Alex's Alliterative Adventures

I just got an assignment handed back to me.  I was worried that I had done poorly on it, since I didn’t start my 3 page answer until the beginning of the lecture in which it was due. If I pulled this shit at Waterloo, I’d be aiming for a 20-30% to help make the exam that much less significant.  I wasn’t sweating too badly, since WaterLund’s performance in the programming contest guaranteed me a 50%, and I never see a mark for this course other than “pass” or “fail.” Even when people request that their marks are evaluated for the course for the purposes of taking a master’s degree, the only distinctions are “fail” (< 50%), "pass" (50% - 79%) and "high pass" (80% - 100%).  There's no motivation to do anything above the bare minimum. I got a 3 on the assignment. It was out of 2.

The project is due in 36 hours.  I’ve been producing stuff more or less akin to this.  It’s pretty pimp, but I miss things like sunlight, and sleep.

Introduction: It’s a tired anecdote, recently retold by JDT: The ones who want you are crazy and knife-wielding, and the ones that you want keep yelling “just drop the knife, man, we can talk things out.”  Due to my recent blessings of an amazing job and a fantastic girlfriend, I had forgotten about this particular internet and teenager held truism; that is, of course, until I started my job interviews.  I had an interview earlier this week for a company that wasn’t a gaming company, so I was initially less than enthused by them.

Principle argument: The interview went something like this:

Interviewer: Our potentially very boring job requires a lot of C++. So do you know C++?

Me: No… but I could know C++.  I know things that are like C++.  Like, for example, not C++.

Interview: That’s great.  I’m just going to ask you a bunch of C++ to degrade your morale and make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Me: Awesome.

*a bunch of questions later*

Interviewer: Wow, you’re awesome. Here, have lots of money.

Me: Um… thanks, but… it’s just not right for me right now.  I just got out of a really great job, and I don’t want to commit to anything serious, I’m… I’m just not ready.

Interviewer: Oh… oh, that’s ok, yeah, I totally understand. No, that’s cool. Just… um… call me, ok?

Me: Yeah, that… that’d be best.

Jumping into the land of the serious for a moment, it was potentially the best interview I’d ever had in my entire life.  He made me think, but he coaxed me in just the right way to not only help me come up with the right answer, but also to teach me a lot about useful things that I didn’t know. The job itself might not be exactly what I want, but I could certainly do a lot worse than having the opportunity to work with people who can bring out the best in me and teach me more than I could’ve ever dreamed of.

Secondary argument: Fast forward to the super awesome gaming job interview:

Interviewer: Hey man, we’re recruiting for the position of Best Coop Job Ever, and we’re wondering if you’re a good match for our company.

Me: I’ll have your babies.

Interviewer: What’s that?

Me: I don’t have scabies, so I’m perfect for the job.  Let’s get started.

Interviewer: *technical questions*

Me: I don’t know that one.

Interviewer: *buzzwords*

Me: Also nope.

Interviewer: Alright, we just have one last question, and th-

Me: …

Me: Hello?

Me: *two minutes later* STELLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Conclusion: Dramatically retold job interviews are much more entertaining to experience than real job interviews where it’s made painfully obvious that you don’t know shit, son.  Also, I really really really want that gaming job.  I’m sometimes woken up at night by the burning pain my desire causes my soul and esophagus.

Epilogue: I fucking love cheese.  It’s like God’s gift to species that can domesticate farm animals. Also, I spoke to another real-life person who’s used VERGE.  It was like meeting my long lost brother from Singapore.

Some of you have already heard about or watched Clinton’s recent interview with Fox News, but if you haven’t, you should really check it out.

edit: for great justice, take off every typo.

Sweden’s weather is just plain weird. A perfect cloudless day will change to a torrential downpour with the occasional airborne cat and back in the span of ten minutes. It might be because it’s a small country that’s surrounded by sea, I don’t know, but for one reason or another the clouds here fly much lower and faster than I’m used to, which explains the schizophrenic weather patterns.Living under a perpetually turmoiled sky makes for some great, if not risky, cloud watching. Shapes are fleeting and impermanent, and yet their closeness makes them more tangible, as if you could take them home in a jar or leap up and glide among them. Watching the heavens makes a part of you think that you’re stuck in one of those time-lapse scenes in a documentary, except the people around you have conveniently forgotten that they are supposed to be fast-forwarding.

Sorry for the absence, all, but I’ve been in crazy-death-mode for the past little while.  The past 4 days have been filled with 13 hours of choir practices, classes, assignments, and 5 interviews.  I also have a giant-ass project that I’m sorely behind on due on the 10th, and I have 5 more interviews up to that point. So yeah, posting will continue to be sparse until then.

I will bitch a bit, though.  Last night, I had an interview with Digital Extremes in London. They helped Epic Games make Unreal, UT, UT2k4, and Epic Pinball, which I grew up playing.  I’ve essentially turned down job offers just so I could have the chance to talk to these guys.  I think that Sweden was just conspiring against my returning to Canada, because the call quality was abysmal.  There was about a second of lag, our voices kept breaking up, and after about 20 minutes we just stopped being able to hear each other entirely.  They’re going to consider me nonetheless, but it’s a kick in the pants.  And the worst part is that I was able to secure the use of my own private office with a private wired phone line in my department, but I don’t get the key until next week sometime.  This is the sort of thing that could drive someone into a life of high-prescription glasses, low-voiced near assertive mumbling, and an obsession with red staplers.

I’ll throw up a post I wrote a little while ago to appease you guys.  Go gnaw on it, and try not to chew up the couch when I’m gone.

Today’s choir practice was 5 hours long.  With 500 singers present, it was so crowded that I couldn’t hold my music in front of me without overlapping torsos with two people and resting my sheets on the head of a third. My knee started complaining pretty early on, we couldn’t hear or sing in time with the other half of the choir, and I generally didn’t want to be there.

Then the orchestra joined the practice.  As we sang O Fortuna to the quick bowing of the strings and the thunderous booming of the timpani, I couldn’t help but shiver.  This is what makes it all worthwhile.

9 problems. 5 hours. 3 men. 1 computer.

Finishing position: 3rd/38th.  Qualifying position: 2nd place. All-expenses paid weekend trip to Stockholm to compete in the regionals:  hells yes, bitches.

Also: 1 free t-shirt.

I’ve spent the past week or so cooped up in my room, juggling resume spamming, corporate research, scheduling phone interviews between time zones totalling 15 hours of time differences (with and without daylight savings time), writing thank you notes, completing assignments, skip- er, attending lectures, investigating 3D mesh animation, climbing walls, cooking, cleaning, and eating. I’ve been working or being otherwise ridiculously productive for between 10 and 18 hours each day. I finish assignments while waiting for emails to download, I write blog posts while the professor moves between slides, and I implement linked queues in C++ between mouthfuls of barely cooked pasta. I’m also thinking about getting a job.

In my experience, getting the chance to sing in a choir is compensation in and of itself. That being said, it certainly ups the singers’ moral when the local student audiences reward the choir’s performances with thunderous applause, screams for an encore, and free booze. Why isn’t singing this popular in Canada?