Morton Fox's journal

Sunny, 34-41°F. Email and phone calls again this morning. This time though, the phone call was important. I'd gone to on-site interviews the last two Thursdays and this Thursday, I got a job offer. The call was to discuss the terms, benefits, etc. So I start mid-January. The commute isn't too long. The office is only 7 miles from home and I know a few different ways to get there. The location is a bit unusual but close to Trolley Square. I guess this means no more daily geocaching excursions, although given my track record with that, I'd probably do it after work anyway. :)

Since I had no reason to stick around at home the rest of the day, I went out for a bunch of local geocaches, 7 of them that were listed in the last few days. It's nice to not have to travel far for caches sometimes. I was done in about 2 hours so I had an early dinner at Old Country Buffet in Newark. Old Country Buffet remains the one restaurant in northern Delaware with not a single wi-fi network in sight, so I was glad I had the Cr-48 with built-in Verizon 3G broadband. Still helping Google beta-test this notebook computer. ;)

( The caches... )

Well, I didn't get the job for which I went to the on-site interview on Tuesday. The verdict was I had good skills and knowledge but just not specifically what their project was looking for. It could be a blessing. I had some concerns about the software firm that I didn't share on that day but now that it's over, I guess I'm clear to write a little more. The first was the salary discussion, which I was surprised actually happened during the interview. I thought it was supposed to be done only after they make a hiring decision. They made a few attempts to bargain me down, saying, for example, that even PhDs at that company only made $95K or so and that some people started really low (below $60K) and got raises afterwards. So I was wondering if they even had the budget for an additional software engineer. The second thing I noticed was even though the company doesn't force anyone to work long hours (i.e. significantly beyond the usual 9 to 5), it looks bad if you don't. Again, it was somewhat odd that they felt the need to impress that on me during the interview. Overall though, the place was eerily similar to my old job. Same suburban-type office building. I think they even have the same office furniture, carpet, and cubicle suppliers. I would've been right at home arguing with management there. :)

Looking back at the last 14 years of my life, I came up with an analogy. A job is like an apartment. On day one, it's a blank slate. Full of promise and ready to be filled with your presence. Then after a while, the plaster starts peeling, the faucet starts leaking, the toilet becomes unreliable, and dealing with building maintenance becomes somewhat unpleasant. Yet, you stick on year after year because staying put is less of a pain than leaving, until you wake up one day and find that you absolutely loathe the place and would do anything to get out. Yes, the apartment was getting like that too. :) Which reminds me, I still need to ask the landlord at the end of the 21-day period if he'll be returning any of the security deposit.

Rainy day today so I stayed home and worked on code. I added support to TwitVim for the new Retweet API. (r68 thru r71) It's not complete yet because of a few things I noticed in the API documentation. First: retweets_of_me does not appear to return info on who did the retweeting. There'll be a significant cost in time and API quota if the client makes a separate query for that info for each retweet. And second: Retweets are stripped out of user_timeline and unlike friends_timeline/home_timeline, there is no alternative API method that returns the full timeline with retweets included. I checked the latest version of Tweetdeck and, even though it does support new-style retweets, it's missing retweets when you bring up a user's profile, confirming that issue. No matter. I just made do with what the API provides and I hope there'll eventually be API revisions or workarounds to address those two issues.

Since I applied for NJ unemployment benefits, I was obliged to begin the job search. So I posted my resume to CareerBuilder. There was significant interest. I haven't had time to return all the calls yet. I know, I've been bad about it but in my defense, I've had other things to take care of too. (To everyone who told me that I wouldn't just do nothing after I left my job: Yes, you were right. *sigh* There hasn't been one single day when I just did nothing.)

Had a phone interview today with a software firm in Newark. First, they sent me a programming exercise to do on my own time. I did it this morning and sent it in. Then they set up an appointment in the afternoon for a phone interview simultaneous with a VNC session in which I showed them how I would write a piece of code. (I actually like this approach because in this line of work, it's better to do it than to talk about it.) I guess I did well enough because just an hour after the phone interview, they called back to set up an on-site interview for next week.

Anyway, I'll try to take care of more of those calls and messages tomorrow before the grocery run. Things are happening too quickly but at least it's never boring.