Personal: January 2004 Archives

A follow up to my post about President Bush being a "deserter":

I need to wear my dress uniform for a function on Saturday night, so I was getting my ribbons organized so I could attach them properly. In the Marine Online system, it says I don't rate the National Defense Medal. The only qualification for the NDM is being on active duty during wartime. As I was on active duty during the Gulf War and the Iraq War, I rate two of them.

Funny though -- Marine Online says have a Combat Action Ribbon. In other words, the computer thinks I was in combat during wartime, but during combat I was not on active duty, and thus I do not rate the NDM. Hmm....

Why, yes; my confirmation name is Aquinas, so it is my name day! Oh, thank you! Oh, you shouldn't have!

I've been looking for a new job recently. I don't want to leave my current position unless I find something better, but it's probably time to leave before I get burned out and unsuitable for human company. Right now, I do Internet development for a company that owns a slew of news properties, including two you've almost certainly heard of. Our team runs the Web sites and the content management system that powers them.

There are plenty of jobs out there, despite what Hodean & The Gang says, but I've been picky about where I've applied. Several weeks ago, a former co-worker recommended that I submit an application to a company for which she was doing contract work. I did that, and they invited me to an interview. By the end, I wanted to switch my line of work to something more spiritually rewarding, like coal mining.

Margaret, the HR lady, met me at their development office. (I have changed the names in this story to protect the innocent and the guilty.) She introduced me to Benjamin, a skinny, pale, intense little person.

The first few questions were sensible: he handed me a short program, and asked me to tell him what various parts of the code did and what the output would look like. I felt like things were going quite well -- we were talking about the kind of things that Web developers should know, and I sailed through that part. Then it started.

"What," Benjamin asked, "is a Cartesian join?"

"I don't know," I said after thinking a moment. "I've heard the term but I can't define it for you." I don't believe in pretending I know more than I do, and I find that people usually appreciate that kind of honesty.

"Umm...okay...." He looked taken aback. "Well, tell me what this SQL code will do."

"Oh," I said, "That will return a resultset with all the rows in both tables."

"That's right. That's a Cartesian join."

Okay, I thought to myself, This guy definitely majored in computer science.

Then we went through the looking glass. "Do you know what a Fibonacci sequence is?"

Nope. Sure didn't. He explained it, and asked me to write a program to calculate it. I started fumbling my way through it. To understand my frustration, an analogy:

Knowing how to calculate a Fibonacci sequence is to running a real Web site as knowing about Monet's paintings of the gardens at Giverny is to running the garden in your backyard. I managed to get over the sheer irrelevance of the task and came up with a solution, but at that point I considered thanking them and leaving.

It's a slow weekend, so I'll post another picture from my sojourn last year. This time, the scene is a casual Friday evening, on the back porch of our tent. I'm on the left, my friend Todd, a corporal, is on my left, and Joel, a gunnery sergeant, is on the right. (I'd use their last names but I don't have their permission. They probably wouldn't care, but still.)

During the war, I smoked the occasional cigarette. They were all around, they're a pleasant diversion, and when you don't shower for 37 days straight you don't worry too much about the smell it leaves behind on your clothing. But then a warning on a carton of British cigarettes told me I should mend my ways...

...and I never smoked again.

Well, except for cigars. They don't count.

Open Source Shakespeare, my master's thesis project, now has all of Shakespeare's plays in it. Check all of them out here.

The next stage will be to make the search tools better, as well as indexing the complete works word-by-word, instead of line-by-line. However, it should be useful right now as it is. Enjoy!

One of my very best friends, Brian McEntire, asked his girlfriend Vanessa Clay to marry him last Saturday. In an uncharacteristically weak moment, she accepted. I'm kidding -- he's a great guy, which is why I was glad to sponsor his confirmation into the Church. They announced their engagement for the first time at a party at the Johnson house (attended by John Schultz and his better half -- or, given his size relative to her, better one-quarter.)

Please pray that their marriage will be as joyful as it promises to be, and that their preparation goes smoothly. The nuptial Mass is scheduled for November in Houston's cathedral. May God give them many happy years together.

All of Shakespeare's tragedies are now available on Open Source Shakespeare, a personal project of mine that will (hopefully) be my grad thesis when it's all done.