The approximate schedule of events:
Jan 11, 12:15 PM: Phone rings. It's Conformia, a company that I'd applied to through Monster in mid-December. They want to know if I can come in for an interview. In four hours.
Jan 11: 4:00 PM: Interview. It goes really well. The people seem great, the work is interesting (interfaces for process control! Squee! Exactly what I wanted to do! And it's for making booze!), and I'm a good match as far as background and general experience. I don't have some specific experience that they're looking for (Web applications in general, DHTML in particular) but they seem very positive anyway. The place is about 12 miles away (spitting distance, by local standards... a 20 minute highway drive, a 30 minute non-highway drive (all depending on traffic of course)) so that's a big plus.*
Jan 11, 5:45 PM: I'm asked if an initial "contractor" period of two months would be acceptable (i.e. I'd be a contract employee instead of a full time employee, so no health care, 401K plan (like RRSPs), paid vacation, etc. for that time) while they make sure I can learn the specific stuff I need to. R:tAG's got us a health plan, there's only one holiday in the next two months anyway ("Presidents' Day"), and DHTML doesn't look like rocket science. I say sure.
Jan 11, 5:50 PM: They ask if I can come back at 11:00 the next morning, since the HR people have apparently all left for the day. I say sure.
Jan 12, 11:00 AM: I'm given a contractor agreement, an NDA and a request that today be my first day of work. I say sure.
So I'm employed. About freakin' time, you might say. :) The starting salary is low-ish, but at this point, I was really starting to worry about the huge chronological gap in my CV. I can only blame the US gummint for so much. Plus since I'm basically restarting my career I was expecting to get a novice-level salary anyway. Plus, at any level, it's income instead of outgo.
Yay!
* It's a block from the Sunnyvale CalTrain station too, but considering that the nearest CalTrain station (College Park) is a 15 minute drive from our house if the highways are completely empty (haw!), that doesn't seem worth it.
Not only my brain is turning to cream cheese. I am terribly, terribly out of shape (not that I was ever really in shape). But yesterday we went up to The City (this was not us) and hung around with Dancin' Jen (now to be known as Cicada Jen, for her new fetish) and walked and walked and walked and went to a lot of cool places, and had sushi, and then I went to a dance class with her that was two hours of non-stop muscley goodness. And now I can't hardly raise my hands or feet. I think I'll check out the local studio to see if I can find my missing muscle tone.
Oh, and by the way, SQUEEEEEEEE!!! I can't believe it's taken this long for someone to get the idea that the Discworld books would make good movies. I just hope they don't screw it up (yeah, yeah, I know, "you must be new here...")
(I was getting tired of all the posts titled "Miscellanea.")
And welcome, Carla, to blogland! Unlike this site, her blog is all about deep and important thinky-type stuff. Whereas I talk about ants and knitting. My brain is turning to cream cheese.
Gamespot had a year-in-review thing, and a little-known game called Psychonauts got a rave review. So we were at Fry's checking out a sale, and picked it up. It's too 3D-reflexy for me to play so I kibitz while R:tAG plays, and sometimes contribute on the puzzle bits. But it is a really good game. Good interleaving of cut scenes, good story, a variety of challenges, and visuals that I never in a million jillion years would have come up with myself.* It's been more like watching a movie than a game. Of course, my experience with games is pretty limited. Maybe they're all this good now.
We also got the Myst collection (the first three games) for cheap. That's more my style. The game, that is, not cheapness. Though waiting until something cool has faded from the spotlight so that I'm not paying a trendiness premium... hmm. I guess that isn't not my style.**
* This is the same reason I love Miyazaki's movies. As I once said to a friend in a fit of pessimism, as I get older there are fewer and fewer good surprises left.
** There's nothing I don't like about double negatives!
Just to be clear, in case you've seen Ze Governator on the news frowning thoughtfully at waterfilled farms, there's absolutely no flooding in our particular part of California, so don't worry about us.
Oh yeah... welcome to T-ass entering blogdom. Old news, I know, but I'm usually the last one to know these things.
And in movie news, we finally saw the Narnia movie and The Producers, both of which I'd been quite looking forwards to though with some mixed feelings in the Narnia case. After all, the Narnia books are part of the furniture of my mind, to use Douglas Adams' lovely phrase, and I've seen with Lord of the Rings how someone else's vision and the vicissitudes of the movie format can clash with my own mental images. But The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a shorter, simpler book, and adapted to a movie really quite well. The main actors were great and the special effects were so good that you stopped thinking of them as effects (the animals especially; I realized that I wasn't amazed at the CGI, I was amazed that they'd found talking beavers). And Tilda Swinton rocks my world.
And The Producers is great. I think they really kept the stage play/musical feel of it (original "stagy" dialogue, slightly stylized sets, over the top acting) and it worked. Mind you, it's a movie based on a musical based on a movie about a musical, so it's going to be campy. It's been a long time since I've seen the original movie (which I don't think was even a musical? It's been a long time) but if my memory serves they even kept a lot of the blocking.* I can't think about neo-Nazis now without snickering slightly ("Don't be schtupid, be a schmartie! Come and join ze Nazi Party!") which I'm sure was Mr. Brooks' intent.
I recommend both movies. Well, all three movies, since the original of The Producers is excellent also. I mean, Gene Wilder. C'mon.
* There was a slight difference in the plot; the original movie had a hippie playing Hitler, I think. Though the whole "I broke my leg!" running gag seemed familiar, so maybe he just auditioned. I guess the whole hippie thing was edgier in 1967. I'll have to see if I can find the original movie. Netflix to the rescue!
Labels: movies
It's raining here. A lot.
So, finally back and feeling sociable enough to even blog. It was wonderful to see so many friends and family again, and I know I missed even more people because of disorganization on my part (forgive me, please). But cramming basically a year's worth of socialization into two weeks left me feeling slightly crazy. Er. Crazier. Not that I needed more proof of my introverted nature.
And we saw more of Calgary airport than we wanted, on both ends of the trip and both times because of weather. On our return date, the San Francisco airport was almost completely shut down (only one runway open, and it's a big airport) because of fog, buckets of rain, and high winds. So we had a four hour delay in the lovely Calgary airport, after even the dubious attractions of Arby's and the Relay store were closed for the evening. Ah well. At least SFO was our final destination so we got home at 2:30 AM PST; I feel for those poor souls who missed connections and were delayed by a day.
But now that I'm home and refreshed by solitude* I can realize how much fun I had, with the wedding and the friends and the family and the hey hey hey. And I can start in on the massive amounts of yarn I brought home. Hey, it's hard to get alpaca wool in California! Don't you dare judge me!
I'm also catching up on everyone else's blogs, and webcomics, and e-mail, and everything... I didn't really look at a computer while I was away. But I was amused to see that someone also wished she'd done a quotes page for the week. There was something at the wedding reception that I kept telling myself "Ok, remember this, remember this, remember this..." and then I must have seen something shiny because I can't remember it.** I should stop wearing sparkly dresses, really.
I'm also very very happy that I got to see four people I wasn't expecting to, Mr. Too-Tall and Mr. Not-Quite-As-Tall-but-Tall-Enough from Calgary, Rob R. the rootless cosmopolite, currently from Malawi (give me your blog URL!) and Marathon Pam, who happened to be flying back to her hometown via Regina at the same time that we were in Regina and had a car. A brief meeting at the airport was all we could manage, but it was still a pleasure.
And thanks to R:tAG's generous family, who provided shelter and transportation and so much holiday food that I felt like a beachball.
And now I'm starting to sound like an awards ceremony. But really, thanks to everyone and we miss you.
* We didn't even go out for New Year's... how lame is that? If it weren't for the fact that we actually did stay awake until midnight, I'd say we were turning into my parents. :) But we split a split (hah!) of champagne and I got to have a whole jar of caviar all to myself since its combination of taste and texture is a double-icky whammy to R:tAG. Mmmm. I like caviar.
** And it wasn't "Monkey! Go!" Believe me, I won't forget that for a while. And it wasn't "Why is my bed on the lawn? Where's my canoe?" because that was after Christmas, not at the wedding.
