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Wednesday, Thursday… recruiters. Friday, three calls for Leon (at 8am, 9am and 10am). This morning, fire alarm testing in the building.

So where did I leave off? Tuesday, Wednesday Thursday I was awoken by recruiters. I can’t remember Friday, but yesterday and today I was woken up early again as well. Yesterday it was some guy with a big metal ladder clanging right outside my window, and this morning (at 8 a.m.!) it was another recruiter.

Yes, I appreciate all the chances to get a job, but my sleep… my precious sleep…

So I had a job interview today with a super-secret Internet startup that they couldn’t tell me what they did, following up from one of the phone interviews I did earlier in the week. I met with the guy I talked with on the phone, that went well enough. Met with another guy, that seems to go pretty well also. Then I met with a third guy, who kept interrupting me when I was talking, got to a certain point in the interview, asked me “do you know [Technology X]?” Which I didn’t. He then asked “do you know [Technology Y]?”, which I didn’t either.

At that point the interview was over, I’m sorry, they do everything in those two technologies, they’d really like to hire someone who knew them well.

I didn’t have those on my resumé anywhere… if it’s that important to you, why did you bother bringing me in?

The problem I knew I was going to have is rearing its ugly head. I learned a little bit about a lot of different things in the last eight years, but everyone wants to hire a specialist.

“Nintendo Wii”? Do they really think that’s a good name? Sheesh.

(Yes, I’m actually awake now. I’ve been woken up by phone calls from recruiters the last three days….)

Errr, yeah. 200 lines in marathon.

(Back to FFXI, then digging through my room for the stuff I forgot for my taxes…)

Certain other members of the household were concerned that the wireless net wasn’t password protected. So last night, I went downstairs, set it up, came back up and everything worked fine after typing in the passwords. And everyone was happy.

Then this morning when I turned on my PC, it wouldn’t connect to the network. I spent an hour trying to figure out why, couldn’t get it, and finally got so enraged that I went down to Fry’s and bought a new Airport Extreme and Airport Express. Yes, that cause/effect doesn’t seem to make sense, but it’s a purchase I’ve been meaning to make for a long time now anyway (upgrading to 802.11g and getting a repeater) and I hoped that upgrading the base station would fix my problem. It did. It also introduced about three other problems, as is often the case.

I’d like to point out that, as expected, my PowerBook went, “Oh, a new network, what’s the password? Thank you.” and connected, and all my Internet was on and working.

The PC went “Oh, a new network, what’s the password? Thank you.” and connected and nothing worked. I got no IP from the DHCP server. I manually assigned an IP and nothing pinged. I got very frustrated and tried many wrong things (as is often the case) and finally someone suggested turning off WEP. So I did so and it worked. But I need the WEP! That was the whole point of this exercise! So finally someone else suggests using 64 bit instead of 128 bit, to which I reply “The Airport only does 128 or 40.”

[Insert dramatic pause while people who know what piece of information I’m missing can laugh at me.]

“64 bit is the same as 40 bit.” Said someone in IRC, just as I read it on a webpage. Had I known this, it would have been one of the earlier things I tried. So switched and, lo and behold, network works with password protection and everything. Then I got the WDS propagation working with the express, after undoing some of the munging I did and everything was happy, I logged in to FFXI to make sure that worked, and started typing this up.

Until I got to this point, at which the network decided to go bonkers, on both my PC and Mac… where I’m getting no outside connection as well as no connection to my linux machine. I swear… what the hell… why me?

This is why I don’t change things when they’re working.

I have just thought of a new word. Well, it’s not completely new, as google has one hit on it: Slacksophone.

My mind immediately went to the wrong place, and “playing the slacksophone” has now become my euphemism of choice.

The problem with worrying about your health is that it can actually impact your health, causing you to worry more about your health.

I purchased short-term high-deductable health insurance and I have a doctor’s appointment next week. My mother should be happy.

Edit: Meant to say high-deductable instead of high-premium.