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October 15, 2008
Ingrid Michaelson: Be OK
Ingrid Michaelson just released a new cd: Be OK. This one’s sort of a single-ish one since a lot of the material is either from previous stuff or live recordings. There’s 11 tracks but three are live, and there’s some duplication (live vs. studio, and acoustic). So I’d say there’s more than a single’s worth of stuff but not quite an album’s worth.
Ingrid continues to do cool stuff with her awesome voice and funky phrasing. It’s pretty unique. Her actual songwriting seems a bit amateurish or at least good but not super great. I guess her style is lots of repetition, which doesn’t work when applied to every song. It’s like the “Green Eggs and Ham” of music. But that’s her style so that’s cool I guess.
I also noticed that her style seems to be using more vibrato and running around with her voice. I’m not too impressed by it. It’s especially noticeable on “Over The Rainbow.” She can do cooler stuff with her voice than that, I think.
Finally, I’m kind of disappointed that she’s not wearing glasses on the cover!!! As a glasses-girl lover I am appalled. Well, not really. But I went ahead and threw the album cover into that “virtual try on glasses” thing I used to pick my own glasses:
Much better!
Anyway, there’s some cool songs on here. Plus the proceeds of the CD go to standup2cancer.org which is nice. My favorite song is probably “Giving Up” (which doesn’t sound like it should be on a cancer fighting CD, but whatever).
Also, I am pretty bummed that the tickets for the Ingrid Michaelson concert in Ann Arbor are already sold out! I guess she has a pretty solid fanbase here. Maybe she should book in Detroit or something. *Hint hint*. I already saw her last year but it’d be cool to see her again, especially before she gets uber famous (which should happen pretty soon).
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October 12, 2008
Talking Pokemon With The Kids
I had a chat with my 8 and 6 year-old nephew and niece, respectively, this evening over the phone. They’re really into Pokemon now. What weirds me out is that I was playing Pokemon before they were even born!
Apparently there’s a lot more Pokemon around now. I know the original 151 and some of the ones after that, and I have Pokemon Diamond (or is it Pearl), but seriously, there’s too many for me to remember.
My niece and nephew both have their own favorites. One likes the scary legendary ones (I told him they look scary and he disagreed), Palkia, Dialga and some other ones. And the other likes Togetic, the evolution of Togepi. Yes, I remembered that!
Is it strange to have this much common ground with 8 and 6 year-olds? I guess it’s kind of cool, but sad at the same time. Pokemon is pretty freakin’ rad though, and I look forward to battling them at Christmas time when I see them. Bulbasaur, I choose you!
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October 12, 2008
Ted Dziuba == WIN!
Mostly because of this post, where he tells you what the programming interviewer is really thinking when he’s asking you how to find a cycle in a singly-linked list.
What The Interviewer Thinks: This job has nothing to do with linked lists. In fact, I don’t think anyone has used a singly liked list since the seventies. I wonder if you’re good at PHP and MySQL, because that’s what all the work is here, but I’m not going to ask you anything about actual job requirements, because that doesn’t afford me the opportunity to be pathologically pedantic.
Seriously, did he read my earlier post where I hated on the exact Amazon.com interviewer that he’s describing in his post?
Ted Dzubia should seriously be named the patron saint of computer science nerds instead of this guy. He says what we think and some people actually listen to him!
PS, I just noticed I used the double equals (==) twice in a row on this blog. Hmm. Maybe I should come up with better headlines.
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October 08, 2008
Yahoo’s Job Site == Fail
So I’m looking at jobs and stuff, and I’m also applying for something at Yahoo.
Most employers’ job sites are pretty bad. I’m not sure why, but it seems that companies think that if the company is good enough, people will try to apply for jobs no matter how bad the actual process is. I’ve seen good implementations in the past as well as horrible ones. Google’s is actually not too bad (upload your resume and transcript, pdf is okay) while Yahoo’s is probably the worst.
First off, when I talked to a recruiter from Yahoo at Michigan, I was told that as a “green” measure, Yahoo wasn’t taking paper resumes. Okay, that’s pretty cool, I guess. Power to the Purple. But then I attempted to actually apply online.
The Yahoo careers site doesn’t take pdfs. It doesn’t take .pages either (which makes sense because those are actually directories!). So I convert the .pages to .doc and upload it. For some reason, the random filler stuff from the template (latin words, etc) makes it into the parser and pre-fills my resume with junk. Also, I found it very funny that the Yahoo resume parser thinks “Ann Arbor” is my name, and not my city!
Another thing I noticed is that there’s a list of universities, but for some reason, it’s only the big ones. University of New Mexico is not on there. Luckily for me, I’m going to a big-name school now! There’s also a field for “Other University.” Way to make community college kids feel good, Yahoo.
Finally, in order to get my resume in there, I have to copy and paste. That’s right, COPY AND PASTE. All the formatting I did to make my resume easy to read and cool-looking has gone down the drain. Getting resumes that are easy to read is apparently not important to Yahoo.
You might think that I would hold my tongue since I’m applying at Yahoo. But seriously, the Yahoo Careers Site is horrible. It needs work. I’m sure Yahoo is a fine place for a career; I’m also sure that Yahoo would be happy that its (prospective) employees would call a spade a spade, and recognize when there’s a problem with the site.
Who knows, I might even end up fixing the Careers site as my first gig at Yahoo. That is, if they’re willing to hire someone who can see problems and is not afraid to point them out.
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October 07, 2008
DOM Vs. SAX: Only One Will Survive
So while working on iPhone stuff, we used a SAX parser to handle xml. I thought this was a wacky way of parsing stuff, and I prefer DOM since it is much easier to understand as it’s conveniently in tree form.
Today, I tried parsing a 39mb xml file with Python’s minidom. Bad idea. It’s currently making my MacBook choke and it also made my desktop PC cry for memory. Apparently SAX is 1337 when it comes to memory efficiency while DOM is incredibly inefficient. Seriously, Python was taking more than 1gb of memory to parse a 39mb file! Perhaps my actual use of the minidom stuff was incorrect, but either way, I’ll probably try doing stuff in SAX if the file happens to be even remotely big.
Lesson learned!
Update: SAX totally pwned those large files. All 8 of them! And in less than a minute!