Phoenix

It’s all done - no going back now. I’ve accepted a job down in the Phoenix area. I gave my employer 4 weeks notice to help finish up a big project I’ve been involved with here at Flying J Communications. I’ve been with FJC a little over 3 years and it’s been a great experience for me, but it’s time to move on.

(Anyone wanna buy a sweet house?)

Apollo

My new job is actually with the Apollo Group, the parent company of The University of Phoenix. It was recently ranked #36 in Computerworld’s top 100 places to work in IT in the US, and one of only 2 companies on the list in Arizona. (No companies in Utah even made the list)

Google

Now that the cat’s out of the bag and it’s official that I’m moving to Phoenix I can relate my Google story:

I had heard from my dad the Google would be moving to Phoenix, so on a whim back in November I sent my resume off to Google. I hardly expected to hear back from this PhD-ridden, uber-tech company. To my surprise, a few weeks later, a nice HR lady emailed me back asking me if I would be available for a phone interview. I replied back that I’d be open for anytime they wanted to call me. An interview was scheduled and immediately (and ironically) Googled “google interview experience.” A flood of hits came back about nightmare-ish and grilling interviews with people who were smarter that you’d ever hoped to be given 300 years of intense schooling.

I had no idea how true this was. The position at Google was for a Unix Systems Administrator, so I studied up on all the things I thought would be asked. I was nerve-wracked and sweating by the time I wandered out to my car for the interview. (My car is the only real place for some privacy when I’m at work) The HR lady was on the phone first. She verified some personal info and then transfered me to an interview technician that know sysadmin inside and out. He was very friendly, but as time went on the questions got harder and more difficult. I got the impression that if you don’t know the answer they want to see if you could figure it out. I didn’t know a few of the questions, but felt good in the fact that I did figure out the answer to most of them after some analysis. After everything was said and done this interview lasted 1.5 hours. Whew!

Even though I think I did OK on on the first interview, I wasn’t expecting another call from them. Sure enough another email came from the HR lady and I was set for my 2nd interview. (To Be Continued…)

Some Ubuntu folks are proposing a .Mac-like service for use across multiple Ubuntu computers. I’m all for it.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Ubuntu%2eMac

I’d like to see others run with this idea too. Maybe a general .Mac-like service for any OS.

I’ve been seeing alot of Web 2.0 mashups on the internet recently. I’ve come up with a sweet FOSS mashup…

MythTV (more specifically MythWeb) + FLV video streaming (ala Google Video) =
Slingbox for Myth (MythSling?)

Of course there’d have to be a conversion process that selects which shows are for “web viewing” and convert them from nuv to flv (ffmpeg?). The question is wheather or not hat process can be done on the fly (lots of CPU usage) or a batch load.

Life is good:

Frozen-Bubble for Mac OS X 

After seeing an article over at PCMag.com about using network-manager with Breezy, I thought I’ve give it a try. It looks sweet and all, but I ran into one big snag.

El Problemo: because of my network config at work and at home the local DNS caching issue / bind9 dependancy was a deal-breaker for me. That is untill I ran across WildBill’s Blog entry. He repackaged network-manager without the bind9 dependancy and Wa-hoo! it works now!

Thanks WildBill.

Hooray!

My shipment of 50 free Ubuntu CDs came in tonight!
(30 PC CDs, 10 64-bit CDs and 5 Mac CDs)
Let the evangelism begin.