March 2006 Archives

Want to know a good way to make yourself feel dumb? Go talk to the person that has your dream job. Want to work at microsoft research? A PhD isn't required but it's highly desirable. Hmmm, maybe work at xbox incubation (sort of the xbox research division)? people go from MSR to XI. Holy god, okay, hmm.

But it's cool, you don't have to have a PhD to work at XI. Just knowing every algorithm ever designed for anything - maybe a few you devised yourself - and all of their drawbacks, that's enough. And about 7 languages, but, I mean, that's a given right?

Not entirely fruitless though, made good contacts and looked "green" rather than just like a drooling idiot. Time to look into the practical masters of comp sci program.

Or rather, no house for me. Outbid yet again on a perfect little house in ravenna. The thing is, it went for about 400 grand in cash! Who the heck has that much just lying about waiting to buy a house?

The leadup to finding out I didn't get the house was probably the most excrusiatingly slow 10 hours I've ever endured. Martin chose to call about every half hour so my phone rang constantly but brought no news (just more people seeking news). When my realitor finally did call I managed to hang up on him while retreiving the phone from my pocket. It wasn't all bad though I suppose. Moni and I plotted where to bury the body of the condiscending photography instructor and I finally got my foot in the door with some of the xbox research division folks.

The only real downside (other than not having a house) is now my financial compas is all out of whack. Don't have an impending mortgage payment? Time to buy a bunch of random crap! Though the list really only includes a corgi and some plane tickets so I guess it's not too far outside of my norm.

I finally found a photography class to take - or rather Monica found one and I latched onto her like the preverbial lampray. Anyway, our assignments are to (at least once a week) go out and shoot a memory card/few rolls of film worth of whatever we come across. But we have to do it in full manual mode. Take a light meter reading, set aperature and shutter speed, manual focus, the whole deal. It's actually a lot more fun than I thought it would be. I'm exceptionally proud of this shot - little bastard made manual focus a tad hard.

flickr

the bulldog turned out pretty good too. So three more weeks of classes and I'll maybe have some idea of what I'm doing with these cameras beyond point and shoot.

Yes it's been a while, interesting things probably happened between posts too but I can't remember them so this will have to do to get me back into the swing of things.