Linked In

Oh, as my initial step back into the job market, I updated my LinkedIn profile.

Will work for salary

I've started the job search again, having spent much of the past year dealing with the... difficulty of having my nephew in the house. When he first came to live with me, he'd agreed that there would be no more smoking, no more drinking, no more drugs, no more partying in general. He'd finish high school, he'd find a job, he'd get his life back on track.

Unfortunately, he also came with a video game addiction and a violent temper.

Ever since my PS2 mysteriously stopped working, I've forbidden game consoles in the house. It's been hard on me, as I'd like to play Guitar Hero. :) But whereas I can control my game time, he loses track of time, forgets his laundry, forgets to eat, forgets to go to bed, etc. Further, he's been of the mentality that running around Vice City killing civilians for fun is an acceptable way to pass the time. I'm almost glad the Playstation broke, as it means no more Grand Theft Auto. In general I don't believe that video games lead to violent behavior, but in his case they certainly feed it.

Having removed the video game influences from the house, having attended a year of school, having found a job, having started to read for fun, and having finally gotten his temper under control, I finally feel I can focus on getting a job.

I've spent the past several months studying as best I can with him in the house (he's very demanding of attention), reviewing HTML, CSS and Java, reading a book on Ajax, and re-reading a book on Objective-C and Cocoa that I'd been reading a year and a half ago when my sister first got arrested (which led to my nephew coming to live with me). I've also started reading a book on design patterns, which were utterly lacking from my education.

I'm nervous about interviewing, for a number of reasons. First, I spent ten and a half years at Oracle, meaning it's been 12 years since I've had a job interview. I did a couple of phone screens before my sister got arrested, but they were for jobs I really wasn't interested in, and were more for interview practice than anything else.

One of the recent trends in interviewing is to ask bizarre questions such as How many gas stations are there in the United States? or Why are manhole covers round? The first is a Fermi problem, where you make a number of assumptions to come up with a result. The second is a bit easier, but still requires enough creativity to realize that any other shape could be dropped in the hole, and wouldn't be as easy to move (a circle can be rolled -- a triangle can't).

I'm also a tad nervous about my past as a software generalist, in which I don't have a speciality but have instead worked on whatever needed to be done at the time. This ranges anywhere from writing a tape backup system for NeXTStep, to learning Perl for the purpose of maintaining an internal source control system, to learning PL/SQL so I could write a programming tool for Oracle Forms, to learning Java for the purpose of fixing bugs in the Java Plug-in. I've read a couple of articles suggesting being a generalist is a good thing, and I like it as it provides ample opportunity to learn new things. I just hope it's sufficient in an interview, as I can't speak in depth on Perl, PL/SQL or Java, having learned each for the specified task, then moving on.

This is part of the reason for reading my Java book twice during my break, and for diving into my Objective-C and Cocoa programming book. Java's the language I've used most since 1998, having used C almost exclusively before then, with a smattering of Perl, HTML, PL/SQL and Objective-C thrown in as the project demanded. In my recent study, I learned some things about Java that I hadn't learned during my time debugging the plug-in. And I'd love to return to Mac development -- it's what I did before I went to Oracle, and is actually what I was hired for at Oracle. However, Oracle abandoned support for the Mac a year and a half after I got there. Much sadness followed.

I was offered a job at Apple DTS three months after I accepted the Oracle offer. I really wish I'd taken it, as I've always wanted to work there. I chose DTS, at the time, as it seemed a fantastic place to learn more about Mac software development. What better way to improve than to help others with their programming problems?

I'd like to think the desire and demonstration to learn would be sufficient, but I don't know that it is. I'll just have to jump into the interview process and find out what happens. Apple aside, I'd love to get into Google or Yahoo!, working on some Mac or Java project, or even on a web-related project, as I'd love to find a practical reason to dive further into Ajax and CSS.

And so it begins...

Watermelon and strawberries

I pulled out the watermelon, taking care not to squish or discard my praying mantis. Unfortunately, I couldn't find it. Last time I saw it, it was perched on a leaf in the guava tree.

Like the cantaloupe, the watermelon hadn't produced a single melon of note. The largest was the size of a grapefruit, but most were lucky if they reached the size of an orange. I may try again next year, though honestly I'm leaning toward honeydew melon, instead. Next time I'll take care to heavily fertilize the soil before planting anything.

It looks like I'm up to four pumpkins. One's turned orange already, two are tree, another had just started and is still kinda yellowish. I planted them specifically for Halloween, but still don't know how many I'm going to get. I may need to break down and actually buy some this year. Make: has a Halloween special on shelves now, with all sorts of great ideas haunted house ideas. And Martha Stewart (gag, but read on) has a Halloween issue out with even more ideas. I chatted briefly with Darren and Corrii about decorating my place this year, since they don't get trick-or-treaters out in the mountains.

Oh, right, I was supposed to say something about strawberries. I think today was my largest strawberry harvest to date. I have two strawberry pots in the back yard, with about twelve plants. Most of the strawberries are green, but this morning I was able to enjoy half a dozen sweet, juicy strawberries. I can see another dozen ripening, and about another two dozen green berries.