the rest of the computer community, does not ship the PowerBook with enough RAM (I don't think I've ever seen a stock configuration from any vendor that included a realistic amount of RAM). It comes with 256 megs, but 512 is really the more appropriate base amount. Fortunately, expansion is a pretty straightforward matter, and I've purchased a 256 meg DIMM on eBay. I'm anxious for it to get here.
I can also report, from what I've seen thus far, that "RealMyst" is a great game. I do wonder how long it's going to take me to find the new "Rime Age", though. If any of my readers know where it is... no hints, please. I'd prefer to find it on my own. And if I get desperate enough, I'll Google it. :^) My best guess is that it's probably hidden inside one of the other ages, since hiding it on Myst Island would be too obvious... then again, I guess one never knows.
Well, I went to work feeling pretty crappy this morning, but the day at the office was reasonably good -- workload good without being overwhelming, and not too many people at the office. I even left a little early today, figuring I certainly deserve it.
The war against the bathtub finally seems to be finished. After assaulting it on my own for the past several weeks, with varying levels of success, I finally left a message with the landlord on Monday to have someone come in to fix it. As I was on my way out of the house this morning, the property manager told me they'd be taking care of it today. When I got home, I found that my bathtub was, indeed, fully functional, and they even cleaned up all the yuck that had been building up since I first started having problems. Very satisfying... I'm really looking forward to my shower tomorrow morning.
In other news, I backed up the Hieronymous Bosch last night, and I did a test restore this evening. Much to my relief, it worked, which I was really worried about because when I tried it on Sunday during the Big Migration, it crapped out. So I'm in good shape for the moment, but like Moggy, I need to modify my backup routine. Right now, I'm backing up to a single session on an external hard drive, and while that's better than not backing up at all, it's still somewhat risky, as she has just pointed out on her blog. I'll have to do a little research and figure something out.
The new notebook is working out quite well so far, and I hope to finish up my "dry run" of everything in the next couple of days or so. I still need to test how it handles external monitors and FireWire devices, and I also need to experiment more with the CD-RW (damn, I hate optical drives, they always give me trouble).
Season premiere of "Smallville" is on tonight -- who will save Clark from his class ring with the Red Kryptonite stone? Lana Lang, I would assume, but I wonder how she'll do it.
So according to the most recent polls, Arnold is probably going to win this coming Tuesday. It really is hard to take this whole thing seriously...