Zhanga: December 2008
Entries have their own pages now. Click the date to see the entry by itself with its comments.
Saturday, December 27, 2008 (4 comments)
My parents seriously saved all the tall genes for my sister. In this photo from Stone Mountain, my sister's the one on the right (she's 11), standing next to a bunch of girls who are all in college:
Note to James: In order to improve the quality of your comments, please keep in mind the first rule of writing, "Know your audience," thanks....
4:08PM
Friday, December 19, 2008 (2 comments)
Facebook time has never worked well, but this is probably the stupidest example of that (read the timestamps):
Why do they even have "tomorrow" programmed into the time displayer thingy? Just in case?
(It's a rhetorical question. No need to answer with explanations like, "Facebook uses the same date/time libraries for photo comments as they do for things that actually can occur in the future, like events perhaps.")
3:16PM
Monday, December 15, 2008 (4 comments)
The Jehovah's Witnesses who used to come to our old house all the time somehow found their way to the new house when we moved five years ago. But ever since my grandparents moved back to China, I haven't been seeing a lot of them or their stupid brochures... until now. The last two times I've been home, I found stupid crap stuffed in the crack of the front door. I was pretty amazed when I saw the first one. You know how the mailman sometimes will stick a note into the crack of your door, and it sticks out the front? Well, these ladies (I assume it's the same two mentioned here) managed to do that, but it stuck out entirely into the inside, not outside, of the door. I have no idea how they managed to do that. Maybe Jehovah did it.
So anyways, I usually just throw this stuff away, but I actually took a look at this one. Check it out:
(Yes, it's in Chinese. That's why I say they followed us here and aren't just random Jehovah's Witnesses.)
The Chinese says something like, "Living in a new, peaceful world." Take a look at the picture. Are they serious? Some Chinese lady and her 10 year old daughter are petting a grizzly bear looking thing. There is a lion surrounded by all sorts of tasty-looking meat (ducks, birds, and humans including tender toddler meat)... and all it does is sit there and let a 4-year-old stick her arm into its eye?
This cult has got to be some huge joke or something.
11:50AM
Wednesday, December 10, 2008 (1 comment)
Did you ever notice that studying always ends with dying?
Also, The IT Crowd season 3 episode 3 is incredible. It's about as good as the 01189998819991197253 episode (S1E2, I think). I only made one mistake reciting that number.
2:55AM
Monday, December 8, 2008 (2 comments)
On the last day of religion class, the girl sitting next to me told the class about how her boyfriend got rear-ended on the interstate (how does that even happen?), and his laptop got destroyed because it was in the trunk. Unfortunately, the laptop had his almost-complete term paper on it. After she finished telling her story, I experienced the following non sequitur:
Me: Hey you know, the hard drive is probably still
good so maybe he won't have to rewrite the paper.
Girl: Oh it's ok, the insurance company is paying for
all of it.
As I opened my mouth to explain, I remembered that she was the girl who acted like she'd never heard of a function (as in math) before, so I just smiled and nodded. Just for the record, she was a dyed blonde and qualified as a chompie, though on a scale of Apu to Homer, she was not that orange and definitely leaned towards Apu.
8:54PM
Saturday, December 6, 2008 (3 comments)
I went to Richmond for a Capital One thing this weekend. They gave each of us this digital video recorder thing. How can I say no after that?
On the trip back, there were four cops equally spaced about 500 feet apart along a short section of interstate. Each of them had pulled over some unsuspecting traffic violator. By the time the fourth cop was visible, everybody on the road had slowed to 10 mph under the speed limit. Then after exiting the highway, I took some two-lane roads. I found myself following some old man driving about 2/3 the speed limit (like, 25 on 35 or 30-35 on 45) on an empty straight road. He drove so slowly that, even though we were the only two cars on that road, when a traffic light turned green I tailgated him and barely made it through the intersection as the light turned red above me.
To go along with that, I have the only good (as in fortunate) driving story of my life. In downtown Richmond, at least where I was driving, the blocks are regular and the roads are straight, but it's hilly so you can see maybe 4-8 intersections ahead of you. This morning, I had to drive about 12 blocks on this one road, and every light that I could see was red except for the two just ahead of me. Then for each intersection I passed, the light two intersections ahead of me turned green, and this continued in perfect clockwork fashion until I turned off of that road. That was so awesome that I just wanted to drive straight on that road forever. Compare that to Johnson Ferry/Roswell which turns red every time I get near...
3:31PM
Wednesday, December 3, 2008 (3 comments)
Here's a dumb recruiting story...
I went to the career fair in mid-September and dropped off my resume with the IT consulting branch of a large software company, whose flagship product is perhaps the most popular database software in the world. That night, I got two emails from their college recruiting robot, thanking me for going to the career fair. The emails, which were identical except the first one was titled "No Subject," requested that I email them a copy of my resume in MS Word format. So I sent them a copy, even though they already had one as evidenced by the fact that they had my email address.
The next day, I got an email from a live human. Here are selected portions:
We received your resume a while back and want to thank you for submitting it.
....
...please send me a text copy of your resume with your current GPA.
I had sent the .doc file (which includes my GPA) as requested the day earlier. That apparently wasn't good enough, so this time I sent both text and PDF formats. Included in my email was a simple question: was this person a recruiter for the consulting job (which is what I initially dropped off my resume for), or for software development? She replied that she was recruiting for development, not consulting, and despite me attaching my resume in two different formats to the email, she again asked for yet another copy of my resume.
So I sent my resume for the third time in two days, and she set up a phone interview for me. Interview day came and went, and nobody called me. When asked about this situation, the recruiter apologized and told me she'd send my name to the recruiting manager to schedule an onsite (second-round) interview.
The next day, a different recruiter contacted me to work out the logistics of my interview trip. She also asked for a copy of my resume.
To recap, so far we had four different resume requests from one robot and two people within one week. Five, if you count the duplicate email. And a missed phone interview, leading to an interview trip (which probably costs the company at least $1000) without them even making sure I can turn on a computer. The resume requests are funny to me because it seems that this huge database company with this great database software couldn't seem to use it to keep resumes straight. Or maybe it just kept eating mine...
So I flew to the West Coast for my interview, and the way it worked was that there were five interviewing teams who would make independent decisions based on their (I think) 45-minute interview with me. In order to not get an offer from the company, I would have to fail all five interviews, and the recruiter said that, in her experience, nobody had ever done that. So everybody gets an offer? (And on top of that, in terms of salary, this was by far the highest offer I got.) It's absolutely baffling. This is a hugely profitable company with a market cap about half of Microsoft's (aka huge). Forget being profitable — how do they even stay afloat?
Oh yeah, another thing. I never heard back from the consulting group that I applied to. Why would the consulting recruiters hand off my resume to software development, who weren't even at the career fair? Their recruiting database must be really buggy.
12:01AM
Monday, December 1, 2008 (1 comment)
The break consisted of a drive, sleep, many RCPs and food, and buying a few toys on Black Friday. And the drive back, which sucked because of traffic.
During the drive back, an unnamed one called me because her flight got delayed or something. She told me a secret that I would be "in big trouble" for telling. Apparently, some guy (who I don't know) proposed to some girl (whose name I don't even know) and she said yes. How am I supposed to even be able to tell anybody that?
Anyways, it's late tonight and I'm only up because I had to do laundry. I'll follow soon with a post about a dumb recruiting story, now that recruiting season is over.
2:55AM
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