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I’ve had career stuff on the mind lately and came across the rants of this guy named Steve Yegge touching on topics ranging from choosing a language to questions for screening programmers (and thus to make sure you know when interviewing). I haven’t read all of them but a lot of them are good reading, even if you don’t agree with everything he says. He worked in the trenches at Amazon for seven years and then moved on to some other company.

A whirlwind tour of languages:

There are “better” languages than Perl — hell, there are lots of them, if you define “better” as “not being insane”. Lisp, Smalltalk, Python, gosh, I could probably name 20 or 30 languages that are “better” than Perl, inasmuch as they don’t look like that Sperm Whale that exploded in the streets of Taiwan over the summer. Whale guts everywhere, covering cars, motorcycles, pedestrians. That’s Perl. It’s charming, really.

But Perl has many, many things going for it that, until recently, no other language had, and they compensated for its exo-intestinal qualities. You can make all sorts of useful things out of exploded whale, including perfume. It’s quite useful. And so is Perl.

The Five Essential Phone Screen Questions:

The right way to do a phone screen is to do most of the talking, or at least the driving. You look for specific answers, and you guide the conversation along until you’ve got the answer or you’ve decided the candidate doesn’t know it. Whenever I forget this, and get lazy and let the candidate drone on about their XML weasel-pin connector project, I wind up bringing in a dud.

The second pattern is that one-trick ponies only know one trick. Candidates who have programmed mostly in a single language (e.g. C/C++), platform (e.g. AIX) or framework (e.g. J2EE) usually have major, gaping holes in their skills lineup. These candidates will fail their interviews here because our interviews cover a broad range of skill areas.

These two phone screen (anti-)patterns are related: if you only ask the candidate about what they know, you’ve got a fairly narrow view of their abilities. And you’re setting yourself up for a postmortem on your phone screen.

Also he recently started a blog with more stuff. It’s a lot to get through but it’s refreshing to hear from someone that has been out there putting this stuff to the test.

From a thread at the Something Awful Forums I found this guy that acts out scenes from movies and he really captures some of the performances. Check it out:

• Home Alone
• Star Trek: First Contact
• Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
• As Good As It Gets
• The Princess Bride
• The Breakfast Club
• The Shining

This week I did my radio show Thursday evening instead of Sunday morning and it was the most interesting one I’ve done yet. Four calls total. The first was a guy asking about an advance release that I had played a song from, and when I told him that the album wasn’t out yet he asked me “where’d you get it then?” I didn’t really want to tell him “leaked on the Internet” so I just said that radio stations get advance copies and that was that. It’s true that we do and I had actually forgotten that I had seen a copy of the same CD around weeks earlier. Like so many others it disappeared and is probably in some box somewhere or got nicked by a DJ.

Two other calls were standard “what’s that song?” which are good and then the fourth was just weird. I’m experimenting with the whole “showing some personality on the radio” thing so I said a bit on the air about finals and saying that I had some the next morning (which I did) and that was that. Immediately after I got a call from some guy who seemed to think I was freaked out about the finals or something. He started off by asking me if I was listening, then rambled on about “joining us” and “it will all be okay” and so on and I really didn’t say anything since I was trying to figure out what the hell he was talking about. I think it was an older guy but I’m not sure. In any case I thought it was funny that he was listening to the stuff I was putting on instead of crazy old man music.
Other than that the show was remarkably free of issues. I hope I can get a similar timeslot since I like getting some feedback and knowing that somebody is listening.

Here’s some stuff that I liked from this week:

• “Paul Simon” - The Russian Futurists: “Wall of sound” lots going on type music that I really dig. His album Our Thickness is great and I find it amazing that he does it all by himself.
• “Rough Gem” - Islands: Some hot hot plucking and flute action going on here. I guess this band is two thirds of the Unicorns, a band I never really checked but which I may have to now.
• “Steady As She Goes” - The Raconteurs: Sounding kinda like the White Stripes but not, starring Jack White and some other guys. The way Jack sings “when you have completed what you thought had to do” with a little auditory smirk is just super.
• “If Only The Moon Were Up” - Field Music: Enjoyably British with some horns, start-stop guitars, and all manner of other instruments. Plus you can’t beat a song with the lyrics “if only the moon were up, I’d be trying to find my shoes”. I need to spend some quality time with the rest of their album.
• “Hold On” - Magnet: More plucky goodness, this time with a whispering pretty boy type. But it also has this alien noise and he raises his voice and it picks up and hey hold on okay! Ha ha, optimism.

That’s it, the rest sucked. Just kidding.

There’s a very real possibility that I’ll be doing another internship this summer. I won’t say who it’s with to avoid jinxing it, but I think it will be a better experience than my previous one. Not that I didn’t like my first internship, but I think this company will be a better fit, plus other things like it being over the summer and thus not messing up any classes or financial aid or anything.

One weird thing I noticed is that this company has a LOT of internship openings in the areas that I’m interested in but only a few regular openings, and those are for recent college graduates specifically (and also not in technical areas). I don’t know if it’s more of a case of mostly hiring in other countries or basically requiring people to come in through the internship program or what, but I guess it bodes well for me if I do get an internship there.

Two things:

1. Hamachi - easy-to-use software for pretending two computers are on a network when they’re really not, done by magic over the Internet. It’s secure too. I know this is no recent innovation but I just had to choose a username, a network name and password, and that’s it. Clients for Windows and Linux. I’m using it to access my music at home from work since my iPod’s hard drive may be wigging out.
2. reBlog - I’ve been open to a Bloglines replacement for awhile since their interface kinda sucks. I looked into running feed-on-feeds on a local Apache install and did so for a time but then stopped for reasons I can’t remember. Now there’s reBlog, an improved version of f-o-f with AJAX and all sorts of other neat stuff. The basic idea is that you go through your feeds, pick out the good stuff that gets added to your own feed, and archive the rest. There are still a few quirks but it has a lot of potential. There’s a post on how to set it up at Lifehacker.

Paul Bunyan, Modern-Day Sex Symbol:

On city streets, too, trends in scruff have reached new levels of unruliness, a backlash, some beard enthusiasts say, against the heightened grooming expectations that were unleashed with the rise of metrosexuality as a cultural trend. Men both straight and gay, it appears, want to feel rough and manly.

Other designers who appeared in scruffy beards during Fashion Week included Brian Kirkby of Boudicca, Nathan Jenden and Matthew Williamson. Santino Rice gave the look national exposure on “Project Runway” this season, with weekly variations. Among the models that Ralph Lauren cast in his men’s show was a wildly bearded young man with long tresses, like Brad Pitt circa 2002.

And with their fully furry chins Ariel Foxman and Bruce Pask, the editor in chief and the style director, respectively, of Cargo magazine, the metrosexual manifesto, seem now to be endorsing a lumberjack ideal.

I had no idea there were “beard enthusiasts”, implying that the term isn’t merely another way of saying “guys with beards”. Maybe this means that rural Oregonians will finally have their day in the fashion sun. I am surprised that they didn’t mention the king of beards, comedian Zach Galifianakis, who pulls off the “looks like I haven’t touched a comb or razor in years” look where so many have failed, including most college students.

Nonetheless I pray daily that the neckbeard will never become trendy, such an occurrence being one of thirteen signaling the end times.

There’s an interview up from Charlie Rose with Jack and Meg White on Youtube (friend to moochers everywhere). I found it pretty interesting since Jack’s a unique guy, putting out great music but not full of himself. Also he has a straw hat and seemed very intent on toying with his cane. Meg even speaks a few times. One thing they touch on is that their American fans are different than their fans in other parts of the world, specifically that America has a distinctive hipster crowd that aren’t long term fans, instead likely to come and go.

I know there are those people and wondered if I was like that. I know I do tend to get really into a band and then move on but I still keep them in my rotation and don’t get tired just because they’re not the hot thing of the moment, but I want to hear lots of new stuff so it doesn’t allow really deep fandom of any group for long.

See job opening at last.fm (since I can’t paste it here for some reason). Man that’d be sweet. I don’t know if they really have a business model down but they’re showing up at conferences and we all know that any company that presents at tech conferences isn’t allowed to go under.

I’m trying out eMusic and I’m liking it a lot. Plain old MP3s with no DRM. $20 per month for 90 songs. Lots of good music. I don’t know if I’d ever give up filesharing, being able to satiate my need for prereleases, but this may help me go partially legal.

Join Hollywood Steve as he explores the colorful past of “Yacht Rock“. Kenny Loggins, Hall & Oates, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, they’re all here. You knew Hall and Oates could kick ass, now here’s the proof. Also includes the secret origins of Jethro Tull (not Yacht Rock).