interview day. ugh.

I had a full day of interviews at Company X in Palo Alto today. 2/3 of them did not go poorly! The other two might be enough to torpedo my chances. I realized that I'm extremely rusty at coding, something that only becomes harder when you're doing it on a whiteboard with some stranger waiting for you.

Coding problems I screwed up:

• Given a sorted binary tree, print out the values, from lowest to highest. This is called an "in-order" traversal, and it took me about 30 seconds to do it recursively. Then it took me 25 minutes to cobble together a non-recursive, iterative version.
• Given an integer, calculate the corresponding Excel column number. For example, numbers 0-25 correspond to A-Z, 26 is AA, 27 is AB, 78 is CA, 79 is CB, etc. This is a slightly different case of an ancient and well-known problem, of converting an integer to a string (itoa(), if you're curious: normally you would be converting the number 25 to the string "25." This took me the entire 30-40 minutes and I did a really bad job.

To be fair, the others were fine:

• Write some code for a build system scheduler.
• Write some Java code for a hashtable. (That was exciting. I've never actually written a hashtable, because every modern language has one that's more efficient and better-tested than anything we would cook up. The interviewer said, "That's good!". Also, apparently I can still write correct Java after 5 years.)
• Model a game of Monopoly using objects.
• Describe how to search a list of objects with given attributes. Make it faster (by adding indexing).

The two problems that I screwed up would have been hard even if I were in coding-shape. With itoa(), in particular, I've never really internalized why it works. Something about it has always blocked my complete understanding.

The Director of Engineering was the last guy I talked to, and he was wonderfully honest and direct: he wanted to talk to me and get a sense of me and my experience, because given the interview feedback, hiring me would be more of a risk than usual. He recognizes I haven't really actively coded in a long time, and they'd be hiring me based on my past accomplishments (which are more important to them), and especially based on my friend's recommendation. If it doesn't work out, the company and I part ways amicably.

Anyway, I feel crappy and incompetent. Which I'm not, really, but my competence wasn't exactly on display today. Either of the guys from those two bad interviews could torpedo the job with their feedback, so we'll just have to see what happens.

I got home late and needed to eat and unwind, so I bailed on aikido tonight. I decided to go to the early class tomorrow--completely forgetting tomorrow is the first Zen sangha event of the year--when I checked my mail and discovered the instructor asking if I could teach the class. I love teaching and she needed somebody, so in theory I'll go for the early part of Zen stuff and then go to the dojo.

Blech, what a day.

life really is unfair

Anna had a kid-related meeting yesterday morning, so I got to drive J to school for the first time. (I do very little caretaking at the moment: J and I mostly interact in trying to live together with Anna in a small apartment, negotiating when and how I'm involved in playing with him, or not, depending on what he wants to do and how I'm feeling. But, yes, my car has a carseat, and yes, it's weird.) It's a good 30 minutes up to his school, and normally he would play games on Anna's iPhone. This time, I'd told her she should hang onto it so she had phone, and we couldn't find her old one, so J just had books. This worked until he asked for Anna's iPhone so he could play games. I explained that I didn't have it, because Anna had hers and we couldn't find the old one.

Rage and anger! He growled, and I said, "Okay, now's a good time to use words," and he was so good about stating how angry he was, and bringing his voice down when I asked. But, so angry! It was startling. At one point he even punched the back of my seat, which was a pretty solid punch even from the passenger side of the back seat, which gave me some new information on why it's such a problem when he drastically mis-reads another kid's social cues and goes all Angry Hands on them: J is a big kid and apparently he can put more force into a punch than several adults at the dojo.

"I am so angry at you! I'm never going to snuggle you and Mama again! Except for the morning snuggle."

(The morning snuggle is pretty important around here.) We talked a bit about how threats weren't really okay, but mostly I was happy he was talking it out instead of having a tantrum seizure in his carseat. I was also trying to explain that there was no conspiracy to deprive him of computer time, it's just what happened, and maybe before taking his revenge on us he should talk to Mama about what happened. Finally I took a step back.

"So, J? I feel like you're not listening to me. I keep telling you that no one meant to keep you from having your computer time, and you keep threatening to withhold snuggles, and I don't feel very good that you're threatening me when I don't feel like I've actually done anything wrong."

There was a few minutes of silence, and then I heard him laugh: he'd picked up one of his books and started giggling at whatever he was reading. And everything was fine for the rest of the dropoff.

No more snuggles, ever! Except for the morning snuggle. SO CUTE.

home life: food

We went to Point Reyes Station this past weekend, to get out of the house, have some quiet time alone and offline, and put some more distance between us and Anna's mother. I haven't met her yet, but she is, to venture into judgmental language for a moment, A-1 Batshit Certifiably Crazy, with a history to match. I haven't met her yet, and we would all be perfectly happy to leave it that way; I'll meet her for a few minutes tomorrow, just to satisfy my curiosity and get a sense of what Anna has to deal with. Hopefully, that will be it, and I won't see her again.

So anyway. A few days in a small beautiful town in Marin is totally a good idea. It turns out that Marin Sun Farms is, in fact, in Marin, and at their butcher shop in Point Reyes we picked up beef cheeks (fantastic stew meat) and garlic-mint goat sausage.

I wasn't joking before when I said that J eats just a handful of foods. The list is basically variations on or combinations of:

• Melted cheese on bread (crusts cut off).
• Unadorned chicken or turkey.

Then there's boxed macaroni and cheese and a handful of fruits (apples must be peeled). You get the idea. He's 6. I used to eat ketchup-and-American-cheese sandwiches. I have to keep some perspective.

(If we had him full-time, there would probably be a "This is what's for dinner" protocol, but shared custody has its pros and cons--we also couldn't have gone to Point Reyes.)

J watches Barney at his dad's house, and has been convinced that if Anna would just try it, would just watch one little episode, she would love it, because Barney is great. They would occasionally have this conversation where J would try to sell Anna on Barney, and Anna would reply that she's never seen Barney, but she knows she's going to hate it. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This sounded suspiciously like the conversations where Anna tries to get J to eat a new food, and he says, "I don't need to try it. I know I don't like it." I passed her a note suggesting that she could set an example of trying things, and maybe bargain J into trying new foods. So for every 3 bites J eats of an unfamiliar food, Anna watches 5 minutes of Barney.

Tonight I idly suggested to J that hey, we have sausage, if he'd like to try it--Anna hadn't suggested it, because normally he won't go for foods that have things like seeds or spices in them (or any kind of multiple colors or textures or etc. etc.). Which he did! Did he like it?

"Well, it's not delicious, but I did like it."

It was unfamiliar, but he didn't make contorted faces while eating it, or try to scrape the taste off his tongue afterward, which means he liked it. Either he ate another 5 pieces, or he did a professional-quality job of hiding them under the rug or something.

Meanwhile, Anna is stuck with another 10 minutes of Barney. It turns out parenting is pretty easy when you can contribute, and then someone else deals with the consequences. Who knew?

linkfarming

I've been sick and my sleep has been broken, so coherent insights have been few. But the Internet never rests!

• An active-duty Army Ranger is one of the world's 3 top pastry chefs.
• There's a fight over the next version of the Big Book of Mental Illness. (Psychiatry is rightfully afraid of embarrassing itself.)
• You're not allergic to MSG.
• Alexandre Dumas's misadventures with duelling.

Sleep well.

new milestones

New dimensions in family life: I had to leave the house yesterday. I've been persistently underslept and was generally having a mood downswing, and J was having a dramatic episode around having to do a bit of drawing for school today. He makes himself miserable with his perfectionism, which is characteristic of his package of stuff: after every stroke of the pencil, "THAT'S NOT A VERY GOOD NECK/ARM/whatever" and he's at the edge of a meltdown. Anna patiently and lovingly intercepts him so he can keep going, but it's a stressful to thing to watch, and I have no comfortable bedroom to go and hide in. I went for a drive.

This is not uncommon among my friends with kids.

I have a job interview on Friday! It'd be working alongside an old friend from Danger, in a comfy office across the street from a convenient Caltrain station. I really hope it works out, because then I won't have to actually look for a job, which I hate doing. So this week is all studying and learning Ruby and getting my coding brain back in action.

he's got a point

J is an observant, affectionate kid. Anna and I were hugging and she was petting my head, covered with short, fuzzy, freshly-buzzed hair. J appeared.

"Mama, it's time to read that book."

"Just as soon as I'm done snuggling Chris."

"It's gonna take forever for you to be done snuggling Chris!"

Well, fair enough.

Happy New Year

I'm not very good at holidays any more, in the sense that special days tend not to feel all that special to me. We could call it a loss of my childlike sense of wonder, although if you can say that with a straight face, maybe we should hang out more. I think it's just that my sense of time has smoothed out, as I get better at taking each day/hour/moment for itself. My life is also, by most people's theistic standards, relentlessly secular. Yes, we mark the anniversaries of Buddha's birth and enlightenment, but:

1. It was 2500 years ago in a pre-literate culture and reliable information is just a little hard to come by, so we don't take that too seriously, and
2. We mark those days (especially the enlightenment one) by doing more of the same thing we do every day: sit in meditation. Okay, sometimes we have cake. But wild excitement is not the order of the day.

It's good to have those reminders that Buddhist teaching came from a human being, has been passed down to us through other human beings, and we're human beings too, and not only we can do what he and they did--understand and move past the causes of human anguish in order to grow peace and harmony in the world--but that it's a pretty important thing to do, and we should do it. They just lack the cultural and personal weight of whatever holidays we grew up with.

(On a side note, the "relentlessly secular" description breaks down pretty quickly: using a broad enough definition of "religion," I'm easily among the most religious people in my communities here in the Bay Area, and we're not slouches.)

So, for me, one year blends into the next. Same for birthdays: excellent opportunity for reflection and getting the friends together, but really, on my birthday I'm just a day older than I was the day before. It helps that I'm now reaching the age where I have to think about how old I am, because it doesn't matter so much. A lot of people feel time passing differently, though, and 2010 brought death and divorces and problems for many, as every year does. Facebook and IRC are inevitably full of things like "2010, you sucked. Good riddance."

I'm no optimist, but you know, 2010 was pretty awesome. I spent 9 months of it in Chile, far away from my girl, but learning and doing some pretty cool and useful stuff.

• Gave teaching a fair shake (notwithstanding the bizarrely restrictive and unproductive environment) and discovered I mostly like it and I'm good at it.
• Plowed through a bunch of ancient emotional crap from my younger days.
• Learned a lot: about second-language learning, cultural conditioning, Spanish, Chile, South America.
• Managed to keep meditating, and at a reduced level, doing aikido.
• Discovered that the girl and I can, if some lunatic need arises, not see each other for months at a time. Though we're cranky about it.
• Spent some time living with the girl and the kid, and having that all work really well.

Now I'm home, and 2011 has other adventures in store for me. Some of them might suck! But that's fine, too. =) I think it'll turn out just fine.

Happy New Year, everybody.