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April fool
Friday, April 1 2016
I woke up at Susan & David's place to another warm humid day. By the time I got up, it was warmer outside than it was inside, so I threw open the doors so the dogs could come and go as needed. Other than that, I stayed only long enough to drink a cup of black tea (the house brand at Susan and David's is Tetley, not my favorite Red Rose).
After getting a cup of coffee and a six pack of tonic water at the Stewart at the Zena Road/Route 28 intersection, I drove to the Tibetan Center thrift store, which I hadn't visited in a couple weeks. Once again, good stuff had accumulated there, and I bought a pair of USB powered speakers, an inflatable airplane neck pillow, and a K'Nex Motorized Madness Ball Machine, all for less than $5, though the K'nex stuff alone costs $344 new on Amazon. I love Rube Goldberg devices, and the K'Nex Motorized Madness Ball Machine is a way to build one. The main problem with these Lego-like kits is the garishness of the colors, all of which are as anachronistically saturated as the tiles that need to be sledgehammered out of kitchens on Five Day Flip. If someone would produce a Lego or K'Nex kit with all the parts in white, grey, or burnt sienna, it would have enormous appeal outside the age 5-12 demographic.
When I returned home, I found Maresa there with her dog Lydia making a social call to meet the new dog Neville. As she was leaving, another car arrived in the driveway, in this case a young woman who had given me her MacBook to repair after her dog spilled a bunch of water into its keyboard. (She's a co-worker of Ray's at the Red Onion, and I'd taken the job as a favor to him.) I'd been able to get the MacBook to boot up, but had chickened out of an attempt to replace the keyboard. There are too many screws and tiny fragile proprietary connectors for a man with my thickness of fingers and middle-ageness of eyesight. (I never got that far, but the keyboard itself is held in place by something like 60 itty bitty screws.) While that was returning the MacBook and accepting a $60 payment, the young woman's dog and boyfriend also emerged from the car, and the rolling dog party continued. (The dog was a big beautiful hound mutt with a gorgeous silver and black speckled brindle pattern.)
For a good many years now, I've fallen into a pattern of only cutting my hair once each year, usually in the Fall. But this morning tufts of my hair were sticking out in all sorts of unfortunate ways, and I would be having a job interview involving video later this afternoon with one of the web developers at an online political news site based in New York City. So I cut a bunch of those tufts back, giving myself something that would qualify as a crude trim.
As for the job interview, it was sort of a disaster, though not as bad as that one I'd had back on March 21st. Again it involved code visible on two ends of an internet connection, with me having to contribute from my end. (It had been billed as an exercise in "pair programming.") But it was cursed from the start, with the necessary environment being sprung on me at the last minute, and, when I couldn't get them to work in the few minutes available to prepare, the interviewer and I had to cobble together a different way of doing things. Then, when I was shown the code, it was as if the interview was unexpectedly being conducted in Danish. It wasn't quite that bad, since the language involved was a sort of Javascript, but it was in a framework called React with which I have zero experience. And its syntax was weird, including undelimited strings of HTML (or something like HTML) mixed in with the code. There were also weird expressions such as let that reminded me of long-dead programming languages I've never actually learned. On top of all of this, the guy interviewing me was a font of unfamiliar computer science jargon. I'm familiar with the term "array," for example, but I've never heard anyone refer to a class of arrays as a "vector." My problem here stems from being an autodidact who mostly works on projects (or parts of projects) alone. I know a lot of practical stuff about programming and can achieve any assigned programming task with my level of knowledge (I'm Turing-complete, you might say). But I don't know all the jargon for the patterns and techniques I use, since I rarely or never have to describe them to anyone else with skills similar to mine. I explained to my interviewer that I'm a practical programmer with practical skills, and that all the abstraction and indirection I was seeing in this unfamiliar code was confusing me. But the truth of the matter was that it wasn't just confusing me; it was somehow making me doubt that I had any programming knowledge at all. Perhaps, I kept thinking, I'm a huge fraud and I should be pursuing some other line of work. But I was also angry; this job I was being interviewed for was that of a crappy Junior frontend developer with a salary 75% of what I was earning back in 2000 at Launch.com, and yet here I was being expected to dive into a weird (and very new) Javascript framework like a duck into water. It showcased the depressing faddishness of contemporary web development that has me wanting to do something else with my life. I kept wanting to tell the interviewer that fuck it, I didn't want to continue with the job interview anymore and that it already seemed like the job was going to suck.
Despite all that, I did manage to do some basic stuff in this React framework for my interviewer. So, though it was a disaster, it wasn't a complete one. But it confirmed my fears that my performance is always terrible when I'm expected to perform anything requiring much in the way of mental effort in front of someone, particularly a stranger making judgments about me.
This evening I finally saw Neville break into a run. He did so upon seeing the cats Oscar and Celeste (aka "the Baby") playing near the end of the driveway. Mistaking them for prey animals, he charged, and they escaped down a the drainage ditch on the side of Dug Hill Road. Neville is also given to barking at me in the distance when he sees me puttering around in the yard (cleaning up dog shit is still the main yard activity at this time of year).
This evening, Gretchen and I watched two episodes of season two of Better Call Saul. I'm finding the lawyerly threads about Jimmy, Chuck, and Kim kind of long-winded and dull, but that's more than made up for by episodes involving the deeply-weather badass Mike Ehrmantraut. Any time Mike tells you you should do something, you should probably do it.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160401 feedback
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