I had a great Mother’s Day. I talked to my mom in the morning, Delaney brought me some beautiful flowers from she and Taylor, Alice and Wayne weeded and planted in the back yard, Andrew took me to East Side Deli for a sandwich, Wayne, Andrew, Lauren, Sean and I went to see the new Avenger’s movie in 3D and IMAX, and Natale baked me two loaves of beautiful banana bread.
Today I learned that there is an upcoming Batman vs Superman movie. Whaaaaat? I definitely want to see that!
Andrew woke with the beginnings of one of his weird headaches but he conveniently had a doctor appointment early in the morning. His doctor is wonderful and went over lots of things to try. I also asked for an order to get an MRI just to rule anything out. Andrew went right back to bed when we got home. Wayne and I had plans to go to breakfast with Alice and then pick up her mom and hit the nurseries for some plant shopping. We decided to go to Cup and Saucer on Killingsworth so we could get their yummy pesto and sun dried tomato scramble. There was no line which is always nice and surprising for Portland. Our food was great but the service wasn’t the best.
We wound our way over to Alice’s mom’s place. Her mom is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and is living in an assisted living facility. The place is really nice! I got a bit of a tour before we left. We ended up going to two nurseries and got all sorts of stuff to plant. Lots of vegetables and herbs. I was hoping they had some tarragon plants but they didn’t. We did find more hot pepper plants for Andrew though. The weather is so nice out which made the nurseries extra busy. Lee and I sat in the shade and did some people watching while Alice and Wayne shopped.
We made a quick dinner of soba noodles with edamame, snap peas and carrots. I spent the rest of my evening putting all of my Kindle books in collections. Saturday night excitement for sure!
Today I learned (too late) that it used to be possible to jailbreak my Kindle and then use Calibre to manage books. That would have been handy to know before this last update to the OS!
Andrew went downtown today since Obama was leaving and the traffic was back to normal. Well, for the Max anyway. Wayne and I ran some errands and got some Thai food for lunch at a food cart near Hippo Hardware. I think I’m turning into a real Pacific Northwesterner because I ordered my food medium spicy and it was SO hot! I couldn’t eat it but the spring rolls were delicious. We picked our lights up and they look great! We have a lot of light fixtures now and all of them are hanging in the upstairs hallway for safe keeping. People are so confused when they go upstairs and see our mini lighting gallery.
I worked on the Mozilla tooltip bug but I couldn’t figure out why my JavaScript wasn’t working. Starring and unstarring events still works but now none of the tooltips work. When I inspect the element it claims to be undefined so there is just something I don’t understand about the syntax. I’ll have to mess with it more a different day.
Lauren, Sean, Andrew, Wayne, Natale, Jayde and I went to Teote for dinner and it was excellent! They only had a couple of vegan options but the bowl I had was so good I’d want it again anyway.
Today I learned that all seven of our blueberry bushes have fruit on them. Some have just a few handfuls but they are all happy this year.
Today I got an email from another place I sent a code challenge and they liked it enough to fly someone out to interview me next week. I kinda knew they would like my submission because I know I did a great job with it. That isn’t enough to translate to a job though because I have to figure out how to get over the nervous panic that is just sitting there under the surface during interviews or I’m going to blow it every time. If I could go in with a “this is simply practice” attitude that would help me but I can’t do that when it’s not true! On the up side I only have a week to stress about it.
I spent most of the day paying bills and working on my Mozilla bug. I really didn’t want to ask Andrew for help if at all possible so I tried changing things to see what would happen. I did that until it was time to head to the monthly PLUG meeting. Tonight Michael Dexter was talking about block storage. It was actually really interesting! We stuck around and talked with people afterward and made it home for a very late dinner of leftovers.
Today I learned that hardware raid is dead, dead, dead, and about GPT vs MBR.
Today I decided to work on some long overdue things. I want to transfer the data from my old recipe site to my new recipe site. The data in the old site is in an interesting format so I’m not sure how best to do this. There are DB dumps so I’m thinking about how to extract what I need but maybe it’s best to write a script to dump the data the way I want it which I think is in JSON. I did a bit of digging around on Heroku where the new site is to see what I might need to do ahead of time and to see exactly how I get the data into the database. I also worked on writing a Python script to grab the data and give it to me in JSON. I was close to having it ready to test when Andrew let me know he had JSON dumps for me already. That works!
I did a significant amount of reading and searching for how to get this data imported to my new site but was getting frustrated. I set that project aside and pulled up a Mozilla bug I had been wanting to get to. I needed to make the tooltip say the correct thing when an event is starred. Right now it says “Save as starred event”. I was not going to let JavaScript intimidate me this time! I figured out what I needed to do and got the code written. The syntax had me struggling a bit but I screwed around with it until I got a fun error “a is undefined” in a JS file that isn’t mine. Well crap. I had to ask Andrew for some help but he was busy and it was time for dinner anyway.
Today I learned about this handy site to help ramp up on JavaScript skills.
I woke up kind of bummed about not hearing back after my interview last week but I guess that’s how some companies handle things if they don’t intend to hire you. It still sucks though. Even just a “Thanks for coming in but we have hired someone else.” or something would be great. Ah well, that’s my rant for the day.
On the other hand dinner night was GREAT! Since it’s Cinco de Mayo we made tacos, Mexican quinoa, refried beans, salad, and seasoned grilled corn on the cob. Yum! We had the six of us, Alice, Jason, Spencer, John, and Glenn. We had a ton of food.
Today I learned how to reconnect all of my irc sessions. I keep them running on a remote server and connect via tmux but the server got an upgrade and needed a reboot.
Today was a busy, busy day full of running all over the place. Wayne and I left with Lauren and dropped her off at a salon where she volunteered to be a hair model. We ran to Trader Joe’s and Hippo Hardware and then rushed back to get her, take her home, and run out to Costco before my doctor appointment. Once we were done with aaaaaaall of that it was nearly 17:00 and I was supposed to meet Alena and hang out with her before her Women Who Code meetup. I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast though so I was really hungry. I of course had Wayne drop me off at Los Gorditos and then I walked up to the Starbucks where Alena was waiting. We sat outside while I ate and caught up on life and such. I was waiting all day to hear about a job prospect but that wasn’t happening. Soon enough it was time to walk to Portland Code School where here class was taking place. She was teaching and intro to PHP class so I followed along and it’s really not much different than any other object oriented language. It was interesting for sure. After her class Andrew came to get me. Dinner was ready when we got home but I was too full to eat so I checked over my code challenge one last time and sent it off. I had been hoping to get it sent earlier in the day but I was just too busy.
Today I learned that “We will let you know by Monday.” doesn’t mean that at all, even a little.
Wayne and I got up early so we could give my friend Virginia a ride to the airport. Andrew had made Wayne a cappuccino and made me a nice spicy chai with whipped cream and a cherry on top. That is my favorite way to start a Sunday. We took our drinks with us and headed out. I don’t really see Virginia much anymore so it was nice to catch up with her.
The three of us decided to head down to Sellwood and look for stuff for the house (more lighting, windows, etc.) It was a beautiful day and kind of a shame to spend a moment of it inside but it was fun to walk around the little shopping area down there. We completely struck out though and didn’t find a thing that was useful or reasonably priced.
I worked a bit more on the coding challenge just improving it and fixing any issues that came up. I did it all in Python since there was no language requirement but the company uses Perl. I hope they are ok with that!
We had an impromptu dinner night of sorts because we invited Jayde’s friend Estelle’s parents over to have breakfast for dinner. Alice, Jason and their friend Kevin joined us as well as did Lauren and Sean. We had sourdough waffles, tofu scramble, sausage patties, and potatoes. Afterward we went over to Alice and Jason’s and watched Walk Among the Tombstones. It was ok.
Today I learned that Sellwood is not the place to go for antiques.
Andrew didn’t have any coffee roasted so the guys and I walked around the corner to Blend. I already had tea waiting for me at home so we sat in the coffee shop and talked while they had their morning caffeine.
I had a late morning hair appointment so Wayne dropped me off and then the guys and I went to lunch at Los Gorditos. Yay! It. Was. So. GOOD! Eddie, the cashier and bringer of food was working and I hadn’t seen him in months. We were so happy to see each other. He brought us some complimentary chips and guacamole. The cook had added some fresh, diced jalapeno to it and that made it extra good. I love that place.
We headed to The Rebuilding Center afterward to look for lighting for our new bathroom and found one. Now we need one to go over the mirror and we will be set. Andrew and I walked up to Mr. Green Beans to get more beans for roasting. As we were walking I saw the comic shop and remembered it was free comic book day! Ack! I was probably too late to get my friend’s free comic book for Hip Hop Family Tree but I tried anyway. As expected they were long gone. Bummer!
When we got home I spent the rest of the day working on a coding challenge for another company hiring a junior dev. I had a ton of success with this challenge. I worked through it bit by bit changing and adding to it as needed. This one involves creating, viewing, and modifying an object. It was a lot of fun to see it grow and turn into a real thing!
Today I learned that just because you can solve something with a regular expression doesn’t mean you should.
Wow, it’s May already. The weather is amazing but what else is new. I had a three hour interview with all sorts of people today. I was SO nervous but relaxed once I got there. I kept thinking about how I would react if I had to do a code challenge of some sort. I just knew I would have major performance anxiety. Andrew kept telling me to just relax and that I know stuff and that I am perfectly capable and I do and I am but when put on the spot I freeze. It’s like a childhood trauma thing. My dad, with the best of intentions, used to randomly quiz me on my times tables. To this very day if someone asks me something as simple as “What is 7 times 9?” I will most likely freeze and be unable to answer. If I think a question is some sort of a quiz I freeze. It’s really annoying! But I was worried about this during the interview.
I showed up right on time and was so pleased to see an office dog! And then another! I would love to work somewhere that has dogs to hang out with. The building is really nice and the office was not too giant and not too small. I’d say it was cozy 🙂 I was offered something to drink so I requested tea and then went into a meeting room where I ended up staying for the entire time. I was asked several times if I needed a break but I didn’t. I’m pretty good at sitting.
The first two people I met with were developers. We had a great conversation and then one of them asked me to explain something. Ack! It felt like a quiz! Yeah, I panicked. I stumbled and fumbled over my words. All he had asked of me was to explain the general idea of an AJAX request. SO easy!! I couldn’t do it. I was just so sure I was going to say something wrong that I pretty much said everything wrong. They were both really nice about it though. He offered to explain it to me and I accepted and felt so dumb as he told me what I already knew. Andrew was going to be slightly frustrated to hear this. The rest of the interviews were great. Everyone was incredibly nice and honestly either way I had a great day just getting to meet some really nice people and see what a happy and cohesive team they are. I’d love to be a part of that because they sure have a great thing going. I’m happy for them!
I got home and surprise, surprise. Another company that has been, what feels like stringing me along sent me a coding challenge. I’m going to do it for the practice for sure but they have definitely shown me that they aren’t a place where I would be happy. I don’t feel like I matter to them at all. I’m sure they will find someone who is the perfect fit but I don’t believe that’s me.
Andrew and I took a walk to New Seasons and got some things for dinner. We were finally able to harvest an ingredient from our garden! We used the beet tops and sauteed them with onion, garlic, peas, red beans and spiral pasta. Wayne took care of the seasoning. It was delicious! We had a strawberry we were watching ripen. It was the very first one and it was beautiful. Someone, not our family, got to it before we did though. Oh well. We are going to have more than we will know what to do with though. The plants look like they are covered with snow because there are so many blossoms. Pies all summer I guess!
Today I learned about various salaries via #talkpay on Twitter. Very interesting!
