Grocery Store

I went to the grocery store for toilet paper. Supplies at home are at crisis levels. I returned with mango juice, four apples, and a half gallon of milk. No toilet paper. I'm going to try again today.

Where You Was

If I'd been thinking about my week in Atlanta, I might have parsed it faster when a non-native-English-speaking coworker asked me, "Where you was?" It took me a moment to figure out what in the world he meant. I've gotta get that printed on a t-shirt.

Phone Interview Part 2

I nailed the second phone interview, no complexity analysis questions, and my solution to the lone algorithm problem was both exact and unique enough that the interviewer hadn't seen it before. Next a manager calls, then maybe a fourth interview out in San Francisco. We'll see.

Haggling

There's a guy who works the front of my grocery store asking for spare change. I declined, as usual, but offered to buy him something. What followed was a master class in haggling over peppermint patties and M&M's, right up until "You're wearing on my patience."

Step One

Did the phone interview tonight. Short, under twenty minutes, just technical. I admitted I'd fail the complexity analysis problems and he asked them anyway, probably to make me feel bad, but then I nailed both problem solving questions and fixed my ego right up. On to step two.

Idiots

A new RSS feed crashed my iPhone app with an out-of-bounds exception. Objective-C's 32-bit address stack traces aren't much help, so I gave up and loaded it into gdb. The culprit: same company, different feed, a different date format. Of course. And it was in stupid 12-hour time.

Interview

A recruiter from a top five social networking site called, and unlike most job calls, this person was well spoken and intelligent. Full-time in San Francisco, neither ideal, but far more interesting than the daily parade of J2EE pitches. So I have a weed-out interview tomorrow.

I Love Being a Programmer

I love being a programmer. Two very different jobs at once: C and Objective-C on the iPhone by day, masquerading as a Java server developer by night. Meanwhile managers stare at bar graphs that can't match the beauty of a graphical debugger. Damn kids, get off my lawn.

I Was Wrong

I was wrong. It happens. Turns out libxml2 has a push mechanism that does exactly what I wanted: feed the SAX parser data as it arrives instead of buffering. Wrap it in some Objective-C and now stories appear in my iPhone app as the XML downloads. Tada.

Message Parsing

Parsing a poorly documented binary protocol in my evening job, I hit a message that ended in a stray 0x00 that didn't fit the spec. As I drifted off to sleep it hit me: the two extra bytes I'd noticed last week. The real question: do I bill them for falling asleep on the problem?