eviljim.com: the mac days

Do yourself a favor - make 4 friends, and grab a copy of the board game “Clue.”

What is sold as merely a game of simple elimination is quite intense when you’re older. A bunch of us got together and played and we went Beautiful Mind on it - the effect only embiggened by the fact that you only get a little tiny piece of paper upon which to make notes.

I think it was Crystal who actually wrote down (somehow in such limited space) every supposition made, and who provided evidence.

Seriously - Clue, go pick yourself up a copy.

I am a HIGH ROLLER, woo!

This was at the Google ski-trip with a mock casino (winner, apparently, won a trip. If I had known about that I would have taken my gambling much more seriously).

My mom went out to visit my brother, and saw a taping of “Deal or No Deal” that, apparently, went on for 5 hours. Here is what she had to say:

“ask billy about the deal or no deal taping.
i got a free mini candy bar.
billy was not so lucky.”

So I used to have this trick question I’d ask near the end of an interview, if I thought people could handle it (eg: they would know, at least, that a hash table was a programming concept). I would simply ask, “How would you go about sorting a hash table?”

The correct answer is to be confused by the question, and ask something along the lines of “Do you mean sort the keys, or sort the values, or something else entirely?”

Based on some recent things happening, I think a better way would be:

“How would you access the fourth item of a hash table?”

It’s the same concept - that hashes are not ordered in any way - but it’s something that yields a better answer both if you do or do not know the answer. Simply put, “You can’t, that makes no sense, I don’t want to work here if you think that’s possible” if you know what a hash table is, or something stupid if you’ve used them and don’t understand them:

@keys = keys(%hash)
print $hash{$keys[3]} // zero indexed; I’m a computer programmer

Even better is you could say something like “are you sure that is right?” and then get this:

@keys = keys(%hash);
if (@keys > 3)
{
print $hash{$keys[3]}; // zero indexed; I’m a computer programmer
}
else
{
print “Define some more variables!”;
}

Which is even better.

Holy crap!

One of the nice benefits of google is the free meals. I will not lie - I ate like a king my first week in Mountain View. My first day they had waigyu tri-tip. Little strips of heaven.

Unfortunately working in Kirkland you are many thousands of miles away from the delicious Charlie’s Cafe.

They still offer decent meals, and one of the nice additions as of a couple weeks ago was a nice selection of ice creams. This includes such things as Choco Tacos, ice cream sandwiches, and more. Yum.

Bear with me here - this is all going somewhere.

Today at lunch I grabbed my meal and there was no place to sit, so I decided to eat upstairs at my desk. So on my way out I grabbed an ice cream sandwich, as the cafe is on another floor. Heaven forbid I walk myself up and down stairs again to grab a 160 calorie frozen treat.

I’m eating my meal and realize my ice cream sandwich is melting! Melting, right before my eyes, as I eat some delicious tandoori spiced pork. So I walk over to a micro-kitchen and figure I can put it in the freezer.

At Microsoft the freezer was often quite full. Frozen meals were pretty popular for people who work late, so there was often many boxes in there. I was worried here at google there might not be space for my beloved ice cream sandwich.

I had forgotten, of course, there’s no need for those boxes as dinner is provided. As such, nobody opens the freezer. Apparently EVER.

A flood of ice cubes come pouring out of the freezer hitting me in the face and chest. I’m stunned and icy.

Apparently this specific freezer does not disable ice making at a certain overflow point. No, it just keeps filling the freezer with more and more ice until someone comes and gets injured by it. That person being me, of course.

I put my sandwich in the freezer and walked away, slightly moist and concerned for my own wellbeing.

Nothing like Netflix to make you feel just a little bit gay:

I now have a brown Zune, and an unlimited subscription to Zune Marketplace. What can I say - the price was right!

Technically this is my second Zune; the first one only worked until it stopped.

My initial opinions: some of the navigation is much better than the iPod, but the device is much more clunky. The tech lead on my project, when he noticed it, picked it up and said “why would they release something this big?”

That was one of the nicer comments made about it, actually, so I’ll stop there.

Videos look quite nice on it, but it doesn’t support any rational format, so I have none but the pre-supplied crappy ones.

Anyway - thank you J. Allard, pirate and legionnaire, for this device.