Do Not Mock Your Potential Employers

Okay, I shouldn't do this, because it's wrong of me. I've been interviewing with ad agencies. I like that kind of business, with its pressures and innovations. One of the lesser houses I came across (at which I did not interview, nor did I submit a resume') was looking for "Web developers" but it's clear from the job description that what they want are graphic designers. In the job pitch, the recruiter wrote (all typos in the original):

As an ad Firm, creativity is key, so dazzel us. … We will be reviewing this weekend and getting responses out to 2-3 candidates by MOnday for project starts early nexy week.

Okay, that kind of bad grammar and misspelling is appropriate for a blog post, not a job opening.

Dudes.

Six days and no word from the parts distributors...

Okay, this is starting to get annoying. I sent my package, with the wrong laptop fan part, with the RMA number and the appropriate tracking information and all that, last Friday. It was received at the distributor's on Monday.

I haven't heard a word since. They were very chatty when they first mailed it out to me a few months ago but now... nothing. Silence. I'm starting to get annoyed. I want my laptop back. The desktop is tolerable (a USB Lenovo keyboard makes it so), but I'd really like a performant machine on which I can rely.

Grump.

In which I praise vandalism

Amusing vandalism

Sometimes, despite the cost of it all, you just end up laughing when you see something this, er, disgustingly funny. I guess it's a comment on the greasiness of the stuff.

Keeping up with the foody stuff

Being home does have its pleasures. Yesterday, for example, I had slow-cooked whole oatmeal with just a touch of brown sugar for breakfast, a grilled cheese sandwich with pancetta & horseradish (It occurs to me that: it's summer, I have a grill. I should make real grilled cheese sandwiches), and for dinner I made risotto with prosciutto and vegetables-- the last made with a half-cup of Beecher jack fresh from Pike Place Market, and home-made stock.

Unfortunately, that was the last of the home-made stock. But there were two carcasses in the freezer, along with a gallon bag of onion ends, skins, and miscellaneous vegetable peelings and cuttings. That's enough for a gallon and a half of new stock, so today the house smells wonderful.

On the job search front...

The phone screen today has pushed over into a face-to-face on Monday. Even better, a random resume sent out a week ago has now come back with a second face-to-face on Monday. Well, this should be interesting. That's five interviews booked in one week.

Good grief, something has to come out of all this activity!

Geek Topic: Dynamic names as first-level URL path objects in Django

As usual, too much source code to post, but here's a great article I derived from my current project on validing usernames or other "slug" entities in Django against the current URL list to ensure that the chosen slug doesn't conflict and isn't masked by the application's base collection of URLs. This allows you to write applications like del.icio.us, in which your username is a first-level "command" to the application to show your bookmarks, while validating that a requested username doesn't override the "tags," "news," or other application-specific commands:

Dynamic names as first-level URL path objects in Django

The real news of the day

Omaha and I are celebrating our 20th Anniversary today.

It doesn't feel like much of a party. I still don't have a job, we're short on money, we've just wound up one court battle with Der Ex and we're about to plunge into another, we're living with your ordinary stressy moody teenage girl, and her younger sister doesn't understand what's wrong with her.

But still, it's a good milestone, twenty years. Half the passing lifetime. Omaha has stood behind me, sometimes pushing, sometimes just standing me up. I'd like to think that I could survive adulthood without such help, and probably I could, but I'm happy that I don't have to. She stayed during a crisis as bad as anything that happened to any upstanding congressional moralist recently, and she decided that despite my faults and transgressions she'd keep on and we'd raise our children together, as a family.

I love and adore her, and sometimes I feel so hopeless to express it, so inconsiderate when I fail, and so troubled when I get it wrong.

Twenty years is a long time, and I'm aiming for sixty more, and every day I make little notes to myself in my to-do list trying to be a better man for my wife, and a better father for my children. Omaha has been the light and the love of my life, and when stress doesn't let that light shine as brightly as it could, I do everything I understand that I can do to polish the lenses and fuel the flame, because that's what she deserves.