So I went to the interview yesterday. It’s for a SysAdmin position that would pay well (a little better than what I make now). And it would be a normal schedule–5 eights instead of the current whacked out schedule. In my dotage, I am finding the 4 10-hour days less advantageous than I did before.

My feelings about the interview are the same that they always are: I think I either did very well or very poorly. Who the hell knows? The good news is that they said they’d be making a decision by Friday, so the people who get it should know by Monday at the latest. That beats the “if you don’t hear from us in the next two months, then that means you didn’t get the job” shit you usually get from an employer.

So I don’t know. We’ll see what happens Friday.

Think good thoughts for me–going for an interview (System Administrator I) in 2 hours…

(i think i can…i think i can…i think i can…)

Before I explain Austin (or, rather, my interest in it. I’ll leave explaining the city itself up to the people who currently live there), I need to go back a ways…

Come back with me to the beginning of the 90’s. Vanilla Ice had not yet been discovered as the dork he is. Parachute pants were still in existence. Dinosaurs roamed the earth and one, also with the name “Bush” was still in charge of the country–although, to his credit, doing a far superior job (if not all that good) to the current reality-challenged, pathological, lobotomized monkey in the White House today. It was a time of innocence, when we thought that the Gulf War was wrong, but what the heck–it seemed harmless enough.

I was just a youngster then, starting my first year of college at New Mexico Tech (then the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology) studying computer programming. Among other courses (like a brain-numbing course in Pascal), I took a practicum in C. Well, to any adult, taking a practicum in C in your first or second semester as a programmer with little to no experience (remember, C was only ANSI-ed in 89, so our copy of K&R didn’t even have the ANSI stamp on the cover) in C is a sure fire way to get your ass kicked.

Unsurprisingly, my ass was thoroughly kicked.

I left NMIMT after that spring semester, confused and unsure what to do. I wandered a bit intellectually–moving to entomology and fiction writing, then leaving college in even more confusion. I returned later to pick up a BA in English (and only 5 credits short of a BS in Biology).

But across all this time (has it already been 17 years?!?! Christ on crutches, where does the time go?? Fuck!), as I mentioned yesterday, two assignments have haunted me.  Well, one will haunt me no longer.

As of a few minutes ago, I completed the calendar program.  It’s not impressive, but it’s not supposed to be.  What it is supposed to be is complete, and complete it is, Sam I am.

I’d put it up for download–because I just know people are clamoring to own this fantabulous piece of code, but sadly it is compiled on Linux, and so will only run on Linux.

Also for the Linux nerds out there, I stole someone’s animation and made it into a little file for Wanda, the fortune telling fish (for the GNOME panel):

So, if you set this as the active image/animation for your Wanda app, and set the name to “Hammy, who is not”, then you will have a little hamster running in his wheel on your panel. :)  I might try giving the panel app a hack to remove the default ” the Fish” from the name.  We shall see.

Ok–so why any interest in Austin at all?

Well, it’s not because I love the city, because I don’t.  I don’t quite hate it, but I am very un-fond of it.  The racism in that city is rampant and codified.  I can only imagine what it’s like in the rest of the state.

But I applied for a job as a programmer (probably mostly C, on legacy systems, though later moving to J2EE) .  If I get it, the money will be good (15% raise, which isn’t too shabby), plus relocation package, etc.  I swing wildly between excitement and fear that I won’t get it.  But all we can do is wait.  I might find something out tonight when I go back to work.  I hope.  And I hope it’s good.  God, I hope it’s good…

So, I’m wading through C, trying to get at least some rudimentary grasp of it (I’ll explain later).

At any rate, ever since my first semester in college (a long, long time ago) there have been two incomplete programming assignments that have hounded me: 1) write a program to print out a year’s calendar, properly formatted, or a month’s calendar from any (reasonable) year, or tell the user the day of the week for any (reasonable) given date and 2) write a program that will strip comments from a C source code file.

Well, technically, the second was “…including nested comments” but since nested comments aren’t legal in C, I’m ignoring that. I’m sure it’s a good practice assignment, but there are plenty of real-life puzzles; we don’t need to start taking on invented, impossible problems too.

As far as the first one, I’m working on it. C is not the language to use if you want to deal with strings. C doesn’t like strings (and, based on current evidence, it’s not too fond of programmers either). But I can manage it thus far.

I found a formula for determining the day of the week:

(d+=m<3?y--:y-2,23*m/9+d+4+y/4-y/100+y/400)%7

Piece of cake, right? Obviously the guy who came up with this is far smarter than I am (well–except for the AOL thing ;)). Also obviously, he was more interested in writing a compact formula than a readable formula, which is also ok. If he can pack it in there, I can unpack it. Eventually.

Also, he pointed out some books that look like a lot of fun.

I can’t say it better than this, except to cuss more.

It reminds me of Monty Python’s Bookshop sketch:

“The expurgated version of Olsen’s Standard Book of British Birds?”

“The one without the gannet.”

“The one without the gannet?!? It’s a standard British bird, the gannet! It’s in all the books!”

I’ve always enjoyed naming characters, programs, etc. Despite their utility, I despise names like “Program Switcher” (although I’ve been forced to use such names from time to time). I’m also not fond of names like “Cedega”, because they tell you nothing about the program. Not a hint about what it does, what it’s for, or why you would even want to pay it the slightest attention. The best names are those that are catchy, unique, and give the reader/listener some idea what the program might do. Consider things like Gnumeric, Rhythmbox, & Stellarium. While you may not know exactly what they are for, each drops a little hint about the general area of concern.

Through several years of experience, I have learned that I’m happier if I pick out a program name before I start working on the program–because once I get going, it’s going to be very difficult to change the name, and if you aren’t careful you end up with names like “Switcho”, “GTWeb” and the like.

Which brings us to the current issue: what to call this VS. deck building web program? DeckBuilder? DeckMinder? DeckMaster? Deckster? Dry Deck? According to Dictionary.com, the work deck comes from the Dutch word dekken, which means “to cover” (think of a deck on a ship, not a card deck). Sounds boring. One possibility is Full Deck, but I’m not sure yet. Gah!

Pale nerd needs food badly…

As I mentioned yesterday, I have been rather abruptly dragged into the great Black Parade. The funny thing is that being sick (which, again, was just allergies–nothing life threatening) has “centered” me in a way I haven’t been in a long time. I don’t mean in the sense of some silly moment-of-clarity, see-the-light, praise-the-Lord type of centered. It has given me, for some reason, some kind of comfort and happiness I haven’t felt in a long time. Not that I was unhappy before. But this is an inner peace, a restfulness that I haven’t felt for a while.

Eating differently doesn’t feel like a diet, or like I’m trying to do something artificial. It feels like I’m doing what I’ve always done, except that it’s not at all what I used to do. Again, it’s not like I’m running 10 miles each morning, but last night for lunch at work I had:

• white rice with low-sodium soy sauce
• raw green beens
• 2 small squares of dark chocolate
• 2 (largish) slices of sourdough bread
• 3-4 ounces of hummus
• 3-4 leaves of green leaf lettuce
• 1 Diet Pepsi Max (while I waiting for my tea to brew )
• 3 stalks of raw celery
• 2-3 ounces of crab & trout paste
• 1 marzipan/dark chocolate bar

That’s a far cry from my “old” fare: 2-3 double cheeseburgers, maybe an ice cream cone; or a 12″ sub with extra mayo from Subway; or, Heaven help us, a yummy platter from Taco Bueno.

On a (probably) unrelated note, I’ve become convinced that the US–and possibly the world–is headed for ruin in the short-term.  Between the war in Iraq, the threat of war in Iran, the near-complete dissolution of civil liberties in the US, the threat of the housing bubble burst, the national deficit, the trade deficit and China’s large stores of US dollars, I think we will soon see a hard rain begin to fall.  I think, barring a complete collapse of the US, we’ll do just fine and experience minimal pain.  We shall see…

In an only tangentially connected thought process (really, it is), I’ve been feeling awfully hippie-ish lately.  I already had been planning on looking for an all-electric commuter vehicle next year, and had been daydreaming about solar panels on the house to at least generate power, if not heat water.  And then the other day it occurred to me that it would be possible to build a green house, capture and store rainwater and actually grow stuff.  Now, the question about whether or not I would actually be willing to do the work necessary to grow food is another thing.

I’m feeling a little overwhelmed by “Monkey Mind” lately–feeling like I could do anything.  Code!  Draw!  Design!  Garden!  Write!

It’s probably a combination of being well again and having my BP lowered (which, oddly, I think has done all kinds of wonderful things for me), and so it will probably go away soon enough.

In the meantime, I’ve made a bit of a personal list of things to do:

• Build the Deck Minder site
• Finish Bentoya
• Finish PSPedia

The first one shouldn’t be too long, as I finally found some spoiler xml files that contain all the data (name, version, cost, att/def, text, flavor).  Combine those files with the previously gathered images, throw in a little PHP and a few one-time scripts and you’re done!

Bentoya is about 30% done, but the hard part (dealing with Etsy’s RSS) is finished.  Now to add the blog, put some polish on it and send it on it’s way.

It finally happened. Despite my best efforts…

And, much to my displeasure, I have to say that I welcome our new Linux overlords. It’s been a HIGHLY pleasant experience, and much easier than any other distro, or any other OS for that matter. It’s really a beautiful thing.

On a more serious note–it seems my blood pressure was 180/115, which apparently is something to get excited about (although not, one would hope, the sort of thing that might raise your blood pressure…zing! Thank you!).

So they put me on some drug to keep the bp down for the nonce, told me to make an appointment with my GP, and sent me home to mourn the inexorable and offensive march of time.