Shouzer

I had an interview with a company back in August that I was pretty interested in working for, and they said they wanted to talk again in October.  I have been trying to get this guy on the phone all month with no success.  He’s not returning my calls either.  So today, I figured I would throw up a hail marry attempt to get a phone call.  My plan was to leave a voice mail that sounded like a was a desperate guy who’s girlfriend wasn’t returning his calls.  I was then going to tell him I was joking, but that I would still like to hear from him.  It was supposed to sound something like this:

“Hello, this is Scott.  We talked back in August, and you mentioned that you wanted to speak again in October.  I’ve been trying to get a hold of you all month, but you haven’t been returning my calls.  What happened?  Don’t you love me any more!?  Just kidding.  Seriously though, it would be nice to hear from you again.  My number is xxx-xxx-xxxx.  Please give me a call.”

Unfortunately, I pulled a Beltran.  In other words, I choked hard.  It came out something like this:

“Hello, this is Scott.  We spoke back in August, and you said you wanted to speak again in October.  Well, it’s the last day of the month, and I haven’t heard from you yet.  I’d like to know what’s going on, so please give me a call.  My number is xxx-xxx-xxxx.”

When it came time to pull the trigger on the punch line, I just couldn’t muster the courage.  So I ended up sounding like a pathetic loser instead of a suave player.

 Update [11-2-06]:  He called me back today, and it was one of the weirdest phone calls ever.  I apologized for the awkward message, and I explained what happened.  He apologized for not calling me back sooner.  Then, he wanted to know about my senior design project.  I told him what I am doing, and he seemed to be pretty impressed with it.  He asked me to send him an email with some pictures of the project, and he offered to donate hardware if we needed it.  I still cannot figure out why.  There was no mention of a job or an upcoming interview.  I am so confused.

I just got back from Denver. I’ll probably post later about the Broncos/Colts game.. We’ll see. Anyhow, when I sat down at my computer, I had a message waiting from my friend Alex with a link to this. From a comedy standpoint, this stuff never gets old.

iTunes 7 is seriously one of the biggest piles of shit I’ve ever used in my life.  I decided to switch from Winamp to iTunes recently, because 7 had just come out and it’s what I use on my Mac (as expected).  Unfortunately, I made the switch before I found out how horrible it is.  It likes to eat my RAM (219 mb right now).  When a new song starts, it pegs my CPU for about 5-10 seconds, so my computer is about worthless for that period.  Seriously, wtf is that?

Before you do anything anything today, take a lesson from our president. I’m off to eat the lunch, and maybe go to the malls.

See, this is the way that I wish all businesses and such could joke with each other. Sure, Microsoft has done some bad things in the past and almost got broken up for them, but it really does seem like they’re doing things differently now. They’re putting out better software, the competition is out there and allowed to survive, and they just seem to have a better overall corporate attitude.

So there’s definitely some things I’d like to get my hands on. First of all, I want an iPhone. The damn thing hasn’t been released, but you know Apple is planning that shit. It’d be pimp if they had some beta testing program I could be a part of. As a recent convert to the Mac cult, I believe I’d be a prime candidate. I could also start a propaganda machine or something. Resistance is futile.

Number two on the list is probably Halo 3. I’ve been thinking for a while that I could really go for some of that action. After all, who couldn’t? “Oh, me? I don’t like Halo. I think the Master Chief is a punk.” Nobody has ever said that to me, and until I hear it, I refuse to believe it. We played some 5v5 Halo 2 the other night, and that really only served to spark the flame. I was on fire most of the night. Anyway, the trailer they showed at e3 was amazing, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. Bungie, if you’re reading (and, come on, we both know you are), I’d also be open to some sort of beta program here.

I think next would have to be for Studio 60 to not get cancelled. The show certainly hasn’t lived up to Sports Night or The West Wing yet, but I definitely think it’s got potential. Personally, I love Matthew Perry in that show, and I don’t think it’d be an overstatement to say that Jason has a mancrush on him. As for the comparisons to prior Sorkin shows, to be fair, The West Wing didn’t show many similarities to Sports Night until it had been on for a while either. If you’re not watching it, start. That’s really all there is to that.

Let’s see.. I also want Firefly to come back. That show was the best damn show there’s ever been, and it didn’t last more than a season. How weak is that? Very. The only conclusion I can really gather from that is people are just generally dumb. Seriously, there’s been like 83 seasons of Survivor, and Firefly can’t catch a break? That’s ridiculous.

I want Apple to release a true video iPod with a widescreen, touchscreen interface. That would be the sex, to quote Kyle. It’s been rumored for a while, a LONG while, but the only thing we’ve ever seen were fake mockups, and that’s just nowhere near as fun as the real thing. When I got my mp3 player (thanks again, Anita!), iPods really were a bit of a joke in terms of functionality to cost ratio. The only thing they had going for them was the “cool” factor, which again, is more or less a sign of the stupidity of people. But nowadays, they actually are up there with everything else.

I’d like for the new Bourne movie to go ahead and get released. I’ve had the second one on DVD for a while now, so it seems like they’d be on that shit pretty soon. I have no idea when, in reality. It could be 13 years out, but I hope not–my guess is that Matt Damon wouldn’t have the same badass aura then that he does now. I could be wrong.. He could be like William Shatner, a badass at age 75.

Next on my ongoing list is I’d like Microsoft to fix the brokeass functionality of the 360 when it comes to streaming media over the network. Right now you can stream music, and that works like a charm. It’s great, as a matter of fact. Great, I tell you. Kyle routinely streams music off my computer to his 360 (ahem, asshole). But how god damn hard is it to include a couple decent codecs (DivX anyone?) and let you stream videos from your pc? They wonder why people mod their Xboxen.. Well this is the reason. Get over yourselves and WMV. It blows.

Well, that looks like it’s about it for now. I might have to bust out a post like this every once in a blue moon.

[Edit:] OMFG! How could I forgot? The mother of all things I want! Check out the last item in this ad. Absolutely amazing? I know it is, and you know it is.  Who doesn’t want a nerf sniper rifle?

This semester has been the craziest one of my four years in school.  I can’t really complain, because it’s been job interviews that have made me so busy.  Still, though, for a period of 3 weeks in a row I was hopping on a plane to head to the west coast for 3 or 4 days at a time.  The trips were pretty cool, but it still gets to you after a while.  I always planned to make myself useful on the plane, but I never got around to that.  I watched the in-flight movies instead.  Speaking of which, do not watch The Devil Wears Prada.

Right now, well obviously not at this very moment, I’m sitting at my computer trying to find classes for next semester.  I’ve more or less decided that I’m going to figure out who I have to email to find out about taking classes as pass/fail next semester.  It would be great if I could take a load of easy classes.  Wish me luck.

The Focus is no more. Scott you can finally stop making fun of my car, as I am no longer driving the Focus.

It had been having some difficulties for the past two months or so–it would randomly loose power when driving–and the people over at Ford could not figure out what was wrong with it. They had since mid-September up until a week and a half ago. So, now it’s become the new delivery car–I know, it’s strange that my parents won’t let me drive it, but they are willing to let the delivery person for the pharmacy drive it, oh well….I mean, after all I did get a new car out of this so who am I to complain, really?

I’m driving a VW Jetta….it’s a great car. Here’s a picture.

It’s quite comfortable and a hell of a lot easier for friends to get into because it has four doors as opposed to two. It’s also a lot roomier than the focus was.

I was browsing /., as I’ve been known to do, and noticed this story. It’s about how the US has dropped in the “Freedom of the Press Rating”. It’s pretty sad really. We were 17th in 2002, the first year they did it (I’m curious what we would have been around 98-99, during the end of the Clinton administration..).

Now we’ve dropped all the way to 53rd, primarily as a result of Bush attacking people who don’t share his pro-war viewpoint. It’s also because the federal government has refused to respect the right of a journalist to protect the anonymity of his sources. Freedom of the press is something we like to pimp when we’re “spreading democracy”, but apparently we don’t live up to the hype.

We ended up winning PuzzleCrack 2006. I’ve got to admit that I thought we had a pretty good shot, but it was still pretty damn cool. We ended up with an Xbox 360, 5 controllers, and 5 games. That’s not too shabby at all. And now that we have won, we got listed on Wikipedia, which was also pretty nice.

Probably the biggest news here, though, is not the fact that a group of 6 people from Southern Illinois won, but that they also took it over. Yup, next year around this time we’ll actually be running PuzzleCrack. I have to admit that I’m pretty psyched for it. I’ve actually already started thinking of some various types of puzzles we could possibly use, and I know everybody has been doing the same. It should be fun.

IE7 is a masterpiece.

Last Tuesday, I had the craziest interview of my life. I don’t want to mention the name of the company, but I will say that they are a defense contractor because it is integral to the story.

I walked into the interview, and the very first thing he did was grill me about my GPA. My GPA is not as good as it could be, but I’m certainly not ashamed of it either. The whole thing was very unnerving though, and it set a bad tone for the rest of the interview.

Later on in the interview, I started asking him questions. I wanted to know what the company ethic was like, so I asked him, “How do you feel morally about making ballistic missile control systems that could kill lots of people?”

Big mistake there. His eyes bugged out of his head, and he literally stared me down as he said, “I come from a soldiering family. My relatives are all soldiers and sailors. I feel that any time they are called upon to go to war they should have the best possible equipment. Their lives are an extremely high priority to me.”

I am not a peace activist or anything, but I’m just not sure I could handle the idea of working on such an offensive weapon. Anyway, there was no way I was going to work for these guys, so I sent him this email:

Dear Interested Potential Employer:
We appreciate your time and interest in providing an employment opportunity to J. Scott Parks. Unfortunately, at this time, we feel that you do not meet our employer criteria. We interviewed many applicants in the job search process and decided to pursue a company whose credentials and qualifications were better suited for our needs. Thus we will not be accepting your position, but thank you for your interest. If a need arises for us to contact you in the future, we will do so and you have our continued good wishes.
Very truly yours,
Scott Parks
Senior Electrical Engineer

Today, I had to go to a seminar for my senior design project, and the guys I was eating lunch with started talking about their experiences with this same guy. They had all been grilled about their GPAs, even the guy with a double degree who had a 3.77. (I would consider him to be in the top 5% of people at Rose in terms of smarts).

It also seems that he talked about me in all of his subsequent interviews. They all said that he mentioned interviewing an antiwar person earlier in the day, and he couldn’t understand why such a person would interview with a defense contractor. Clearly, it was a mistake on my part.

Let’s just say we dominated. First place. Finished in under 3 hours. Trampling second place finisher by 2 hours. Jared can fill you in, I just wanted to spread the word. WORD.

Well folks, PuzzleCrack 2006 began on Monday and The Big Enchilada was back in full force.  We tied for first on Monday through a snafu (I’m still not entirely convinced we didn’t win), we got second Tuesday, and we won today outright.  So far it’s shaping up to be a pretty good competition for the meta puzzle on Friday.

Through this part of the competition we’ve won a wireless mouse and two wireless 360 controllers from Microsoft.  If we win Friday, the prize would be a 360 Pro, 3 wireless controllers, and 5 games.  It would be pretty sweet, to say the least.

I forgot to mention that the Broncos are now 3-1. They took down one of the undefeated teams leaving only the Colts and the Bears. They play the Colts in a few weeks, and they’ll have to take them down too, I suppos. I doubt anybody else will, though it’s certainly true that Peyton has been carrying the team to victory lately. He’s good, but I don’t know how long he can keep that up.

So anyway, the Broncos have a stellar defense. They’ve only given up one touchdown in four games. In all, they’ve given up something like 34 points in their four games, as well. They just need to start scoring some points, and they’ll be golden. Plummer needs to keep it together. He’s got a running back who’s averaged 5.3 yds/carry throughout his career, and he’s got two pro bowl receivers. I don’t really know what more you could ask for.

Go Broncos.