Glen's corner of the web

I just noticed my HD-DVR has a Video On Demand option. Apparently, this recently added and still beta feature pulls the shows over your Ethernet connection and records them for playback when done. Pretty neat!

Between the XBOX 360 (I'm borrowing), the slingbox, the RCA HD-DVD player and the DirecTV DVR, I think I have more things networked in my living room than in my office. :)

...a combination bookstore and Mexican restaurant called "On The Borders"

I wonder how many servers who work in the International House of Pancakes can identify all the international flags etched in the glass separating booths there...

If a towel hanging up means "I'll use it again" and a towel on the floor means "please replace" what does a towel suspended in midair mean?

Sometimes, interviewing while under the weather is not a good idea. Yesterday I was in New York going through the finals day for an interview when I botched it.  It was like watching a train wreck. You see it coming, you see it happening, you want to scream at yourself on the inside "What are you saying???" Even when it's over, you are staring in shock at the carnage and cannot put two thoughts together in your head.

There I was talking on the phone to my first interview person (quite an impressive skillset and background on that guy) when all of a sudden the topic of architecture came up. Immediately and without warning, everything related to that topic - design patterns, SOA, application design, n-tier, everything - went out of my head. Just...gone.

After fumbling around horribly for a while and trying to answer what should have been straightforward questions and also trying to re-congeal all of the horribly fragmented concepts in my head,  I found myself not being able to explain what a design pattern is and actually admitting on the phone "I guess I don't know architecture all that well" . What???

Imagine being on a game show and they ask you "what is a traffic light" . Immediately you have all these concepts of vehicles, intersections, traffic flow, green/red colorblindness, LEDs versus lamps,  the little wire sensor in the street that tells the system there's a car waiting there (I think it's detecting the inductance field changing when a car's metal body is over it) and you cannot come up with an answer and you wind up thinking "gee, I guess I really *don't* understand what a traffic light is" so you can't answer the question. Then on the drive home you witness all of that stuff as part of your drive and you say "wait, I *do* know what a traffic light is". Only by then it's too late, you had been escorted out of the studios and the next contestant is up.

Fine. So that call wrapped up and for some reason I figured I'd be OK even after that mental collapse.

I had a great talk with my second interview person. We were disucssing what technologies were going to be pivotal for ISVs in the coming years, why it's important to be able to relate to the CTO and architect on the business level and when necessary the developers about APIs and tools. OK, things are looking better. We wrapped up that meeting and I was excitedly anticipating talking to the next person and thinking things were getting better.

However, instead of the next person coming into the room, I got the dreaded visit from the hiring manager. Both my interviewers had reported back to the team that I was a no-hire. I was in shock. I mean, I had tripped a bit but to me it seemed I had recovered and was on my way to blow the doors off things through the rest of the day. I certainly would have expected a "no-hire" from the first guy but not from the second. Wow.

It slowly dawned on me as I was walking through cold Manhattan back to my hotel that I had seriously botched it - almost suicidally. I jumped on the MSDN site and searched for "Architecture" and immediately upon skimming the articles returned by the search I realized I knew all this stuff! They'd been in my head all along. I *do* know architecture. But by then it was too late.

In the end I would have rather been told "thanks but no thanks" because of stuff I actually *didn't* know rather than for stuff that I *did* know but could not access during the interview.

Too bad. I would have loved the position and rocked at it, and enjoyed collaborating with my geographically co-located teammate as well...

Final note - it makes me feel infinitessimally better to write about it. Blogging is good for that I guess.