The last few days have been a good few days for yours truly. Everything just seemed to be going my way. So much so in fact I was preparing for the inevitable heap of pure bad crap that usually always follows a run of good fortune. It's just Sod's Law. It's his job to kick you in the nads when your on a high and least expecting it. As expected and right on schedule, Sod came alone and did his job.
So, where to begin? Well, lets start with the good stuff first. Last Saturday evening I went along to a charity event held by a swing dancing friend in aid of Habitat for Humanity. It was an Oscar themed swing dancing event. Before you went into the event you were asked to fill out a sheet predicting best actor, best actress etc. A big prize was then given to the person at the end of the night who managed to give the same predictions as that of the local resident "film expert" in Filmbase Ireland. It just so happened that I was that lucky person... yay me! I won myself a lovely big hamper of goodies and a weekend for 2 away in Galway. I knew all those misspent late nights watching crap movies would one day pay off. Up to that point in time I have never ever won anything in a raffle or anything of that nature before.
Roll on Monday morning. I had a driving test scheduled for that afternoon and had borrowed a friend's car over the weekend for the test seeing that I didn't possess any wheels of my own. The test was in Rathgar which was not the original test centre I had applied for (still with a 6 month wait I wasn't about to complain). I had previously checked the pass rate at the Rathgar test centre and it stood at 44.5%, the lowest pass rate in all the test centres in Dublin. So needless to say I was not looking forward to the test and was preparing myself for failure. On top of that, I managed to stall the car every single time I went out in it over the weekend which was not doing anything for my confidence. In any case, roll on Monday afternoon and the test... Low and behold I passed!!! First time and all. Didn't stall the car once! Of course on the way back home I stalled it again :)
So at this stage the Sod's Law alarm bells were starting to go off in my head. Too much good stuff was happening to me without any bad stuff. Now the bad stuff.
About a month ago, on a whim I applied for a position with a particular animation studio in the States (lets just say the name of the studio starts with a P and ends with an R). Not thinking anything of it, 3 weeks ago I get an email from their HR department asking for a quick phone interview. So since I was to fly out on my ski trip at the time I scheduled it for the Tuesday that I was back. Of course, I didn't tell anyone about this interview cause I didn't want to Jinx it. The interview itself when I finally had it was a short 20 minutes or so chat with one of the software engineers in the place. They basically wanted to talk to me to see if it was worth flying me out to California for a proper full interview. The guy at the end of the phone seemed nice enough and he didnt' really ask me anything that I couldn't answer. He basically described the position and what the job entailed and asked if I had done x,y and z before to which I answered yes to, promptly followed by long winded examples of using x,y and z in current and previous work (it's what I tend to do when I'm nervous, I babble). In fact the position from what was described to me was exactly what I always wanted to do and just seemed so perfect for me. In anycase, at the end of the "little chat" I was told that I'd be contacted shortly about their decision. All in all, despite my ramblings I thought the "interview" went quite well.
So a week later on Monday evening, the day that I passed my driving test and when Sod's Law alarm bells started going off in my head I received a PFO letter from the HR department :(. It wasn't entirely unexpected. I did get my hopes up there for a while after the initial interview but overall I guess it was just nice to know that my background and qualifications were good enough to warrant being noticed among probably the dozens of other applications I'm sure the studio gets everyday. I'm just going to put it down to that they decided at the end of the day it would be less hassle for them to interview and hire someone local. Besides, they are surrounded by some of the top ivy league universities in the states (i.e. Stanford and Berkley) so it would make more sense to interview and hire graduates from there and save the inevitable headache and cost of potentially hiring someone from abroad. Still, I'm glad I got the initial interview if nothing else. At least it shows that I'm more qualified than I've given myself credit for in the past.
So, now I'm expecting Sod to continue his "good" work and I'm bracing myself for a lot more crap that he's going to throw my way in the next few weeks. To Sod, all I'm going to say is : "Bring it on!".
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Ski dancing week
Just got back from a week of skiing in St. Anton's in Austria followed by a kick ass weekend of dancing in Herfordshire in good old merry England. My legs ache, my arms ache, my neck aches, in fact my entire body is in a considerable amount of pain at the moment.
Mental note; "do not go directly to a 3 day all day all night dance festival straight after spending a week skiiing. You are not as young as you once were" :(
All in all, the skiing was good and despite the fact that the "Aprés ski" was better in Austria than it was in France (and also ignoring the fact that everything was almost twice as expensive as would have been in France) I think I still prefer the usual resort in France that I usually go to. Speaking as a person who dosn't drink (well hardly ever anyways) and/or generally likes really noisy pubs and bars the "kick ass aprés ski" thing is meaningless to me.
This time around I went with a rather large group of people. There were 11 of us in all but there might as well have just been the 2 of us. We rented 2 apartments (each one about 5 minutes from each other but a good half hour walk to the slopes) since there were so many of us. 7 in one apartment and 4 in the other. The majority of the people were all the new post grads from the new lab which meant that I really only knew about 1 and a half people there (I say half because I know one of the post grads but only on a friendly hello basis). So as a result of this, they all went off and did their own things with each other for the most part and never made an effort to include myself or Chris (the other oldie) in any of their activities. I didn't mind so much as I was there for the skiing but still a token gesture towards the "old folk", no matter how meaningless, would have been nice, otherwise we might as well have gone on our own (which wouldn't be too far from the truth in this case).
As for the ski runs; we were lucky enough to have good snow fall for most of the week but a lot of the ski runs at the resort just didn't do anything for me. Instead of having the usual 4 marking systems (i.e. green, blue, red and black) for piste difficulty levels, the pistes at St. Antons' did away with the super beginner green and just started at "improver" blue (probably presuming that only menly men go skiing at St Antons and thus would never be caught dead on a green slope). This I later found out was a bit of a misnomer. Some parts of the blue runs I would probably consider easier red runs and the black runs (the supposedly most difficult runs) were nothing more than what I would have considerd a hard red. In fact some parts of the red runs should have been blue runs. The marking system overall for the pistes were a little erratic.
I left the ski resort a day earlier than the others so that I could catch a plane from Zurich to London and then onto Haileybury College (home of Harry Potter) in Herfordshire for a long weekend of swing dancing. I arrived at 11pm just in time for the evening soiree.
Haileybury College I must admit is actually quite a nice place. You can definitely recognise the locations used for the filming of the Harry Potter movies. You could also see that it is quite a rich, posh school. Fortunately, the students were all on mid term break so we were given make shift accomodation in around the common areas of the students' usual accomodations; for example the students' tv room (which incidently had a huge 46 inch flat screen plasma tv in it). Because we got there a bit late all the good spots were already taken so we had to make do with laying our sleeping bags inside one of the small corridors outside the students' rooms. The only problem with this solution was that the corridor lights were controlled via a motion sensor. This meant that everytime someone turned in their sleep they would set off the motion sensor and thus switch on the lights and wake up everyone else :D This problem was promptly solved the next night with some tin foil and selotape, McGuyver style.
Caught the 6am flight back to Dublin on Monday morning to be nicely on time for work (after having danced all night the previous Sunday evening till 4am before getting a taxi from the venue straight to the airport). Luckily I fell asleep for a few hours (ok it was a lot of few hours) after dinner on Sunday so work on Monday wasn't as bad as it could have been.
Oh, and did I mention I had a driving lesson straight after work? Now that was a loooong day :)
Mental note; "do not go directly to a 3 day all day all night dance festival straight after spending a week skiiing. You are not as young as you once were" :(
All in all, the skiing was good and despite the fact that the "Aprés ski" was better in Austria than it was in France (and also ignoring the fact that everything was almost twice as expensive as would have been in France) I think I still prefer the usual resort in France that I usually go to. Speaking as a person who dosn't drink (well hardly ever anyways) and/or generally likes really noisy pubs and bars the "kick ass aprés ski" thing is meaningless to me.
This time around I went with a rather large group of people. There were 11 of us in all but there might as well have just been the 2 of us. We rented 2 apartments (each one about 5 minutes from each other but a good half hour walk to the slopes) since there were so many of us. 7 in one apartment and 4 in the other. The majority of the people were all the new post grads from the new lab which meant that I really only knew about 1 and a half people there (I say half because I know one of the post grads but only on a friendly hello basis). So as a result of this, they all went off and did their own things with each other for the most part and never made an effort to include myself or Chris (the other oldie) in any of their activities. I didn't mind so much as I was there for the skiing but still a token gesture towards the "old folk", no matter how meaningless, would have been nice, otherwise we might as well have gone on our own (which wouldn't be too far from the truth in this case).
As for the ski runs; we were lucky enough to have good snow fall for most of the week but a lot of the ski runs at the resort just didn't do anything for me. Instead of having the usual 4 marking systems (i.e. green, blue, red and black) for piste difficulty levels, the pistes at St. Antons' did away with the super beginner green and just started at "improver" blue (probably presuming that only menly men go skiing at St Antons and thus would never be caught dead on a green slope). This I later found out was a bit of a misnomer. Some parts of the blue runs I would probably consider easier red runs and the black runs (the supposedly most difficult runs) were nothing more than what I would have considerd a hard red. In fact some parts of the red runs should have been blue runs. The marking system overall for the pistes were a little erratic.
I left the ski resort a day earlier than the others so that I could catch a plane from Zurich to London and then onto Haileybury College (home of Harry Potter) in Herfordshire for a long weekend of swing dancing. I arrived at 11pm just in time for the evening soiree.
Haileybury College I must admit is actually quite a nice place. You can definitely recognise the locations used for the filming of the Harry Potter movies. You could also see that it is quite a rich, posh school. Fortunately, the students were all on mid term break so we were given make shift accomodation in around the common areas of the students' usual accomodations; for example the students' tv room (which incidently had a huge 46 inch flat screen plasma tv in it). Because we got there a bit late all the good spots were already taken so we had to make do with laying our sleeping bags inside one of the small corridors outside the students' rooms. The only problem with this solution was that the corridor lights were controlled via a motion sensor. This meant that everytime someone turned in their sleep they would set off the motion sensor and thus switch on the lights and wake up everyone else :D This problem was promptly solved the next night with some tin foil and selotape, McGuyver style.
Caught the 6am flight back to Dublin on Monday morning to be nicely on time for work (after having danced all night the previous Sunday evening till 4am before getting a taxi from the venue straight to the airport). Luckily I fell asleep for a few hours (ok it was a lot of few hours) after dinner on Sunday so work on Monday wasn't as bad as it could have been.
Oh, and did I mention I had a driving lesson straight after work? Now that was a loooong day :)
Friday, February 1, 2008
Back with a bang... of sorts
After over a month of silence I've decided to give this whole blog thing another try. You know, with the new year and new resolutions and all that other jazz. It's not that I've had nothing to share or say, it's just that I got lazy.
So, in another attempt to get my literary juices flowing again, may I be so bold as to suggest the topic of the humble "rail gun". Why do I bring this up I hear you mumble? Well, other than getting the chance to play with one in Quake, it now also seems that the US navy get to play with one in real life as well. It's not as, erhem, "portable" as the one in Quake it would seem but I'm sure the US navy boys/girls are going to have just as much fun with it. The lucky gits.
So, in another attempt to get my literary juices flowing again, may I be so bold as to suggest the topic of the humble "rail gun". Why do I bring this up I hear you mumble? Well, other than getting the chance to play with one in Quake, it now also seems that the US navy get to play with one in real life as well. It's not as, erhem, "portable" as the one in Quake it would seem but I'm sure the US navy boys/girls are going to have just as much fun with it. The lucky gits.
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