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.