Thinking back on my interviews and the questions that were asked I remembered one that really struck me as odd. I can’t remember what interview I was in when the question was asked but the question was something like, “Do you miss programming in school?”.

I had to think about it for a minute because at first I thought it was loaded question. As I slowly answered I thought to myself, “don’t hang yourself here Stephan…”. The fact of the matter is that I do miss programming, to a point. I am glad it is not all we do in our major but at the same time I think to get a good amount of programming in since most of us will end up in programming positions at first.

So I answered the question that way, stating that I miss programming and that I think there should be more in our program. Hopefully I did not shoot down my chances of getting that job.

I am finally back in Lubbock for a good amount of time after traveling a lot in the last two weeks. I have been in Dallas a few times now for day trip interviews with Software Architects and ARGO Data Resources.

Both companies were pretty interesting, though ARGO is a little too formal for me. Everyday is a formal suit day, which I don’t find too entertaining.

I was also in Austin this past weekend for an interview with National Instruments. The interviews went well and the people there treated us very well. They seem to be a good company to work for with a lot of perks for employees and the relaxed atmosphere.

I am just happy that I am done traveling for a while. Now I can just worry about school, get some much needed rest, and hangout with Sarah. I guess I could never be a jet-setter.

The trip to Dallas this weekend was great. I left Thursday afternoon for an “interview” with protiviti in the area of technology risk. My arrival at DFW was met with a limousine. Now, I have never been picked up at the airport by a limo so I had no idea how to proceed. The driver was very nice and told me that I didn’t have to do anything but give him my bags. He took me to the Hilton Suites in Addison and I spent some time at the Dallas Galleria, which was right across the street.

The “interview” turned out to be more of a, me interviewing the company, type event and I learned a lot about what I would be doing. The office is located in Addison on the Lyndon B. Johnson highway and the whole area is very nice. The trip went well and I arrived back in Lubbock in time for the football game against A&M.

But, my travels aren’t over just yet. I fly back to Dallas tomorrow for a different interview with ARGO Data Resources also located in Addison. I am really interested in the interview because this company writes banking software for just about every major bank in the U.S.

But I’m still not done traveling after that. I will be in Austin from Thursday till Saturday interviewing with National Instruments and then in Dallas one last time interviewing with Software Architects. It’s a lot of travel but I’m enjoying it so far.

Well, I have been lacking in the area of posting mostly because of school. I have been swamped with work and now I am starting my second round of interviews. I fly out tomorrow for Dallas and will be gone until midday Saturday, back just in time for the A&M game.

I will be having interviews every weekend until the 18th of this month and more next month. I am ready for a break from Lubbock and these will be the perfect opportunity.

MySQL 5.0 has reached version 5.0.15 and is considered ready for mass consumption. The MySQL team officially released it yesterday and the downloading has begun.

There is already a whole lot of reading for me to do but it will have to wait till next week since I am busy with school mumbo-jumbo. I am guessing there will be some subtle bugs in the new release but hopefully everything will be fairly smooth. This release comes as I was just getting ready to switch to PostrgreSQL. I will wait to see what the final verdict is and if the performance is still the same after the feature additions or if we have a dud on our hands.

Doing research on how to proceed with the restructuring of this site and what would be most useful in searching for archives I have found that tags and categories are the two most popular methods. Categories of course have been the most used way to group information together with things like “Technology” and “Computers” used to group everything about the internet or iPods together. Is this proper? Does it make the information easier to find? No. You end up with a fairly convoluted archive tree structure.

The answer to this problem seems to be a tag type system like those used on flickr and Technorati. Michael Heilemann has an interesting tag cloud at the bottom of his archives page. I am thinking about using something similar to keep my archives by keywords instead of categories. The whole category system just seems too concrete without a whole lot of room for expansion or change. We’ll see how it goes.

System of a Down has released their new single titled “Hypnotize”, also the name of their upcoming album.

The song has a completely different feel than other System of a Down music in that it is softer and almost “poppish”. Of course they mix it up with verses having different beats or guitar riffs but the sound is deliberate and a welcome change.

The lyrics of course are political and counter-culture. The song attacks the media and the entire fashion industry saying “Why don’t you ask the kids at Tiananmen square?

Was fashion the reason why they were there?”. The lead singer remarked that it isn’t right that a child molester goes to prison but as a nation we have no problem with Calvin Klein hiring a 13 yr. old girl and having her pose half exposed to sell some jeans.

I can see the point and agree with it partly. Yet, I think that child molesters are some of the sickest people on the face of the Earth and have no right to be out on the streets. I really enjoy the new song and hopefully the album will be more of the same.

The Astros have finally won their first pennant after a season that started off 15-31. The game last night was, for the most part, flawless on the part of the Astros. The call at second base with the tag out may not have been the best call but there’s not a whole lot that can be done now.

It has been my cheesy childhood dream to see the White Sox play the Astros in the World Series but who would have known it would actually happen. Why was I White Sox fan you ask? Frank Thomas, enough said.

Saturday is going to be an exciting day for everyone in Houston and probably the state of Texas.

As predicted, Apple has released new PowerMacs and PowerBooks. The resolution on the 15″ model has been upped to 1440×960 and the standard processor speed is now 1.67Ghz.

This will be the last update to the PowerBooks before the switch to Intel based hardware.

I have never used WordPress for my personal publishing needs but when Jay offered me an invite to WordPress.com, I had to check it out.

It is a Blogger type hosted blogging solution. The interface is the standard WordPress administrator dashboard but I don’t have to worry about databases or anything in the background. I am going to try and get something up at my WordPress.com site here soon.

Thanks again to Jay for setting me up with an invite!