Pong

I notice I tend to start blog posts like an awkward attempt to jump-start a stalled conversation: “So, I was looking at…” or “So, I was doing X…” It’s a little cowardly on my part, afraid to just jump into something without some sort of warning—in this case, the word “so”. Either that or I dump some random self-referential crap.

I was panned by IBM for an accessibility position last summer because I didn’t have a college degree. Their loss/that’s OK, since they dropped all that work this June. A few months later I was cold-called by Google for a position in New York, but I umm-aaah-huh (flubbed) a question on the sticky bit so that fell through. (Within a month I could recite from memory the appropriate section from the chmod man page.)

I didn’t take the interview completely seriously, since I was to the offer stage with a job at a startup in downtown Chicago. I put up with the four-hour/day transit time for a couple months before moving to the North Side with a co-worker from my campus-paper admin days and one of his friends. Our living room looks like a tornado hit on a datacenter, but since I’ve somehow managed to avoid stepping on the numerous case screws, that’s cool.

I’m well into SA territory, filled with all the standard hoariness of a layer-zero build-out—BTU/hr, VA, UPS—thrown atop our wonderful Xen setups, OpenVPN, etc. On the downside, we’ve had a minimal layer of management introduced, complete with weekly status meetings and “action item lists” (a term I had figured would be shamed out of existence well before I got out of college based on Palaniuk’s star power alone).

Life is good, but I re-discovered today that reading pgo is still more fun than all the social democrat blogs combined.