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2006-04-30

 

Magic Number

19.

You heard me right, the magic number is 19. Nineteen. One Nine. At least according to my current agenda. And if they don't add more people.

Are they making me to also interview with their janitor? Seriously, Googling random names in the agenda always return someone who has chaired a few conferences and a long list of publications and patents...

No wonder it has to last for two days. Of course, if I interview for eight hours each day for two days, and with one and a half hours spent on the seminar, I could in theory still do 33 interviews. 19 means the schedule is not going to be too tight...

Is there any chance that I can even stand up after all the interviews?

2006-04-28

 

NY Interviews

The NY interviews are going to happen in a week and change. How many one-to-one interviews do you think I'll have? Remember that this is a two-day interview with a long seminar. Take some wild guesses and I'll reveal the magic number later.

2006-04-27

 

Difficult Decision

I now know the details on my offer. The numbers are good, comparable to the nonevil company. Their stocks are more attractive, since it is only at about half of their peak. The title is also SDE, albeit it is within their research lab and has the word "Senior." They also want me to start as soon as possible, to the extent that they don't mind paying for my trip back to Houston for my defense if I can join them before that.

But the bad side is that they want decision soon. Very soon. In a couple of days. This is going to be well before the NY interview trip with the Colored Giant. What should I do?

Update: While I can't get them to guarantee to hold the position for me, they do allow me to reply them after the interview, and it would be "very likely" that they would still have the position for me...

2006-04-26

 

A Word A Day

Today's word: ridicurous.

Definition: ridiculous.

As in: This is ridicurous. The HR person arranging my New York trip wants to buy me air tickets that are twice as expensive and with a connection (instead of direct flight), so as to avoid the New York city traffic... on a Sunday and on a Wednesday morning before 5am! So that I would end up spending 3+ hours on the plane and in an airport each way to avoid traffic...

Side note: Of course, like other HR people, she sent me this email at midnight...

2006-04-24

 

Offer

I was told that I'm going to get an offer from the anti-virus company. Cool! Now I finally have an offer for a research position!

2006-04-23

 

Tracker Stopped Working

My tracking for this blog stopped working all of a sudden, the reason being "no such account registered." I'll probably replace it with some better service later, but a bit too busy for that right now, even though my New York trip is delayed to next month. So, for a while, I won't be able to know if, say, someone from D E Shaw coming to my blog through searching for "interview data structure questions."

Update: It seems to be working again now. I get to know that there are still dudes trying to search for a proxy server to read the Hong Kong newspaper Appledaily for free...

2006-04-20

 

On the Flights

A bit more on the flights. I managed to get some work done on the flight to LA, partly because of the upgrade and that the movie they were playing was Harry Potter, but more because of this noise canceling headphone. It really worked good enough to reduce the noise into an acceptable level for working. The only drawback is now that the background noise is reduced, I sometimes hear things I couldn't hear before. Like the girl in the first row in coach was singing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star...


2006-04-19

 

The Trip to La-La Land

Back from the interview, I can only say, impressive! It is a job about spending a couple of quarters working on a new idea and try to build a prototype and put it into a new product. And repeats. Seems to be much cooler than implementing mail and calendar.

I stayed on a hotel three blocks from the Santa Monica beach. Its exact location is on the west end of I-10, a freeway that also goes through Houston. Makes it sound very close.

I did not get an upgrade on the return flight. But I did get another upgrade. The rental car company ran out of midsize and offered me a free upgrade to a convertible (Chrylser Sebring), giving me my first time driving one.

It also turns out, a lot of people there know my boss. I heard many interesting stuff on my interviews... well it was closer to chatting anyway.

2006-04-16

 

Can You Believe This?

I am preparing for my seminar for my New York interview. You won't believe it, but the following is the first paragraph of the abstract.
Resource management plays a vital role to the survival of small- and medium-scale business. With the inevitable progress in digital revolution and globalization, competitions among corporations become more intense than ever. An effective resource management solution would give resource-constrained corporations an edge in competitive industries. Its integration with information technology becomes necessary for business to succeed nowadays.
I have absolutely no idea what I will be interviewing for...

2006-04-15

 

Broketail Cat

If you pay close attention to my posts, you might notice some seemingly inconsistency. Why are the new kitties black and white, while I said the old lady next door has a black male cat?

The mystery has been solved. Remember the other family that prepared a comfy cushion for the cat? I found out that they have a black and white cat...

Damn, why my neighbors have nothing better to do than breeding cats around? There is already way too many cats around!

A side note. The new mom has a broken tail. It might have something to do with the screaming I heard the other morning at 4am...

2006-04-13

 

More Obsession

Q: What can I do to have more obsession with twngan on the net?
A: Use the domain name obsessionwithtwngan.net instead!

2006-04-12

 

First Class!

So I'm flying to LA for the interview with the antivirus company next week. They finally sent me the details so that I could call American Express Travel to make reservations for my trip. I made a deadly wrong decision: I called immediately.

Since it is less than a week from the interview day, the outbound flight is at full fare. Combining with my Elite Status, I upgraded to first class (actually for US domestic flights it is more like business) right away. But since the inbound flight is exactly one week away, AE still managed to get a normal fare ticket. This means that I'll need to wait until one day before taking off and hope for a remaining first class seats (4 remaining now), which I would then get an automatic upgrade. If I knew about this, I could have waited one more day and have my first class seats guaranteed both way, at the expense of maybe $200 more ticket fare on the company...

Nah, I'm just saying it. I wouldn't have done that anyway.

(A side note: my 6pm return flight that arrives to Houston at 11pm has a complimentary... brunch!)

2006-04-11

 

SQLite

As a systems student, a large part of my work is on running lots of experiments to generate lots of data, and expressing lots of data in different forms to show the "fruits" of my designs. Thus, even after finished running experiments, I still need to do a lot of data processing, mostly via writing lots of Perl scripts, before knowing how well I have done.

I recall that a year or two ago my boss suggested me to use a database to store the data for easy accessibility and querying. I didn't do it then because... it sounded like a lot of work. Plus the only machine I had convenient root access was my 7-year-old desktop machine. You don't really want to add services to that poor machine.

But now that I'm again running experiments, I reevaluated this solution. Now it sounds almost like a stupid thing not using a database, after discovering SQLite. I don't need to run a damn SQL server to use SQLite, yet I still get a lightening fast database that I can code with all the languages I'd use. It even comes with a command-line access program, making it god damn fast to generate processed data.

My life will never be the same...

2006-04-09

 

Firefox 2.0

I've upgraded. Not exactly to 2.0, but an alpha release called Bon Echo. It is noticeably faster, particularly for page rendering and when you open a new window or several new tabs through bookmark. It also seems to have much less memory leaks. Maybe I can finally leave it running all day long without restarting.

I can upgrade now because the most important extension, Adblock Plus, has finally upgraded to be compatible with it. I have also updated the other extension I can't live without, rsremover, to be compatible.

Actually, I didn't exactly upgrade to Bon Echo. I just installed the portable version and keep 1.5 around. There are still some sites Bon Echo would crash. One of them is Yahoo Mail...

2006-04-08

 

Gas Trend

If you wonder lately, "am I going insane, or is the gas prices in Houston that is actually going insane?" it is not you.

Look at the chart I shamelessly stole from HoustonGasPrices. We have just passed the USA average last week. Finally, Houston is no longer a darn cheap place to live in.

"What can we do?" you ask. Here's one if you get your gas from ExxonMobil. Apply for a Speedpass to save 5¢ per gallon (reapply for a new one if you already have one). Link it to a credit card that gives 5% cash back on gas, i.e., Citi Dividend Card, Chase Cash Plus Rewards Card, or, for this quarter, Discover Card and register for its cash back bonus (the Discover Card is preferred since it doesn't have the stingy cap). Then, on top of that, link your credit card to a Upromise account to save 1¢ more per gallon.

An example: if the price is $2.79 / gallon, for each gallon, you get back 5¢ from Speedpass, ~14¢ from the credit card, and 1¢ from Upromise, making it around $2.59 / gallon.

There's a catch, for me at least, though. Upromise is for saving college money for your kid. But I don't technically have a kid...

2006-04-06

 

Panic Mode

It's official: I have just switched to panic mode.

Let's look at my schedule for the next few weeks, shall we?
Deep shit, isn't it?

2006-04-05

 

Holy Shit!

That's exactly what I said this morning, when I was in my parked car preparing to go to school.

I saw my neighbor backing up in the parking area. When I say backing up, I mean all the way. And more. She (of course it is a she) hit the car parked on the opposite side. It was not like her car slightly touches the other car, but it wasn't a severe collision either (I didn't hear anything). What happened was more unbelievable: She did not stop at the moment of collision; her car slowly pushed the other car and forced it to tilt for an angle of maybe 5 degrees. It was almost like she was trying to make a collision while minimizing the damages to both cars.

Finally she stopped, moved a bit forward, and looked back at the poor parked car. Three seconds later, she (of course) left without leaving a note or something.

Now I don't feel safe parking my car around.

2006-04-04

 

Meow!

The biggest selling point of my apartment has to be the fact that it makes a perfect home for growing... kitties. Three (?) more now. I wonder which generation do they belong to.

 

Nonevil Decision

After getting the offer from the nonevil company but hanging the offer around for only around four months, the nonevil company seems to start getting impatient. The HR person politely asked if I have any question and if I could decide by mid April. Hm... my interview in New York is not going to happen until the end of the month... What should I do now?

Update: It was easy. All it takes was to say that I have an interview. That gives me a whole month. Unlike some other companies, maybe they're just confident enough to let you shop around as you like.

2006-04-01

 

4/1

I was tempted to post some April Fool's joke, like after serious considerations I have decided to decline Princeton's faculty position for a chance to go to my dream city Boulder for University of Colorado, but concluded that I have already seen too many jokes after seeing just one and got my eyes hurt: the redesigning of Slashdot to attract 13-year-old girls...

I somehow find it necessary to put down this quote from the movie (guess which one).
Dude, on a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being not so extreme and 10 being extremely extreme, I give this a 9.5!
   - Extreme Sports Punk #1

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