Categories: pedro | jobs

(5) Fri Jun 02 08:06:46 PST leaving las vegas:

I informed my workplace today that I will be leaving, effective August 4th. I was really nervous about the reaction because so far I have been a fairly integral part of a lot of our new projects, but everyone handled it very well (which was nice for me because I was afraid of major drama about it). I hate disappointing people, and I certainly didn't want people to feel like I have been ungenuine, but there was no way to not deliver the bad news, and delivering it now is better than later from the perspective of the company.

The good news is that I got in to UCLA for a masters in Computer Science -- I am so excited to be doing that instead of this, although both of us being in grad school is going to really put us in the hole for a long time.

A friend pointed it out that it is almost a year since I left NPU.

One of the things that has been really frustrating about this job is that I spend so much time doing things that we would have student workers do at NPU. I'm doing some cool things (we run Linux servers instead of Windows, for example) but most of the time I can't really work on cool stuff for those systems because I'm too busy helping people with email (non-)problems and the like. It's not that I think I'm "too good for it" or something, but my time would really be better spent working on challenging projects.

It has been a struggle to get an assistant/partner in here to help take some of the workload, but even then, we both spend most of our time working on fluff issues. What we really need is a 19 year old kid to work here to do all the grunt work.

(1) Thu Oct 06 12:28:45 PST i've got a job and other news flashes:

I've got a job! Apparently the interview yesterday was a success from the client's perspective and I will be starting next week! The people from the hiring company told me that the client had actually looked around at some other candidates but didn't find anyone that was anywhere near as good a fit. I am super excited about the job, so that's cool.

In other news -- I am surprised by how little people here use their horns. In Chicago, if the light was green for half a second and you hadn't started rolling forward, people were honking. But on a scale of 1 to New York City with Chicago being a 7, I think that LA has to be a 3 or a 4. I don't know if I've been honked at once.

I was listening to the band Barenaked Ladies today, as a nostalgic romp back in time, and listening to them embarasses me a little, because I hear a lot of my own musical sensibilities that were shaped in early college when I listened to BNL a lot. Much of what I would like to cut out of my own musical stylings was put there (or amplified by) BNL. I don't even say that to dis them; I think they're great musicians and they put on a great show (at least they did in 1994 when I last saw them). But I don't want to be them.

Finally, our hot water is out. We're pushing about 36 hours with no hot water, but they are working on it. Our dishes are stacking up like lepers around the pool of Siloam, except that the pool is dry as a bone. Monday I heated water up on the stove to do dishes just like we used to a boy scout camp, but I'm not going to do that today.

Maybe the cold shower before the interview was what did it?

Wed Oct 05 16:23:54 PST job search:

I had an interview today for a very cool job that I'm really excited about. I don't want to talk too much about it, but it's primarily Linux oriented and the subject matter is really exciting, so that's cool. I like them and I think they like me, so I'm very hopeful.

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