Six
Nov/090
- I am so very tired.
- This has resulted in me being easily irritated today. Specifically, regarding the fact that I purchased some (unhealthy) products, but my brother just ate them without telling me. And I bought them with my money, and wanted to eat them during my break from making that money.
- I got angry/annoyed. This is because I’m tired, and mildly irritated, and because I haven’t been angry in quite a long time. It didn’t last very long, I know some people who are quite nice to me.
- AT THIS POINT MY POWER DIED
- My laptop still had power, but then later on (with this blog finished and open in my browser still) it decided to freeze and make me restart it. Blog lost.
- The whole point of the title and the numbered list was to make some mention of what happened exactly six months ago. This effect is somewhat lost by posting it the next day.
Regardless, some dates stick in the mind. Especially when they ultimately result in dates.
On May 1, I saw Adam Hills perform. That night has brightened my life to a degree I scarcely believe possible.
Protected: And
Aug/090
Hat-trick
Jun/094
So I’m 3/3. Or, from a more accurate perspective, 0/3.
It’s been a year since I was writing this. I remarked a few weeks ago to Steve that it would be pretty interesting to see a graph of post count over time, and how it related to what was happening in my life.
And holy shit, it is pretty revealing. Clearly I’m an angst blogger.
(an aside: I really love how Office 2007 makes graphs look acceptably presentable)
Also, since this blog is a year old, it has been given a theme (as promised in the first post) and upgraded to 2.8
I had an exceedingly interesting week. Some of it was recounted in the last post, so I’ll skip to Tuesday. I thought I’d have to go to Australia Post on work related secret business, but apparently not. It was a shame, as I had actually been looking forward to wandering up to Lane Cove in the middle of the day. It was one of the small joys I had in the second half of last year, in that semester of pain, penury and strife. It’s nice to have the freedom to walk about in the middle of the day, even if I allowed myself only the time required (35-40 minutes) to go directly to the sushi bar and return.
That actually makes it sound like I was exceedingly diligent in my time keeping and habits, which is such a massive whopper. Anyway…
I didn’t have to go to Australia Post, so I instead went straight to Bulga to ’study’ with James. We actually did pretty well, for about two hours. By that stage, however, we were entirely bored with the subject, and the remaining four hours before the exam were occupied with football, food and Xbox. On the whole, this struck me as an ideal balance.
Then the exam: harder than I had been lead to believe it would be. Such is the inevitable result of hubris. I still did fine, though. I was the last (of the three of us) to depart the exam. I’m blaming the invigilator, and my lack of a timepiece. I was sitting there for 20+ minutes, waiting for the time at which I would be permitted to leave. I was expecting it to be more like 45 minutes, so the difficulty was definitely a blessing.
After the exam, we went for one beer. That sentence accurately captures our intent, but is in fact as big a lie as the one suggesting I had a work ethic. We drank several beers, and then several schnapps, and then had about as much fun as you’re allowed to have at QVB Stand C. That evening was in no way a sensible idea, but it turned out to be a most enjoyable one.
Wednesday: interview/assessment day at Optiver. I was hungover. I have no idea how I did the initial programming quiz, and especially no idea how what I wrote convinced them that I should be interviewed.
Optiver has the coolest office I’ve ever been in, and the whole day was quite an experience. I was damned lucky that I’d chosen DS&A for my elective this semester. It’s the first step taken towards being the kind of programmer they actually want there. It is also the only step I’ve taken towards that path, and it’s not certain in my mind that I want that path. I still don’t know what I want from my career. I think it actually needs to be more rounded than just being a developer.
I’m getting sidetracked…
I thought it went well on the whole, but it was clearly going to come down to how much they wanted to trust in my potential. To skip ahead somewhat to Friday: not enough. They will not be offering me a position.
There was actually some interesting feedback along the lines that they didn’t think I was passionate enough, weren’t sure I truly wanted to be a developer, weren’t sure I wanted to work there. I guess they read me pretty well, better than I even knew myself. I had doubts about working there, and I didn’t bother to address them before the interview. I should perhaps have gone in with a plan, or at least a conscious effort to play the interview game.
What’s the point though? They interviewed me, a nearly completely honest version of me, with limited garnish. We weren’t a fit for each other. That’s fair enough, and possibly saved a lot of trouble later on.
Wednesday’s meeting was unremarkable, I guess. The chicken katsu afterwards was nice (when it arrived). The sang chow bow spring rolls were not quite as good as I’d hoped for.
Thursday was not a heap of fun. The question posed on Sunday was answered, in the negative. Over email, so I was trying to appear sufficiently busy at work whilst also retreating into my head and composing a reply. One day, someone will say something to my face. One day, it might even be an affirmative response. Being in a different city is a pretty good excuse for the former, though.
The usual suspects were suitably generous in their consolations.
Even more so than last time, I’ve surprised myself with the generally philsophical response I’ve had to the happenings. I think things generally work out. When I’ve got my ego up a bit, I usually extend this thought to ‘things generally work out to my benefit’.
It’s pretty weird, writing obliquely about someone whom I know reads this blog. (p.s. hi)
Then again, I’ve basically been doing that for a month. I wonder if you realised.
Yesterday (although it was still today when I started composing) was a better day, but mostly only at the very end. Three very cool things happened. One was getting out the SMH Friday cryptic crossword. Even if it took four other people and we spent nearly 90 minutes, it’s a pretty sweet achievement. DA (the Friday compiler) is an utterly devious bastard, and normally quite inscrutable.
The second thing was going out for a sneaky 2:45PM Friday beer at the Redoak. (ssh!).
I chased Optiver, and finally got the news they had promised would be delivered sooner. When you don’t hear something positive right away, it’s often fairly safe to assume the negative is on it’s way. (This was not the third cool thing, this is:)
I then chased my manager, who had been saying that he wanted to talk to me for over a week. He’d quite like me to keep working there, and said some rather ego boosting things. I definitely ended the week in a good way.
It’s funny, though. Without making any effort to curry favour at ING, or indeed trying very much at all, I’ve still managed to impress people. Yet another analogy for the benefits of just being yourself?
It’s a nice offer to have, but I have no desire to work full time next semester on anything which is not for Three Ring Solutions. I also consider that the offer from IBM has benefits that go beyond just a place to work. Assuming that offer is still on the table, it’s where I will be next year.
On the bus, on the way home, I finished Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I really liked it, but I’m not sure whether it was the P&P or the &Z which was most entertaining.
I actually intended for this post to just be a couple of graphs, possibly with captions, and now I have in excess of 1200 words.
mostly to scale.
One outlier bucks the inevitable trend, vs the goal
Sample data available for one flow only.
Whoops, 2am.
SPorts fan?
Aug/084
The Beijing Olympics have come and gone. Due to circumstances largely outside of my control – like my insane workload, and the general upheaval of the house due to ongoing renovations – I didn’t spend as much time watching the various sports* as I normally would have.
*if you can call synchronised swimming a sport…
I started to think that I just didn’t care about sports as much as I had previously. When I did catch the odd glimpse of the games, they just didn’t seem to captivate as they once did. It didn’t help that some of the message was ruined through communication issues (7’s woeful coverage). Nevertheless, all it takes is a special moment for me to remember exactly why it is that I like sports. A single passage of beautiful play, an outstanding individual achievement, someone pushing their limits…
All the frustration melts away, and I remain a sp orts fan.
Now: Foggy, 21 degrees
Jul/081
Clouded judgement.
Confused thoughts.
Altered priorities.
Easily distracted.
Loss of inhibition.
I wish it was from beer. It’s not.
Kevin can’t tell me what the safe limit is this time.
Overdue blog post
Jun/085
* Yods must be due for a blogging
* jamhos agrees wholeheartedly
<Yods> Problem is, I don’t know what I want to blog about.
<Yods> Which is a lie of sorts
<jamhos> ah yes… i suppose that could be a problem
<Yods> I know what I’d like to write about, I’m just not sure that I like it going out on a blog
<jamhos> heh, fair enough
<jamhos> how about write it, then decide?
<Yods> cunning!
The above sums it up, I guess. I feel like blogging, or at least writing down my thoughts… but I don’t really want them on the Internet for all to see. So there’s either no post, or an ambiguous post, which has to be heavily laundered, as the CIA would say. (I’ve been reading Tom Clancy’s The Bear and the Dragon – not the best Jack Ryan novel, but adequate)
Since this post is overdue (well, there’s no deadline for blogs, but I was hoping to post more regularly than once every five days…) I suppose I may as well move chronologically through the time since my last post.
Wednesday: Web Services Development, final exam. Honestly, when I first looked at the paper I was swearing pretty loudly inside my head. The lecturer audaciously threw in some short answer questions, in addition to the 20 multiple choice questions – in stark contrast to the paltry offerings we faced in Applications Programming or Database Fundamentals (30 MC in 2 hours and 45 in 3, respectively). No big deal compared to the HSC – in fact, it’s occured to me several times over this past semester that the HSC was far harder. I often feel like a bludger, but my work ethic is a subject I’ll commit to a blog later on.
Anyway, I didn’t prepare nearly as much as I could have for WSD. It was a combination of apathy, burnout and the distraction I mentioned in my last post. I’ll end up with a good mark, perhaps even an excellent mark due to the lovely vagarities of assessment marking, but I could’ve done better. At any rate, it’s out of my control now, so I won’t write anything about it until the results come out!
Wednesday evening was when things got a bit interesting. It was excellent fun – free drinks! Even better, for someone who likes to pretend he has a modicum of standards in regards to alcohol, it was unrestricted free drinks – any beer at all. (Or wine, or spirits, but my first preference is beer and I know better than to mix between the three after a variety of messy experiences). I drank, I caught up with work colleagues, I convinced my manager that I didn’t have to return to the office until Monday. I reached the level of inebriation where you lose the ability to perceive subtleties but didn’t get to Dutch courage – basically, I remember everything that happened and was upright throughout the evening. In hindsight, I think not reaching the point of drunken bravery was fortunate – some things are better sober, I imagine…
I decided at this point that I wanted to password protect this post. To paraphrase Alan Shore from Boston Legal, I’m tremendously fond of my own intellect. I believe that my written expression is very good – an opinion magnified enormously by CITP and all the tourists attending UTS… but this blog post has already taken an hour and I’m not even past the first day. It’s not the act of writing that’s troubling me, it’s dancing around the things I want to say. My thoughts center around someone, and I don’t really want to give the game away by publishing them freely.
Wednesday’s events technically finished on Thursday, but only by a few minutes. I shared a taxi home with someone, which was just one of what I think were several pretty encouraging signs. At the very least, she’s not adverse to being around me. I hesitate to think – nay, to hope – beyond that because of the aforementioned drinking and a decently sized chunk of insecurity.
Thursday: caught up with some friends from high school, saw Get Smart. It’s actually pretty good, I enjoyed it a lot. We bailed once it got awkward, and went to my mate Steve’s house. (This one is a Stephen, Steven :P). We watched Serenity – Steve had just gone through Firefly and was desirous of more of the same. Who could blame him?
“I ain’t got no answers for you, Inara. I got no rudder. Wind blows northerly, I go north. That’s who I am. Now, maybe that ain’t a man to lead, but they have to follow. So you wanna tear me down.. do it inside your own mind.”
“I’m not trying to tear you down.”
“But you fog things up. You always have. You spin me about. I wish like hell you was elsewhere.”
I added the emphasis… this line from Malcolm Reynolds pretty much sums up where my head’s been since Wednesday night. Actually, where it’s been since about May… but moreso lately.
While watching the movie, I only drank one beer. I’d actually been feeling pretty sick all day, and assumed it was just a hangover – I’ve drunk a lot more in an evening, but hadn’t eaten much so I just figured that the alcohol was affecting me more than usual. However, the next day I was still feeling off, which means that I get to blame the food I ate! “Must’ve been something I ate” is the excuse given by everyone with a hangover, but I’m pretty sure it was actually the case. Total food consumption for the day: Large popcorn from the cinema. :/
Friday: Watched the first two Indiana Jones movies with Steven and James. We ordered pizza under the name which also serves as the password for this lengthy dump from my psyche and generally had an awesome time. Also fun: driving to and from Ultimo in the dark, and getting free parking as well.
Weekend: Not as much as I would’ve liked… I really needed to get some (website) work done, and it would’ve been a solid money earner, but I’m a lazy person, and a lazy person who’s been distracted at that. I did have a good footy-kicking session on Saturday and was informed that I do look thinner. I’ve been trying pretty hard over the exam period to a) eat less fast food / junk, b) drink less, and c) exercise more. I feel better, and according to the scales, it’s working. I can’t deny that someone is responsible for the majority of the motivation in this area – but it’s really about being more confident in myself rather than a fear of not meeting her… standards? criteria?
<jamhos> probably be good to write, regardless of whether it goes on the internets
James was right! (Unsurprising)
I’m not going to force anything, but if I could have lunch with someone tomorrow then that would be excellent. And if we talk about Wednesday night, I can say that it too was excellent, and worth repeating.