Dav's Rants and Random Thoughts

After 7 hours of interviews, my stay here is over. I can't go into any details of what I did or didn't do or what was said or wasn't said. But all in all, I think that the interviews went pretty good. The atmosphere there was really enjoyable, the people where very friendly; overall I really liked it there. Well, I have a major case of jet lag. It's only 7:30pm here and I am ready to pass out. This was a really long, but enjoyable, day. I really hope to hear back from them soon. On a side note, I haven't heard anything from the group in Arizona since I told them I was interviewing with Yahoo!. Maybe I'll hear from them soon. Last words from California... "Man that's a lot of purple" 8-)

Well, Yahoo! has invited me out to California next week for my in person interviews. I have been looking on-line at apartments & such in the South Bay Area. Still not sure where we would live if I moved to California, but I can cross that bridge when I get out there next week. I'm hoping to have time to check out a couple of places before I leave there. Donna is really excited about the possibility of moving to California, she went there a couple of years ago when she won that trip to the set of Port Charles. Well I still haven't heard from the group out of Arizona & I'm still skeptical of the group in Atlanta. I'll post more later...

I know it's been a little while since I posted any updates, but I am at the point with Yahoo! right now that I don't want to post too many details. At this point, we have set a tentative start date of May 15^th. With me going out a week before Donna & Zach. We are still looking at apartments, we have ruled out Fremont & are now looking at apartments in Sunnyvale, Mountain View & Cupertino. Hopefully we will narrow down the search soon, so I will have a nice list to bring with me that first week in California. Well here's to apartment hunting.

Well I made it home in one piece, the flights where pretty uneventful & boring. I did clear a couple of levels of the Grand Prix on Mario Kart DS. When I got home, I already had an email from Yahoo!, so I think I did pretty good with the interviews 8-) I won't say anymore than that but I will post more when I know more. It's just my luck, the first time I go to California the weather is horrible; cold and rainy. Then I get back to Southern Illinois & it's a muggy 80 degrees at 9:00 at night. Go figure..

I'll be releasing the next version of blogCal in a couple of days. It now features support for Internet Explorer 5 on the Mac. I am waiting to here back from Andrew Gregory, I use his excellent XMLHttpRequest library. I have modified his library to add support for IE on the Mac & I am awaiting his approval before I post the changes.. You can see it here. I am running the latest version on this site, so if you have Mac IE handy follow this link. I'll explain more in detail later..

I just found this MP3 posted on Slashdot. You have to give it a listen, if you are any kind of coder, you will love this little tune.

Finally, I have working copies of the last 3 of my "necessary" applications in a universal binary. I have been waiting for these 3 for a while. Still missing all of the Unsanity haxies to be ported, but that is a different story 8-). And of course there are the few other apps that I use, but not nearly as much as these. The apps that I have been waiting on are: Firefox 1.5.0.2 PSI Jabber Client gVim Now that I have all of them in a universal form, I can now open the Activity Monitor an bask in the glow of Intel listed under Kind.

Well, I made it. My flight got in about 1:45am CST last night, I didn't get to the hotel until about 3:30am CST. It's just my luck, this is my first time in California & the weather sucks. It's about 50 degrees and raining, of course I didn't bring a coat (didn't think I would need one). Anyway, my interviews start at 10am PST; so I'm going to drive around a bit this morning looking at apartments & things. Hopefully I will get some useful info from some of the crew at Yahoo!. I am having lunch with a few of the other engineers, so I get a chance to pick their brains. I'll post again after the interviews to let everyone know how it went.

Well, we are now officially homeless. We closed the sale of our house this afternoon & we are temporarily living with my mother. I will be without a "normal" internet connection for the next couple of weeks, so posting may be minimal. But I will be posting a review of the new Yahoo! Beta email, which I finally got an invite to, as soon as I forward my mail to it instead of Google. So I'm off to my brothers house to have a few beers. Cya..

Well, I got confirmation from Yahoo!. I'm going to California next week. I leave Tuesday night, I'm scheduled to interview with 2 different departments on Wednesday, then I fly home on Thursday. I finally heard from the group in Arizona, they asked a few more questions & for a code sample. I hope to hear from them again next week and possibly get out there to visit them soon. I'm still leery on moving to California, the prices there are considerably higher than here.

I know I haven't posted much this last week or so, but I didn't want to post anything that would jinx the offer with Yahoo!. Well, I received my official offer yesterday & I accepted it. So I will start on Monday May 15^th at 9:00am. So know I can tell my current employer on Monday & begin the process of stepping down from my current position. We applied for an apartment last week & they have tentatively accepted our application (pending all the normal checks). It looks like we got Zach into one of the best school districts in the nation. Not to mention the new apartment is in the home of Apple. Yes, we got an apartment in Cupertino. The place was a little more expensive than we where expecting to pay, but the benefits of living there far out weight the price. Well I'm off to trade off my truck for a smaller SUV & look into a storage garage to temporarily store our belongings until the move next month.

I got Zach a new toy this weekend, but it turns out that Donna & I play it just as much (if not more) than he does. I got Zach a Nintendo DS to replace the Playstation2's we sold yesterday. He seems to enjoy it more than the Playstations too. We got him SonicRush & Mario Kart for it. It's really kinda kewl, I got Mario Kart to play through my Airport Express base station. I only had to change one setting in the base station.

I had to set the Multicast rate to 2 instead of 11.

Then the DS picked up the wireless connection & worked like a charm. I played Mario Kart online for over an hour. Well, Zach's turn at playing is up.. I get to play next..

My flight leaves in about 2 hours. This time tomorrow I will be interviewing at Yahoo!. I don't know if I will have internet access until I get back, so I don't know when I will be able to post again. I'm bringing my camera so I can take some pictures while I'm there. I'll post those when I get a chance. Wish me luck 8-)

Well I got a preliminary offer from Yahoo! last night. I'm not going to go into details about it, but I will say that if it gets approved; I'm moving to California. Donna & Zach are really excited about the possibility of moving to California. We started looking at apartments in Fremont last night. Since we can't leave until the end of May, our house closes the 28^th of this month, we still need to find a place to rent/live for about 3 weeks. This has become quite a pain, no one really wants to rent an apartment or a house for a month. Hopefully my buddy Tommy will come through for me, he has a friend that has a couple of rental houses. Anyway, as it looks right now, we will be moving to California around the Memorial Day holiday.

Since I am interviewing with Yahoo! this week, I have started "re-finding" Yahoo!. To be honest I haven't used a lot of Yahoo!'s tools in quite a while (except Flickr). I have to say, that their list of tools as gotten quite large. My wife has been using their mail for some time; personally I am waiting on an invite to the new Mail Beta, I have read a lot about it & would really love to try it out. I consider myself a "hard core" email user, so I would love to tear into it. I'm pretty impressed with Gmail, but from what I have seen of the new Yahoo! Mail, I can't wait to play with it. I also installed the new Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox. Let me say, I really like it. It knows when you are logged in! That to me is totally kewl. It also installs a Right-Click menu, so I can Right-Click on a link and add it to my Bookmarks. I can also customize the toolbar from the website. Not sure, but I am assuming that when I install it at home tonight; the settings should carry to that machine. Now if only they had a good blog tool, I know about 360, but you need to be able to change the look and feel of the site as well as the content. Update: It worked as expected, I installed the toolbar at home & all my settings carried with.

Well first off, I got notice from the county that I was excused from Jury Duty. So now I can go on the various job interviews and begin searching for a place to live. Second, we had a very large Yard Sale this weekend. Anyone who knows me, knows that I love tools.

In the immortal words of Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor: Uurgh POWER.

I sold 90% of my tools, so we could move across the country. I figured that where ever we move to, they must have a Home Depot or a Lowes. Besides, we will probably move into an apartment before buying a new home. I may not have a garage to store them. Anyway, we made enough money to pay for the U-Haul trailer and most of the gas. I have another phone call scheduled for Monday with the company out of Arizona & one on Tuesday with a Back-End Manager at Yahoo!. Also, as some of you know; yesterday was the one year anniversary of our house being robbed. I still have not heard from the Detective that is "supposed" to be working our case. I guess I will never see that laptop or the guitars again. Well enough for now, it's the weekend.