eviljim.com: the mac days

Right now, Google’s logo is “Mother’s Day” - click on it, and you do a search for Mother’s Day.

Makes sense, okay.

But at the same time, it’s almost like a giant ad for everything Google can do inside search, too. Almost too much so, maybe, to be a coincidence.

For example, you get an instant answer onebox (mother’s day is on …).
You also get integrated inline news results (fairly new), related searches at the bottom, an ad with a Google Checkout badge, and of course, a YouTube video is one of the top results.

Take a gander over at live search and you get a pretty plain old results page - you get news results at the top, and one related search that makes no sense (”Monologue S For Mothers Day” - wtf? Is monologue R for Memorial Day?)

Ask.com has a nifty “MOM” tattoo heart thing going on, but the result of a search is pretty much as bland as live.com.

The winner? Google, because their related searches include apostrophes in “mother’s” - grammar is important.

Now I have to buy a Mac… great.

I was looking around, customizing a new laptop (for someone else — 2 is enough for me right now) and I see this on Dell’s customization page:

Do they have any proofreaders? Don’t they ever double check things? Does anyone literate work for Dell? I guess not. Idiots.

(Sorry, but this and it’s/its are stupid mistakes that companies should not make).

So I have officially graduated college. Well, actually, it’s still unofficial but I did get a nice paper saying they hope as much as I do that I’ve fulfilled the requirements.

So the first thing I realized is that so far my life hasn’t changed at all since graduating. I did, however, recently take a survey and for once checked “completed college” instead of “some college” under Education.

The big change will be coming in a couple months — I’ll have moved halfway across the continent and starting in a new (well, mostly) job.

Oh, and, since you’re reading this I assume you are my friend, and as such are a good person. You know what to do.

I was just sitting, minding my own business when suddenly an overwhelming thought came into my head:

“Cowboys of Moo Mesa”

I have no idea why. I never watched the show, which last aired over 10 years ago, and have not thought of anything remotely related to cows, cowboys, mesas, or specifically Moo mesas.

Yet there it is.

A few quick updates for the update hungry:

1) I accepted a full-time job. I chose this over this. This means sometime in February (or so) I’ll be moving to Washington. Fortunately I’ve watched plenty of “Frasier” so I’m well prepared.

2) I was hit by a car. Everything is fine, except my bike, although Brian has promised to try to fix it. I need to write up a full detail of this but I need to take some pictures first, for the benefit of those not who haven’t used the crosswalk where I was hit.

3) Another Black Friday has come and gone, and once again I get into an argument outside Best Buy. Really it was the best option for entertainment anyway.

4) School is winding down. Two more weeks of classes left, two finals, then commencement. There are, I should mention, less than 12 hours between the end of my last final and when I have to show up for graduation. I hope they grade quickly.

5) My new clock is cooler than yours.

Chat with a spammer. Despite the fact that I called him, more or less, deporable, he tries to sell me bulk email services.

I need to write up a real entry up here one day. And close the window, it’s raining.

I got this in the mail the other day from one of my credit cards:

I believe what they want me to do is write down my username and password and tack it up somewhere by my computer.

Yes, my credit card company has actively encouraged me to do this.

I so badly don’t want to work on my homework I’m going to update my little web log.

Not too much interesting or exciting has been happening, hence the lack of updates. I moved into a new apartment. The best single word to describe this place would be “classic”. Or maybe “vintage.” Less highbrow people would probably just simplify that down to “old.”

The complex was built in the early 70’s — as proven by the “Lead Paint And You” brochure I received upon moving in. Despite being gigantic it is far from luxurious — I miss having a washing machine and a dish washer. Oh, yeah, and carpet that isn’t green shag covered with what appear to be blood stains.

Nah, it’s not too bad though. The only real problem is my oven has two settings: “surface of the sun” or “off. Or so you believe.” Brian would be more better suited with this oven, as he always leaves his on. He could not do that with this one; his apartment would otherwise melt. Yes, melt.

I also recently attended a job fair. Having an outstanding job offer you could simply accept and be lazy thereout is, well, something that makes you want to simply be lazy and accept. The job market, however, seems to be looking up. I already have had two interviews, was just emailed for a third, and was promised I would definitely be interviewed for two other positions.

People I know keep telling me “oh, I just accepted my Microsoft offer” and it tempts me just to do the same… but I know it will come down to a point where I will wonder what was out there if I don’t at least look, so… I am.

On an unrelated and tangental note — when people protest “peace in Iraq”, did it ever occur to them that there wasn’t peace there before the war?

This past Saturday was a Microsoft intern event known as Puzzle Day. Basically at the beginning of the day some Microsoft employees set up this poorly acted story (that our Dean — Dean Bean — had his kidneys stolen) and we’re then given a bunch of puzzles to solve loosely tied to some central theme (urban legends).

A group of 12 of us formed a team, working against 30 other teams (of about 300 interns total). Some puzzles were pretty straight forward, others were a bit tricky. Some were incredibly tricky. Each answer goes to help you solve a ‘meta puzzle’, an uber puzzle you can solve only with the answers from the other puzzles you’ve solved. The metapuzzle gives an answer — in our case “Find kidneys in building 9 cafeteria” — telling you how to finish the quest.

Despite the fact that many of the team members got sick of puzzles in the middle of the day and more or less stopped working on them, our team did really well. We placed 5th and finished just about 15 minutes behind the 1st place team (I believe they were the Harvard team, and one of the other teams we lost to was the MIT team).

It was really cool looking at some random jibberish and suddenly saying “woah, this makes sense.” Or looking at a puzzle that 11 other rather smart people looked at and couldn’t figure out, and figuring it out in about 30 seconds.

All in all a really cool experience. And we even got a can of beans as a 5th place trophy (and a bag of cookies, too. Microsoft is cheap).

Here’s a nice humiliating video of me performing an interpretive dance for Microsoft.

I have style.

Holy crap am I tired.

Another busy week (even though I had two days off of work…) It seems like I never have any free time anymore. Anytime I sit down to write up an entry, give someone a call, or just watch a little TV someone calls or knocks on my door and drags me away.

One thing I did this weekend was get a chance to play a game called Mafia. It’s a game for around 10-12 people that involves killing and lots of lying. It’s a unique experience playing a game that relies a lot on logic with a bunch of rather smart people. At one point another guy from UIUC was giving a 5 minute speech about why two people had to be Mafia, it seemed a very solid argument and he had a good proof but was horribly, horribly wrong.

I also saw Shrek 2, which was nowhere near as good as the first. Alas.

Also on the disappointing movie list was The Prisoner of Azkaban. Sure it was pretty, and a few scenes were done really well… but the combined dissapointments between the total slaughter of my favorite scene from the book and the terrible casting job of Professor Lupin just annoyed me.

Oh, yeah, and it also made no sense. So when everyone is fighting the boggart in the teacher’s lounge, Harry starts to take it on — it shifts to a dementor, then Lupin jumps in and it turns into an obvious moon (also stupid). In the book, he never even comes close to handling the boggart. So, later, when Harry asks why he didn’t get to take on the boggart, it makes sense that Lupin says he worried it would have turned into Voldemort. He still says this in the movie, despite the fact that it had already obviously turned into a dementor. Stupid.

Also new — I signed up for the local gym (apparently the largest gym in the nation). I go work out with a friend of mine from the complex, George (who also happens to be greek, he’s 100% though). Oh man do I hurt.

The first day of work.

So far things are going fairly well here. I arrived in Seattle sunday night, picked up my rental car (which I will probably keep through the whole internship) and found my apartment complex. I brought in my first two bags and as I opened up my door to go back out for the last two, there were four people by my front door about to knock.

So some introductions were done — two of the guys had just gotten in that day too, and the other two had flown in from India the week before. We talked for a while, introduced ourselves, talked about our positions with Microsoft and what groups we had been assigned to.

One of the guys, Byron, and I decided we wanted to go to the grocery store to pick up some essentials, so we hit the local Safeway. The other three guys tagged along, probably just because they were bored. After shopping, we five decided to go find a place in Seattle to grab dinner (Seattle is about 15 miles west of Redmond, where I live and work — not a huge drive).

We found a street full of furniture stores, but could only find one resturaunt, and it was closed. I have started to suspect people in Seattle are inhuman (or, possibly, humans that do not need to eat). We headed back after driving around Seattle for a few hours, which was fun anyway, and ate in Redmond — back where we started probably around 3 hours earlier.

We didn’t start work until Tuesday, so Monday was free to run about. After unpacking I realized another trip to Safeway was in order, so I headed out. As I’m checking out a sale on pork chops and turning the aisle, I run into Byron who has once again returned to the Safeway. This time he’s with his roommate, George, and the girl who lives across the hall from them, Brittany. So more shopping is done, mostly on their part — they purchase in one order a total of like $350 in groceries.

After that I happily find out that George has brought his Gamecube in, so we all sit down for some old fashioned Mario Kart. We’re all pretty much good at the game, even matched so it was quite a bit of fun. I also got to try out Wario Ware for the GC — another really good party game. It’s like crack on crack.

So Tuesday, today, was the first day of actual work. The first half was an orientation where paperwork is filled out (and I unfortunately forgot my birth certificate, which thankfully Dora UPS’ed overnight to the HR lady). I got a neat waterbottle out of it too, and a whole lot of papers on corporate ethics and legalities. Even though they have a orientation meeting every Tuesday for new interns, there were at least 200 at this meeting today. All told the program has between 800 and 1000 interns. And these guys are the best from everywhere. I met a few other people, including some from U of I, which is nice.

After that we all were sent our seperate ways to meet with our mentors who help us set goals, tell us what we’re going to be expected to do, and get us familiar with everything.

This is where my day hit a snag. My team was extremely busy building an alpha release which was due out today (I actually don’t think I’m even allowed to say what I’m working on, because it’s a new product that hasn’t been released yet), so I was pretty much on my own to set up my computer, get it up and running, and figure out whatever I can. Tomorrow I meet with my mentos to (finally) find out what I’m going to actually be working on.

After work I stopped by George and Byron’s to find out how they fared that day. We all talked about our projects and it’s amazing we can all get completely excited about working on things that sound totally mundane or uninteresting to an average person. Anyway, based off what they’re working on and what I get to work on, sounds like I’ll get to see some pretty cool stuff over the summer.

Anyway, that’s my recap. I tend not to like to put up daily summaries (as any reader would know) but since I’m in a different situation and far away from everyone, this makes it much easier than explaining it over and over and over again.

Here’s some pictures of my apartment — it’s pretty nice, including a giant fancy dinner table (and it even has, in my closet, the little leaf to make it bigger). It’s corporate housing, though, so it still has a very hotel kind of feel to it… but at least it has all the features an apartment needs.

I have stepped foot into 203 N Gregory Apartment 205, my home for the past two years (ish), for the last time. It’s like the end of an era.

I think back on all the fond memories — of all my food being removed from the cabinets and shoved into a box, the greco-roman wrestling that apparently was going on upstairs by the sounds I heard, peeing on all of Brian’s stuff… good times, good times.

Tuesday I start my internship at a small company in Washington. I leave Sunday for three months of rainy weather and… I think all they have is the rain, yeah.

Well, I got a new phone. My old one decided to die in the convinient period where it was out of warantee and Sprint wouldn’t give me money for a new one… but I sweet-talked them into it anyway. So now I’m equipped with a styling new camera phone (you can see a picture on your right), fancy speakerphone capabilities, and the world’s most annoying and horrific ringer imaginable. For some reason the Sanyo people included a ringer that is simply the most high pitched noise that is in a human’s hearing range.

The school semester is over and now it’s time for finals. All the slacking comes back to haunt the bad students.

Actually, I think the whole “good student” and “bad student” thing is a bit of a misnomer. Honestly every single student I’ve ever met fits into the “bad student” role, which leads me to believe there aren’t actually any good students out there.

Today I found out Wesley Willis died several months ago. So, in tribute to him despite the fact he died quite a while ago, some soothing lyrics:

McDonald’s is a place to rock
It is a restaurant where they buy food to eat
It is a good place to listen to the music
People flock here to get down to the rock music

Rock over London, rock on Chicago
Wheaties - breakfast of champions

- Wesley Willis

One of his many record labels (he released well over 20 CDs of original material on several different ‘labels’) posted up some free MP3s.

Terrorism:

The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.

So a bunch of hippies have decided to take over a campus building. They are refusing to allow anyone into the building, and initially were not allowing those inside to leave (unlawful use of force). These people are advocating the removal of the school’s mascot (person or an organized group). They say they won’t leave until the school’s mascot is retired (intention of intimidating or coercing socities or governments, often for ideological or political reasons).

There are police there protecting them. I’m not at all capable of understanding why said police are not arresting them, but I guess I just don’t get these kinds of things.

Honestly, I don’t care if you’re right or not, using terrorism in an attempt to force people to convert to your point of view is pathetic.

Oh, and don’t forget, if you remove them they’ll scream out you’re violating their first amendment right. Despite the fact that, you know, their whole protest is that the school should violate the majority of the community’s first amendment rights.

As I type this, the building across the street is slowly burning.

I don’t start instant messaging conversations. I do notice, though, that of the people that start them with me, it’s often to elicit a response about something. The converser will dodge around whatever it is, hoping to get me to ask about it. Here’s an example:

Say Betsie just won $1,000,000. She would instant message me about moving into a new house, getting a new car, etc, hoping I’d say “so how’d you get all this money.” See, then she’s not bragging, she’s answering my question.

I’ve become rather good at not asking and it makes me happy.

Anyway, I was at McKinley with Allison (yes, she’s still around) and, having been told that I need a booster, decided to get a Tetanus shot.

Wow.

The lady who gave it to me clearly had some problem with me because she sadistically attacked me with a needle. My right shoulder is now rather puffy and it hurts to move that arm pretty much at all.

On the plus side, it’s so swollen it looks like I have a pretty nice muscle. On the negative side, it’s not quite bikini season yet so I can’t show it off. Ah, plus it’s really only on one arm. Alas.

Interestingly enough, despite being on fire for the past half hour, the fire alarm in the building across the street [i]just[/i] started going off. Safety first, kids.

Ah, a gripe. There’s something new in the world of blogging.

Anyway — one of my classes had an assignment; part of the assignment was (this’ll be technical and senseless, but trudge through it) “decompose the relation into a BCNF form that preserves all dependencies.”

That was the entire question. One of them I noticed could not be done as such — it could be reduced to BCNF, it could keep all its dependencies, but not both. “Oh dearie me!” I said, quietly, to myself, “whatever should I do in reguards to this conundrum?” I just put the BCNF decompisition figuring neither way is a whole answer.

Apparently, I was supposed to put “impossible to do.” So I made a gentle recommendation that in the future, should impossibility be a possibility, they simply add the phrase “if possible” onto the question somewhere. Heck, add it on even if all of them are possible.

The TAs response was, more or less, I’m stupid if I didn’t realize I should write that and that constructive suggestions are not welcome unless you want your head cutoff and all future assignments graded with a sharp bias.

And now I have to go to that class for some more learning. Fun.

See, you just don’t have to worry about things like this when you eat my super-duper popcorn.

Two things produced this entry — I was looking at How Much Is Inside and thinking about the various accessed thrown around about Valentine’s Day and I fondly remembered one Valentine’s Day past that stood out.

Now, as many of you know, I’m old, so this happened before dating was invented. With nothing better to do we decided to play some good old fashioned video games. I believe Goldeneye was the game of choice that night — good N64 multiplayer action.

I had come — fashionably late, as usual, but also with my own personal 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew. I don’t remember ever really liking Mountain Dew that much so I’m not sure why anymore.

So between rounds I’d grab my 2 liter and drink straight out of it. The strange thing was eventually my friend Phil started saying things like “don’t you want more Mountain Dew?” or “you should do the Dew now” or various other Phil-comments.

I figured he was just trying to distract me to destroy my super game skills.

Roughly 8 or 10 swigs later, I realized the entire time he had been slipping conversational hearts handful by handful into my Dew. I noticed this only because it had become nearly solid. Those things are like sponges, seriously.

From there we took the obvious step of making the loser chug some dew. Four cases of diabetes and three shots of insulin later we realized there was no way we could finish off the bottle of dew. No matter what. Not only that, it was important we never see the bottle again. Try a combination of Mountain Dew and conversation hearts and you’ll know why.

So to be rid of the vile substance, we slipped the bottle into our friend’s neighbor’s mailbox. Simple enough, and effective.

On the slightly-more-recent-than-like-seriously-5-years-ago-or-something front today I interviewed, again, for a Microsoft internship. Different than last time is the fact that I never submitted my resume this year, so, who knows how they found me. Mystery of life, I guess.

The interview went well — last time I was way overly tired and stumbled a few times, at least I can say this time I interviewed well and did a good job. Even if I’m not offered the internship, all that matters is I at least was able to not seem like a moron this time.

Well, now it’s back to work — two MPs and two tests and two homework assignments are all due next week. Fantastic.