We don't need a carpenter. Are you a hammerer?

I received just about the weirdest telephone job interview I've had in a long time. It was specifically for a "CSS Programmer," and that was quite literally what the interviewer wanted. I got the impression she was reading off a list of requirements from another team, but list of questions were extremely CSS specific: doing positioning, color control, IE6 hacks, and nothing else. Nothing about Javascript, or DHTML semantics, or XHTML versus HTML, or Doctypes, or any of that stuff. Forget about back-end stuff.

That's like trying to hire a guy who's fixing your house by saying you don't need him to know any carpentry, but he has to be an expert hammerer. He'll just do what the carpenter says.

On further reflection, I suppose such a position is possible, but you'd better have a ton of pages that need stylin'. And if you do, then you're an incompetent boob who hasn't learned the power of Sass, Grid960, or CleverCSS.

Drrrrramama Queen!

This afternoon I went to pick Kouryou-chan up from her school. The kid's been a little obsessive-compulsive about her Nintendo DS handheld came, especially the Legend of Zelda series, and this morning was so focused on it that she neglected a lot of her morning responsibilities until I finally took it away from her completely. She snuck off after being awakened to play it; she snuck off again, and stole the thing from where I'd put it up after she'd had breakfast and was supposed to be making her lunch. I finally took it away from her completely. On the short drive to school, I gave her a brief spiel about the difference between a pleasure and a vice, and how the DS was becoming a vice for her. "A vice," I told her, "is a pleasure you have not learned how to take control of, and now it has control of you."

I was also booked to pick her up from school that afternoon. On the drive home, she again said, "Daddy, when we get home, can I have my Nintendo DS?"

I told her no. That she had been rude and thrown a tantrum after I'd taken it away from her the third time this morning, and she wasn't going to get it back until tomorrow at best. In any ordinary kid, this would result in either a routine tantrum or a sulk.

Kouryou-chan is no ordinary kid: "When I was at school today, I told all my friends about how I couldn't wait to get home and play on my DS. But now that's not gonna happen and all my dreams are shattered!"

When one door closes, another opens, right?

${ETHICS_VIOLATION} and I agreed that I would not be a good candidate for their team going forward. It was easier than I expected to tell them so.