Nicholas Pike

Yesterday was the RIT Spring Career fair, first one I have ever been to! Judging from the literature and guides that RIT throws at us weeks in advance, students are supposed to feel nervous about this event, but lucky for me moments before going to the career fair I got an interview with RightNow Technologies. (Thanks Dan)

Dan had passed around my resume to a coworker or two, and it actually paid off. I also attended their booth at the career fair to get some face time in – so maybe I could get more then one interview offer?

While walking around I saw Jason standing in line for a company called BlueTie, naturally I had no clue who they were, and their HR lady kindly filled me in. After she finished I got in line to talk to their on scene developer, who almost immediately offered my an interview after glancing at my resume. Awesome! Now I just have to wait for them to contact me to setup an interview.

Small World?

Nick Muerdter, a previous coworker at the CCL currently coops for BlueTie.

The Pain of GPA Rejection

I actually got shutdown straight up by the HR lady from Harris (defense contractor) for having a sub-3.0 GPA.

Thats fine, if GPA is that important to you that you can skip my entire resume, then its your loss and I don’t want to work for you anyway.

Microsoft Happy Hour (w/o Alcohol)

Microsoft held another recruiting/PR event at RIT today: free food, give aways – of course I went!

Long story short, I won a raffle ( a copy of Fable ) , and when calling out my name the recruiter, Ginny , yelled out “Oh I know him!”. Awesome.

I talked with her briefly after the event, and the break down is this: I was too late, and not awesome. I think if I had applied slightly earlier I would be currently in Redmond, or if I had been a C++ genius. Either way, she made it rather clear that Microsoft is interested, and that I likely wont be sent a reject letter – but will be kept waiting in the wind for a second interview.

I walked away with:

• A full stomach (yay for free pizza and soda)
• A fresh copy of Fable for Windows
• A green microsoft t-shirt (medium)
• A pink microsoft t-shirt (medium)

Here’s some pics:

(NVidia booth at Career Fair)

(Line to talk to Ginny, the RIT Microsoft Recruiter)

(With the flow of pizza cut off, the room empties out rather fast)

This should be interesting.  Took two of those gel caps about an hour ago, and boy is the drowsyness really starting to set in.  Been “sick” since Sunday afternoon.  I say “sick” because not everyone agrees what sick is. *cough*

Haven’t been to work this week, and have so far skipped two classes.   Its alright though, I don’t do this often – and I should be better tomorrow I expect.

Tomorrow is the RIT Spring Career Fair, somewhere 198 companies will be in the field house at RIT from 11am to 4pm.

I managed to get out today and get a quick haircut, some cold/flu/allergy/sinus drugs from Walmart, new shades, a sweet new “Hawaiian” t-shirt, and some new slacks for tomorrow.

My list of companies to visit and hopefully get some schwag from:

• Harris
• McAfee
• BlackRock ?
• Microsoft (and give them some gentle prodding regarding my last interview…)
• Paychex
• RightNOW Technologies

RightNOW Technologies is probably my best bet if Microsoft falls through.  They are located here in Rochester, and my friend Dan has been working for them coop and part time for a year or two now.  They do cell phone software, like voice recognition menuing systems.

Google Calendar Notifier

I just want to take a brief moment to mention that the Google Calendar Notifier for Firefox is almost at 64,000 downloads on Mozillas website since it was first public.  Pretty big number!

I haven’t had much time to maintain it lately, but I do have some things planned for the next version, which I will work on as soon as my schedule dies down a bit.

Anywho, really really really tired.  DayQuil.

…this time for Google Desktop!

Basically fetches the pictures located here and cycles through them.

Pretty basic/quick/dirty gadget, but yet another good experiment for me to work on another Widget/Gadget platform.

It has some bugs of course, but you can download it for Google Desktop here.

It seems Google has implemented on of my favorite features of Vista in Google Desktop: Sidebar!

On the left over here you can see part of what my current Sidebar looks like – almost exactly like the Vista one! Google even has a Calendar widget implemented that looks and mostly functions exactly as the one I was working on in Vista… thats kind of depressing, but I am happy I wont have to make it for Google Desktop now ;-)

I think I will try to port my CollegeHumor.com Vista Gadget to Google Desktop though – maybe release it to the wild.

Oh, and for those curious heres a screenshot of what my computer looks like with the Google sidebar:

Full Desktop 03-22-2007

This will be a pretty busy quarter, currently scheduled for about 20 hours of work at the CCL, 20 hours being the max a student employee is allowed to work.

My Intelligent Secure Systems class is also turning out to be a lot more work then I had originally anticipated: first assignment being a 5-8 page essay/review of two fairly large security articles (one was 245 pages..), and the next assignment (due Monday) is something about patents and is probably of similar length.

Oh and one more picture that my Mom emailed me the other day:

“Check out the “expression” on this woodpecker this morning!”

Holy post with pictures batman!  Anyway, it is time I go put my wet laundry in the dryer.

Took some time this evening to freshen my resume again.  My friend Jeff Forbes just got an offer from Apple Computer for a position working on the Quicktime team for the summer.

I am pretty jealous, and I have already applied through “official” routes (www.apple.com/jobs), so I am going to try emailing my resume with a kissy kissy cover letter to his recruiter.  Can’t hurt right?

I really think writing Objective-C for a summer at Apple (or elsewhere..) would be awesome.  From the experience that I currently have with it (Del.icio.us Add-On for Safari) I think it is easily the most productive language I have ever worked with.

… Still no word for Microsoft.

What are your favorite websites, in term of design?

A coworker of mine over at the CCL has an assignment for a class, where she has to come up with a list of websites she likes in terms of design.

Heres my list:

1.  A List Apart
2. Google.com  (I really like minimalisiic designs, and you can’t get much more minimalistic then Google)
3. Eastern Boats (an EnSky client)
4. My website!

So what would be on your list?

Well, finally had some time to enable comments in my ported Drupal theme for WordPress.

Here’s a quote from the awesome lecture I am ignoring to work on my WordPress Theme:

The universe is cyborg because only humans have the means to know it exists.

… Straight from the Professors lips to my blog.

On a depressing note, this morning I woke up and tossed two hashbrowns into the toaster oven, then jumped into the shower. It takes at least 20 minutes to get them to a point where they are eatable. When I got out of the shower, I put some sausage links in the microwave. 45 seconds later, breakfast is done!

But on the delivery to my desk, I dropped it all on the floor =(

Extending GAIM: Bringing back the away message box

This weekend I started some research for another pet project:  GAIM 2.0 beta introduced a “new” away message system, one that doesn’t quite agree with my needs.  Previous versions mimicked AOL  by displaying a small dialog while your away called an Away Message Queue.  This dialog showed you how many messages you’ve received while away, and more importantly who they are from.

GAIM 2.0 has lost this feature, instead messages can be immediately displayed (which steals focus, bad for gaming!), or messages can be hidden, and an indicator is added to the Windows system tray icon to “alert you of new messages”  (This sucks, not a very good means of alerting you to new messages)

So I sought out the original away message code in GAIM 1.5, and will try to encapsulate it into a plugin for GAIM 2.0.

Google – your pissing me off!

I use Google Browser Sync for Firefox to keep Firefox on my Desktop (Windows XP Pro) and my laptop (OSX) in sync – lately GSync has been duplicating my bookmarks, or outright losing everything.  Google, I don’t want to switch to another service.  Yours has worked great in the past, whats going on?

Congratulations to Jason for his new job at the Center for Campus Life as a Rockstar Web Developer. His first project will be an AOL AIM bot, and getting me coffee on a regular basis.

I got bored with my first design, so whiped up a new one! I think it looks pretty slick: (WordPress seems to mess up the aspect ratio – click for fixed view)

Word Press seems to be working out alright, granted I have yet to take the time to implement comments in my theme.

Just finished the first week of Spring quarter, my schedule is as follows:

• Cyborg Theory
• Intelligent Secure Systems
• World of Business
• Chemistry Principles I (Online) + Power Lab

Cyborg theory feels like it will be a pretty straight forward elective, with atleast fairly interesting/relevant material – but the teacher and students in the class in general are a bit… flaky? I honestly don’t see how you can have intense discussions on if an amputee with a prosthetic is a cyborg or not, or if a turtle, being an animal born with a shell that protects it counts as a cyborg.

Intelligent Secure Systems will be my favorite class this quarter I think. Its with a professor I have had previously (and enjoyed) and I have several friends in the class. The gist of it is research on creating an autonomous/intelligent intrusion detection system for network/computer security related applications/environments.

World of Business is a freshmen business class, as such, seems to be filled with plenty of freshmen. Makes me feel old.

Online Chemistry? Don’t really have any comments on it yet, but I do have this to say: Screw you RIT! We are required to purchase a kit that contains 10 cds with lecture material, and a registration code to use on a 3rd party website to do graded homework and exams.

The problems I have with this:

• The kit costs ~$130 ?
• I already paid RIT an exorbitant amount of money to take the class to begin with, why should I have to buy a ridiculously expensive kit that contains the lecture material?
• The first graded homework assignment is due Monday before 9am

Luckily, I am taking this course with 3 friends (Well one of them is a close friends roommate), so we have devised a plan. One of us will purchase the kit from the school store, with an employee discount (15%?), we will then copy the 10 cds for the other three people – and the other three people are left to buy a separate subscription to the course website for $50 a pop. Hopefully it works out.

Now the power lab for Chem Principles I is something entirely different. Usually for a science lab, you have lab once a week ( and 3 lecture periods or something ), but this lab you have once a quarter. It starts Friday afternoon on some random day, and finishes on a Sunday afternoon. So yeah, you effectively blow an entire weekend, but I guess thats better then destroying an afternoon each week. *shrug* We will see.

On hiring a new Web Developer at Work…

Today we had the last interviewie for a web development position at work (Center for Campus Life) .

Ideally I was looking for a candidate that knew PHP like the inside of their fridge, unfortunately none of the candidates so far brought this to the table. So a choice was made on which candidate was believed to be a quick learner, with the most potential. (I wont disclose who got the position until they have been notified by my boss)

Its rather disappointing because I have a lot of work to do at the CCL, and really could use some help – but I have no problems with taking a week of down time to train someone who is capable of learning what I need them to learn. Lets just hope the new hire is up to the task!

Small Project of the Week

Added the current weather/temperature to my cellphones EVDO homepage.  (I don’t use the paid Verizon service, but instead my own proxy)

Jason got me hooked on a new Source mod, Dystopia.

Basically its a normal FPS, but a few members of your team are “deckers” (hackers) who run around in a cyberworld version of the map, and hack the other team. This allows your hackers to unlock enemy doors, active turrets, steal enemy turrets, etc.

The rest of your team has three classes to choose from: light, medium, and heavy. Each class has 4 different weapons it can equip, and a hodgepodge of implants they can equip as well. (The combinations seem endless)

A few notable combinations:

• Light class: Stealth/Cloak (makes you invisible) – this is amazingly fun to run around with a sword and 1 hit enemy players
• Medium class: Medic implant and assault riffle – basically run around and heal your teammates and yourself (auto) while spray’n and pray’n
• Heavy class: Minigun or Rocket launcher – I think rocket launcher is self explanatory.

The game also includes some pretty intense stat tracking on your current round, and carries over a “global rank” across all servers. (woot for rank 1829 something)

If you like quick and dirty fights, with lots of action, and plenty of options – Dystopia is a mod you should check out.

GoDaddy hosting rocks. But their MySQL sucks – incredibly slow. The current install of Drupal (4.5?) gets pretty dog slow at times with GoDaddy’s service, so I had to seek out something more efficient.

• Upgrade to the latest Drupal and hope for the best
• Email GoDaddy support and complain (check)
• Give WordPress2.0 a whirl

So I did the later two items. Took me an hour or two to get my Drupal theme ported to WP. (I am not a fan of just using a precanned theme, that everyone already is using – granted this theme isnt entirely original, but its a modification of a modification of a modification)

So far WP seems to be fast enough – but I have also disabled comments and what not until I get a chance to finish the comments section of this theme.

Crosses fingers