In my search for my first job after graduating college, I applied to any job that I was remotely capable of doing, whether because I'd done the job in the past, or the skill set sounded very similar to what I was doing at PSU. And for all of December I was applying for jobs and not getting any kind of response for my efforts. So like any human being I became frustrated, Probably more so than I should have been, but regardless, I was frustrated.

So when applying for jobs, I let that frustration out in some of my online application questions.

Do you consider yourself an expert in Linux?
“No. Even though I've been playing with it for over ten years and I am consonantly being challenged by it. All the new features that come out with each kernel version just keep things new and interesting. Linux itself is a moving target, and I feel the only people that can call themselves linux experts are the kernel developers. Everyone else is intermediate, including me.”

And of course this little nugget of pure angst:

Please read the job description below and tell us why you are a great fit for this position.
“Although I am a recent college graduate. And I know that in this bad economy that there are better qualified people for this job I can offer a couple of things that they can't. Because the other people might be better qualified, they will also be better qualified for other jobs once the job market improves, thus anyone you hire will probably leave sooner as opposed to later. I on the other hand have a lot of growing to do, and finding an environment that allows me to do such would be beneficial to everyone. I can attain the same level of skill as these other candidates, but I will also do it for cheaper ( as I have little experience now) and will probably stay longer because I need to build up the time to build up the experience.”

Both of these questions came from two different job opportunities, and I'm sure you are just as surprised as I am to hear that neither of these companies have contacted me. Which is kind of sad in a way because if one of them did, I would know that THAT company is one worth working and toiling for because it at least has some semblance of a sense of humor. Alas, no love for the little angry wanna-be worker bee.

On the positive side, I have received a job offer from one company. So the hard work is done. I'm going to ask for some time to finish up what current interviews I have left, and see if any more job offers roll in before deciding which job to take.

UPDATE: Never tell the CEO of a social networking company that social-networking is "nothing more than self-aggrandizement and is just a fad".

Sorry, today's post will not contain anything technical. The past two weeks I've been busy studying for my last finals, of which I passed. :) As well as packing and moving from Portland to San Francisco. Because of all the craziness that life has bestowed upon me recently I won't be able to post anything geeky this week. But there is a silver lining to this, I'll post something worth while next week.

Also, I've decided to change my format slightly, I will be posting twice a month, instead of weekly, from now on. I'm doing this in the hopes in reducing the timeline of posting, that I can produce technical posts of higher quality, which I'm sure everyone would appreciate.

See you all next week.

Surprise blog posting... YEAH!!!

While just checking out my stats for webpage views. I noticed a very interesting thing. My post about converting Gentoo to Funtoo has been viewed 204 times. While that is very cool (at least to me), oddly enough the vast majority of those numbers are from day, 192 visits in one day to be precise, and my referral stats haven't changed a bit.

So this leads me to draw two conclusions: 1) Google got attached by evil code gremlins, who wanted to play with my head and make me think I have more readers than I really do. OR 2) Someone really liked my article, and posted it somewhere in such a way that a referral was not able to get marked. But this would mean that 192 people really did visit my site in day.

Regardless, I prefer to go with the second case. And would like to thank all the people who made this odd accomplishment possible(that means YOU!). I give you my gratitude. Thank you.

And of course, if anybody reading this has ideas on how this happened, I'm all eyes.

So its been a while since I've posted last. Really intense summer school and a vacation will do that to a blog. However, in my head I haven't stopped writing, so I have a couple of postings that just need to get written. Like this one. :)

So usually when I hear the word ingenuity, I think of the fictional character MacGyver. Who as the pop culture jokes go could make a bomb out of a rubber band, a paper clip, and a button. Or anything else he could put together that was in front of him. But you don't have to be MacGyver to have a moment of ingenuity.

Back in August I had the experience of riding my motorcycle down from Portland to San Francisco. And the event was around nine at night, on highway I-5 in southern Oregon. Just to give you an idea of the environment that I was riding in, close your eyes while standing outside. That is how much light is actually lighting the highway. The only way I can see what is in front of me is the light from my bike. And being this is just a single motorcycle headlight, you don't get a lot of light to see with.

While riding along, an object suddenly appears in my view, a dead deer. Just laying in the center of the fast lane. At the speed I was traveling at I was unable to stop safely, so I had to swerve. Which I tried to do, I didn't succeed. And somehow I rode my motorcycle OVER the deer carcass. After using the deer as a jump ramp and landing though, my bike started to make a noise. I thought at the moment that it might be wheel or tire related. So I pulled over, and tried to see what the damage was. But again, no outside lights, and I forgot to pack a flash light ( lucky me ). And being around forty miles to my destination for the fist leg of my trip. I decided I would just go really slow and hopefully I would make it. So I put on my hazard lights, and slowly rode down the should. After a couple of miles I came across a rest stop and the rest stop had street lights. So I pulled over under one of the lights to finally find out what was wrong with my bike. And as soon as I got off the bike and looked I saw my problem. Somehow when I went over the deer, a part of the deer took off the spring that kept my center stand up. So that weird sound I heard while the bike was moving was my center stand hitting the ground.

Only being about thirty miles away at this point, I needed to figure out a way to keep the center stand from hitting the ground. And all I had on me was clothes. So I needed to get creative to solve this problem. I looked around the rest stop, but those places are kept pretty clutter free, so I wasn't able to find anything that I could use to keep the center stand up. So after a while, a moment of ingenuity hit me. And I started to dig through my bag, and pulled out one of my socks. Which I tied one side to the center stand, and the other to part of my motorcycle frame. Using this sock I was able to ride at normal speeds to my destination. Where I quickly went to sleep and temporarily forgot about the problem of how to continue my trip to San Francisco.

Just to tie up this loose end in the story. The next day I was able to acquire a bungee cord. Which I used to keep the center stand attached to my bike. About a month later, that bungee cord is still keeping that center stand up. And probably will till next riding season.

You might now be thinking, “Bryce, you write a tech blog. Why are you telling us this story?” And my immediate response is to say, "That is a good question." I would like to say that there is some kind of connection between ingenuity and technology. No examples of this come to mind, but I'm sure they exist and maybe even might exist within your own experiences, ones that you might have created yourself or least maybe observed. So maybe I'll just say that the reason that I'm telling you this story to remind you that anyone can have a moment of ingenuity, one just has to remember to keep their wits about them in the middle of a problem and be willing to try new or different solutions to the problems that are faced, both technically and reality based.

Of course, this adds the question, do any of you have examples off the top of your head where technology and ingenuity come together?