Tuesday, November 9, 1999

To quote a recent Volkswagon ad: Well, that was interesting.

A recruiter at Litton/PRC caught me in the hall on the way out the door, carrying an armful of computer equipment (more on that later) and asked if I would help her recruit potential new hires at George Mason University. On Tuesday, today. I said I’d be happy to if I could get approval from my manager. After getting home, I called my manager and he was nice enough to let me go for the day. So after a quick call to the recruiters’ celphone, I was ready to go.

Sadly, I didn’t wake up to my alarm clock. It went off on time; I just didn’t wake up until forty-five minutes later. *sigh* So I rushed around getting ready, fumbling with a tie for the first time in many moons (OK, I take that back — I wear a tie to AWANA). I got there later than I would have liked, but my first potential hire wasn’t scheduled until about the time I got there, so that worked out OK. Thus began the Day Of Interviewing.

It was enjoyable, but I wouldn’t want to do it every day. Evaluating people for eight hours (with a one-hour lunch) is much more tiring than I expected. By the time I got home, I felt like the Dilbert character who had his life force sucked out of him so he turned into a limp dishrag.

As to why I was leaving my building with armloads of computer equipment on Monday, a guy in the building sent out an e-mail advertising that he was giving away computer stuff. I trudged up a flight of stairs to the 5th floor, followed the signs, and lo and behold there were two Sun workstations sitting there for the taking. No joke. CPU’s, external hard drives, monitors, cables. After trying to lug one of the 80-pound monitors down to my truck, I grabbed a rolling chair and over several trips managed to get two Sun CPU’s, two Sun monitors (one with a remote control!), three external Sun hard drive units, and one standard 14″ monitor (to replace the one I own which has developed a bad case of the Plague). Coolness.

Did a bit of work on Informant, but not much. I hope to get BeTalking working tonight, then maybe I can work on Informant over the rest of the week and the weekend.

And I finally got my second Tenchi cel. I’ll probably go and get it framed soon.

So Microsoft’s a monopoly. I probably should look through the finding of fact over on the U.S. DOJ’s website, since it seems a bit difficult to prove. Hmmm. But hey, Be‘s stock has more than doubled. I can’t complain. ;-)