Checksum Arcanius

Some time this morning, I noticed that the permalink for my last post was not simply “wasted”, but rather it was wasted-3, implying that I had used the title twice before.  After a short investigation, I found that this was indeed the case — wasted was written in 2005 and wasted-2 was written in 2004 (it was imported from greymatter, so it received the “-2” moniker). I guess I didn’t have a wasted period in 2006; perhaps this will have to do.

At any rate, I figure having only one post with that title per year isn’t doing too bad. So while I get over the sniffles I acquired while staying up too late watching the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica, listen to my music, and plug away at my Bioengineering project (due Tuesday), and contemplate some of life’s mysteries, I think I’m going to be just fine.

In other news, I changed the slugs for the three “wasted” posts to -2004, -2005, and -2007. Once a year.

First the good news — some very good friends of mine threw me a cool early birthday party at Golden Gardens park. Alice and Sabrina — Thanks!

Now, the less happy things. My first technical interview ever went poorly. That is was with Google, a company I may actually want to work for, adds to the pain a little. I don’t expect much after my performance, but I’ve been surprised by events before, so I won’t give up hope either.

Life has also been a bit stressful recently, and I responded badly this weekend, getting nothing done. At a critical juncture in the quarter, a whole weekend wasted!

Between me and surgery on Friday, I have quite the line-up: I’m interviewing with Microsoft on Thursday, four or five Biochem lectures to watch before a test Friday in the early morning, a CSE project milestone, a BioE project and two labs, significant work on my BioE capstone project, and probably a few other things to finish before I get older.

Just got to keep my eye on the prize.

Today amidst my classes and lab work, I spent a few hours chatting it up and dropping resumes off at the CSE Affiliates fair, an event where a bunch of companies that want to hire UW CSE students show up to get resumes and convince people they are worth working for. Among the companies I talked to:

• Yahoo (opening office in downtown Bellevue)
• Intel
• Redfin (Real estate… have two friends working there)
• Zillow (Real estate… one friend there)
• Adobe (Two friends)
• Apple
• Cray
• Pluggd (Video & Audio search… they seemed particularly interested in me)
• Microsoft
• Cozi (Family organization products)
• Chief Architect (Home Design software, Coeur D’Alene, ID)
• Pure Networks (Network Setup Software)
• Adapx (makers of a Smart Pen)
• Marchex (Cool water bottle givers, online advertising)
• Tableau (Data visualization)
• Pelago (Outdoing Google Local)
• WhitePages.com
• Teranode (Life sciences modeling software)
• TalentSpring (Resume Social Networking)
• Google

I may have even missed a few that I talked to — there was a lot going on!  At any rate, Google is last on purpose — I didn’t actually drop a resume there, as I did at the rest of the places on the list. This is because I have already been in contact with Google, and I have a phone interview with them on Friday afternoon.

8:45 wake
9:30-10:20 CSE 467 Lecture
10:30-3:00 Capstone lab
3:00-3:30 lunch
3:30-5:00 Bioen 499 Lecture on Cochlear Implants (very good!)
5:00-11:00 CSE 467 lab (not done!)
midnight-2:45 work
2:45-3:00 saw 4 people being chased by or already pulled over by cops

Also known as first Biochem test of the quarter. Then three more to go, and no more stupid memorization-only classes after that.

The first all-nighter of the quarter, courtesy of Computational Bioengineering.

In today’s CSE Lunch With the Chair, CSE Chair Hank Levy announced that the department has secured funds to allow ten current seniors to enter a new 5th-year masters program that the department is starting. I am planning on being one of the ten.