It's Working

I wrote a Chrome extension tonight that redirects me to my to-do list if I try to go to Reddit.  Or, at least, it redirects me 95% of the time.  It was basically four lines of code:

chrome.tabs.onUpdated.addListener(function(tabID, changeInfo, tab){
  if (tab.url && (tab.url.search("www.reddit.com") != -1)){
    if (Math.random() < 0.95){
      chrome.tabs.update(tabID,{url: "https://keep.google.com/#home"});
    }
  }
});

So far, it's working.  I can't believe it took me as long as it did to get around to writing it.

Probably because I was on Reddit all the time.

[Well, not really, but the joke isn't effective otherwise.]

Peace out.

In 10 City

I've been daydreaming quite a lot recently.  I guess that this is actually an issue (?) that I've had for a pretty good while, but it definitely feels like a different quality/intensity now than it has before.

It seems to happen the most strongly when I'm just transcribing with 3Play.  Especially if it's an easy file that I'm working on, my fingers and some subset of my brain seem to just go on autopilot and I realize that I'm hardly even thinking about the work in front of me anymore.  I'm staring right at the screen and still correcting the spelling and grammar, but in my mind, I'm seeing extremely vivid scenes from the past few years.  One of the most common ones is sitting on the deck at the back of the MV Explorer on a warm day; I remember playing guitar there or looking down to the lower deck and seeing people reading, sleeping, sunbathing, whatever, especially my friend Caitlyn.  I used to just sit there between classes for five minutes listening to Seaweed Sheets.  But sometimes the scenes are less detailed, although still feel very animated, like just the feeling of being in a classroom on the side of the ship, or walking through the main hallway, or looking out the window of my room, or playing piano in the auditorium, but they all kind of happen together in the same feeling.

My daydreams don't take me to Cambodia very often, and I'm not really sure why that is.  I guess that's just how it goes.

When I think about China, for some reason, by far the biggest hit with the nostalgia part of my brain is Nan Shi Da (Nanjing Normal University).  I always just get this feeling that I'm walking over there after school on a Wednesday, and the weather is either just barely warm or just barely chilly, and there's a student next to me that I'm talking to, though the student and the conversation are both indiscernable.  We're always walking up the path to the huge set of stairs at the southwestern part of the campus.  Sometimes it's like a mash-up of all the different little shops and restaurants that I had been to while I was there, though sometimes it's a specific feeling of the ones that I had gone to most often, and sometimes it's even the clubbing district, 1912, or a specific night there.  Sometimes I'm on the roof playing guitar and Angela comes up to see me, or I'm walking with Kara and Eric, or I'm at brunch or with Courtney and Dani, or sitting in the corner of AJ Cafe with Tracy.

I love all of those memories.  I'm glad I have something to miss so strongly.  But sometimes thinking about them makes me feel very dissatisfied with my life right now.  I wish I didn't feel like that, although sometimes I wonder if it's a sign that I need to go.

Peace out.

The Interview

I had an interview with [Redacted] Games a little bit before Christmas that I think was just about the worst interview that I've ever had.  Well, maybe the interview for the Fulbright Scholarship was worse, but in that case I was totally unprepared for what was going to happen, so it's not really even comparable.

Anyway, the guy who was interviewing me apparently used to be a pretty big developer -- and apparently wrote a chapter in one of the most famous Ruby on Rails books? -- but I guess is now more of a manager(?).  He got a business certificate from U Penn, whatever that means.  Anyway, when I sent my resume and short bio to them, apparently they wrote back a few minutes later, "This guy looks fucking legit."  So we're starting off with the assumption that I am probably pretty close to what they're looking for given that reaction.

For some background, [Redacted] Games is a company that makes exactly one game, [Name of game], and therefore should probably be called [Redacted] Game.  They were interviewing me to work on the developer operations team, which basically means that they have so many computer programmers working for them that they're now hiring a meta-layer of computer programmers to make life easier for that original line of computer programmers.  But the point is that it's a programming gig.

Anyway, the first question was like, "Do you know what [Redacted] Games does?"  Yes, you make [Name of game].  I think that's your only game.  It should be called [Redacted] Game.  "Do you play [Name of game]?"  And this is where things started to go downhill.  No, of course I don't play [Name of game] because I know how to operate in the real world, so playing is a totally non-optimal use of my time.  But of course, I just said, nah, I don't play it.  "Do you play video games at all?"  Again, the truth here is the same -- no, I don’t, because it's a tremendous waste of time.  Also, did I mention that I work full-time and go to school full-time while playing on three hockey teams?  Because I work full-time and go to school full-time while playing on three hockey teams.  If you think I'm going to choose to spend my spare time staring at a screen any more than necessary, you're crazy.  But anyway, "Not really.  Well, sometimes I'll play something super casually, but I'm not really a gamer in a meaningful sense."  (That's the wrong answer, by the way.)

From there it moved on to a bunch of bullshit.  "Tell us about a time that you were criticized and responded well."  Someone criticized my work and I read the docs.  But my real reaction was, "Are you kidding me?  Do I look like I'm 16 to you?  You should ask me real questions."  Then, "Tell us about a time that you criticized someone else and they didn't respond well."  I told him about kids cheating in Cambodia, heh.  "Tell us about a time when you criticized yourself."  This question is so stupid.  Nearly every human on Earth criticizes themselves all the time.  I criticize myself when I forget to turn the heat off, or bump my leg on the table, or forget to text Yuge back.  But you can't say that during an interview, so I mentioned having an imposter complex and getting a Master's degree to help alleviate the feeling.

Then more bullshit.  He described the projects.  "So if you had to figure out what the developers wanted to see on a dashboard like this, how would you do that?"  Well, I'd ask someone whose job it is to figure that out, because I write code for a living and that's what I'm good at, not figuring out what developers want on a dashboard.  "What do you think is interesting about this?"  Well, it wasn't very interesting to be honest, which made it hard to answer, so I really had to fish.  "Finding a way to measure the effectiveness and use of each service in a unified and maintainable way seems challenging."  Well, it might be challenging, I think, but certainly not interesting.  I don't think there was really anything elegant going on in this project.

Then yet more developer-specific bullshit.  Do you go to hackathons?  Do you contribute to the open source community?  Again, keep in mind that I have been going to school full-time and working full-time since I became a professional developer so I really don't have a lot of free time, and the little I do have, I don't really want to spend doing slave labor so that my resume looks better.  For those who don't know, hackathons are competitions where companies ask people to solve their problems in 24 hours (or 48) and then pay them a negligible fraction of what that solution saved them.  Open source typically refers to bug fixes on open source projects so that you can tell an interviewer that you have open source contributions.  I didn't mention CATNIP because I just forgot it, which was unfortunate, but I'm not sure it would have really made a difference anyway.

I really hate those questions.  The question shouldn't be, "So do you do your job outside of your job?  Like, you work 24/7, right?  Like you're a developer and nothing else?"  It should just be if you're good at your job when you do your job.  I have better things to do outside of work other than work some more.

Anyway, then they asked me if I had questions.  I asked some questions, though I could tell that it hadn't gone particularly well and was pretty frustrated about that.  I think the frustration came from knowing that they first thought I was "fucking legit" and then proceeding to ask me a bunch of meaningless questions which I haven't geared my life towards answering well (i.e., playing video games, being a non-developer at work, doing work after I'm done work) without giving me a meaningful opportunity to explain why I might be good/useful for them.

Part of me wishes that I had called them out for that at the end.  But also, by that point, I didn't really feel interested in working there anymore, and doing that definitely would have sealed the deal that I could not go there.  I'm not sure that I want to work with people who judge others by those standards, anyway.

Peace out.

How You Know That You're in China

As I've said before, I basically jump out of planes as soon as the seat belt sign is turned off at the gate after landing.  I happened to be really lucky on this particular flight because the flight attendant pitied me when I asked for a right-handed desk to do work (I already had a left-handed aisle seat) and gave me an open seat in the front row.  That didn't really solve the problem because it was the middle seat in a row of five, but it was better than where I was, so I did some work there and eventually just stayed there, including taking all of my bags.

So when we pulled up to the gate and stopped, I took my seat belt off, and as soon as I heard the ding, I launched out of my seat, grabbed my stuff from the overheads, and went careening down the aisle through first class as fast as I could and was probably like the 20th person off the plane, even though first class was huge.  Once I was in the airport, I made a pretty mad dash to baggage claim and, of course, had nothing to claim, so just kept going.  Next up was customs and immigration.  The Chinese national line looked pretty long -- sucks to suckkkk -- but the foreigner line was empty.  First one, woohoo!

So I went into the roped off area and walked all the way to the front.  At that time, though, there wasn't even a customs worker there to handle foreigners, so I ended up just waiting at the yellow line or whatever.  As soon as the workers all noticed me, they signaled one of their guys to go over and help out, and so he starting walking up to one of the booths where the workers sit for processing.  And as he was doing that, a middle aged Chinese guy waltzed right on up to the window of the booth, even though I was clearly standing at the yellow line first.  Didn't look back; didn't say sorry; didn't say that he was in a rush; just jumped straight to the front of the line as if it was the proper thing to do.

And that's when I knew that I was in China.

Peace out.

All I Wanted Was a Pat Down

When I was coming back from China, I had a layover in Dallas.  My plan was to -- as I always do -- jump off the plane, run to customs, and be the first one to the gate for the next flight.  The only thing standing in my way is, of course, the TSA.

And now the TSA has pornoscanners, which I think is the most ridiculous thing ever.  I don't want to talk politics too much here because I much prefer to keep this one personal, but the whole idea is just so ridiculous that I will never allow myself to do it.  Most obviously, it's incredibly invasive.  The government is literally looking inside your pants.  Second, who knows how secure those images are?  Less obviously, it solves a red herring problem.  The problem is not that I might bring a pen, a coin, or a razor blade onto a plane.  The problem is that the cockpit is attached to the passenger area.  You will never, never, never have a safe plane until that problem is solved.  It's a fundamental flaw in the system.

Sorry.  That was more politics that I wanted here.

Anyway, as soon as I got to the front of the line, I went to the side of the pornoscanner and asked to opt out.  The girl who was guiding people through, maybe 20-something, maybe Hispanic, seemed nice enough, somewhat quietly called, "Male assist?"  Yes, with the question mark at the end.  I sat at the doorway beside the X-ray machine and waited.  All of my bins went through.  All five of them, since you need a separate one for your shoes (kill me) and your computer (are you serious) and your jacket (come on).  Note, of course, that my wallet, passport, and phone are all in those bins on the other side of the checkpoint doorway from me.

I waited a while.  Someone came through the doorway with a bunch of bins.  I saw how they unlocked it, which was easy -- literally just pulling out a pin from the side of the door.  I filed it away in my just in case folder.  I felt a bit impatient because it was getting on five minutes probably, and I had plans.  I needed to eat, go to the bathroom, get some water, and most of all I needed to submit an assignment for my operating systems class which I had found out existed that morning when I was in Nanjing and needed to turn in after six hours on trains/subways and then another twelve hours on a plane.  Anyway, I asked if she could call again.  "Male assist?"

I waited some more.  I looked around.  No one was looking at me.  I was pretty sure I could just walk through the door and no one would even notice.  I also noticed that all of my bins were still sitting there where anyone could just grab my wallet, walk away, and I'd just be sitting there behind the gate yelling they stole my wallet! but basically unable to do anything as the terribly incompetent TSA would probably just let it happen.  That frustrated me, even just the idea.  I waited for a long time again, then asked for another call.  "Male assist?"  Seriously, it was like she didn't even want me to get a pat down.

I waited yet more.  At this point it was getting kind of ridiculous, like maybe 15 to 20 minutes of just sitting at this door and waiting.  I was very, very seriously considering just opening the door and walking through.  There's a good chance that no one would have noticed, and if anyone did notice, I probably would have gotten a pat down, WHICH IS ALL I WANTED, YOU GUYS.

Just as I was on the verge of making a move along those lines, a 20-something white dude from the TSA starts walking over.  I make eye contact with him.  But before he walks over to where I'm standing, he turns and walks into the pornoscanner and waves someone to come in.  I maintain eye contact, and say hey or something like that, and he pokes his head out.  "Hey, do you think you could help me out here?"

And, quite sarcastically right off the bat, he said, "Hey man, I'm doing this right now, sooooo~~~"

I said, "Yes, I know, but could you perhaps call someone to come help me?"  The girl who had called three times was clearly listening.  I didn't plan that, but considered it a benefit.

He started moving his hands flippantly, pointing at himself and showing his palms and such, "Sorry, dude, I have to do this thing right now, sooooo I can't help you, kay?"  And then proceeded to raise his hands in the air and squat a little bit to demonstrate to someone how to be pornoscanned.  I thought it was interesting that this job of his didn't include his mouth, which is what I wanted him to use to call for someone.  It's TSA agents, though.  How are they supposed to figure these things out?

She said, "Male assist?"

It was not very effective.

Eventually, probably 25 minutes after I had started waiting, a pretty polite older guy came over and gave me my government mandated pat down.  I noticed that the cocky young white guy that I asked to help me out had actually called for a male assist also after he realized I was still there waiting five minutes or so after he had accosted me.  I quietly said thank you to him as I walked through, but purposefully also smoldered at him because he seemed like a punk.  I had never been so relieved to have a government worker feel up my junk.  At long last, I could reclaim responsibility for my passport and submit my assignment.

It's the little things in life, you know.

Thanks, TSA.

Peace out.

New Year's Devolutions

I've started to feel pretty guilty about my terrible discipline in memorializing things for the past couple years.  I used to take pictures all the time, but now I find it more annoying to carry a camera around in my pocket for some reason.  I've also heard that doing that leads to the lens problems that always seem to destroy my cameras.  But really I'm just making excuses.  I should take more pictures.  I also should have been writing more.  I know that I'm going to regret the disorganized trail of breadcrumbs that I left for myself for the past couple years once I'm a little bit further down the road.  Ugh.

Sorry, self.

Anyway, so the goal is to write three posts in any subset of my journals that I feel like per week.  That might include public and private ones, or just ones that (if anyone is still reading this...) you don't know about, so... just a heads up?  Also a heads up to my future self.  =)

I guess you might also notice that this, the first entry of the year, is taking place nearly three weeks in.  I know =(  But I was in China!  So it's not really my fault.  Kind of.

The other resolution/regression to previous behavior is to floss more.  I'm not sure why I feel like that's such a big deal, but I've always heard that it's extremely important to dental health, and I know that I don't do it enough.  So....  yeah, I know, that's boring as hell.  But it's a worthwhile goal, right?

Right, guys?

Peace out.