Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Frustration

Well to keep sharp I'm working on this on again project to monitor and respond to certain real time events. This is basically a way for me to learn programming in the Macintosh OS environment. Well it turns out I started the project partly down the wrong path (dumb bo bo) and am having to retrench. This is involving adding things at a root level of my project and is a long tedious process involving I/O code for objects. Some of that very necessary tedious coding that has to be done correctly or else nothing works. I'm down to the end of my night and its not done yet. The I remembered that yes it is Wednesday and we get the next installment The West Wing Fantasy Season 8, except its already 10 PM PT and it hasn't been posted yet on the Josh/Donna West Wing fanfiction group.

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Blowing a job interview

Ok, I screwed the pooch on this one. This was a single company "Job Fair" with the company trying to fill a number of positions, including 9 Software Engineer positions I am interested in. I sit down with the first guy and we are going through my experience and he states that they are looking for stronger Oracle candidates and people who can start working immediately without a training process. When he said this, I really should have come back at him with something along the lines of good luck because Qualcomm sucked all those people up years ago and the ones they didn't aren't worth hiring. What I did say at that point doesn't matter, I just ended up trying to sell myself which is what you can't do in an interview.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

A run of luck . . .

Ok, so my week ends last week with my ReplayTV loosing all of my recordings then not being able to complete a recording and my Epson printer breaking down also, both on Thursday. On Friday, I traced the ReplayTV problem to a failed hard drive, replaced it (3 hours to install an Ethernet card in an old PC to d/l a clean image file, 30 minutes to load the image onto a new HD and replace it in the ReplayTV. The HD was one I had sitting around to upgrade the unit with, so no money out of my pocket, just the time involved to get the PC working. My Epson had ran out of black Ink, so I installed a new cartridge and then it stopped printing black entirely. The online help ended with a please send us an email and we will get back to you. This was early Saturday morning and on Monday I did get an email back of basically, call us and we will help you. I do that and after giving them my serial number the told me the unit was out of warranty and they wanted $9.95 to answer my questions. Well, I bought this printer for $80, I had just spent another $80 on Ink (it needed black and all 3 colors due to running the cleaning cycles to try and fix the problem) and now they want $9.99 to answer my question. Pass, since my best guess is that it would need service (on my dime). After another fun day of calling people job hunting, I'm off to Fry's to buy a printer. As I'm pulling in, I have the top down and hear that click-click-click of something stuck in my tire (hint convertibles have expensive tires). As I'm get out of the car I hear the hiss of air leaking out of a rear tire. No problem, I have run flat tires (expensive) and I'll limp home and get it looked at tomorrow. Sure enough in the morning it is flat, so I pump it up and take the car in. Since these are low profile (expensive) run flat (expensive) performance (very expensive) tires (for you gear heads 225/25 ZR 18) they are not stocked in San Diego and my car wont be available until Thursday at the earliest. Oh and I need 2 because of the tread wear after 30 K of my driving (corners are fun!) All told, a quick $1K with an alignment. So much for limiting my expenditures while I'm unemployed.