Plaidophile

For the past two and a half years, my commute has been slowly wearing me out and killing me. So for the past week I've been driving to work, and the difference is profound. When I get to work I'm immediately productive instead of taking an hour or so to get into the swing of things. When I get home at night, even after an 11-hour workday (due to my own recent obsessiveness over my project) I still feel energetic and don't feel like just collapsing on the couch and crying for an hour. It's an amazing difference.

I'll still try to ride my bike on nice days (since it's good exercise and doesn't wear me out like the bus or BART), but holy cow, I am so over mass transit now, at least for my daily commute. (I'll still use it for going downtown to meet up with people, since it's still cheaper and quicker than parking and of course leaves more drinking opportunity and whatever, but work pays for my work parking.)

Basically, San Francisco mass transit sucks and it was pretty much killing me. And I'd rather be alive (and even happy!) than smug.

Lately I've been disillusioned with my job and career choice more than ever (not at all helped by realizing that I work for the bad guys), which of course always makes me think about what I'd like to do if I win the lottery or are otherwise independently wealthy. Then I start to wonder why I can't do those things anyway, and start to think about what I need to do for that to happen.

I'm way overdue for this vacation. I'm burning the candle at both ends and it's catching my frayed ends on fire.

Incidentally, Steve/ucblockhead is no longer on my friends list. I had thought I could stay friends with him after he became my manager, but that has clearly turned out to not be the case. The fault lies at least as much with me as with him, but it's still a difficult decision to have to make, especially since he's the one who recruited me to this job when I was going through the exact same kinds of crap at Amazon. Although it's pretty clear at this point that whatever friendship we had didn't mean nearly as much to him as it did to me.

I simultaneously do and don't feel like going into details. Maybe some other time. I have a comic to finish for tomorrow.

When on vacation, even if you absolutely MUST log in to corporate email in order to provide an update to the team mailing list about something project-related, do not, under any circumstances, actually look at your incoming email, not even a little bit. And if you do notice a bunch of bug reports against a key component you're responsible for, don't look to see what they are and start thinking about how to go about fixing it, because you are on vacation and the whole point to that is to not be at work.

"Hey, the building's on fire."

"Yeah. Could you put it out?"

"Well, I don't have any water. I'm waiting for the fire department to arrive. Any idea when they might come?"

"Is there something else you could use?"

"Not really. Just the fire department."

"How about this vodka?"

"No, that will just make it worse."

"What about this bottle of Coke?"

"Well, that might put a small part out, but then we'd have a big sticky mess and it wouldn't really do much to the fire anyway."

"Well, keep plugging away at it, maybe something will turn up. I heard the fire department might be here in two days."

"Might be? Couldn't we get a firmer commitment than that?"

"No, not really. So just keep on using what water you find. This is a top priority, and I'm confident you can handle it."

I'm glad you feel that adding a poker game element will be the most innovative thing ever for whatever crappy Mafia Wars knockoff you're working on now, but if you insist on using the bathroom as a meeting room for discussing your game designs while I'm taking a crap, I'm going to crap on your game designs.

So, this morning I talked with the Google staffing lead who I had previously corresponded with. I had to call him at 8:30, because I guess he'd forgotten about intending to call me while on the shuttle in. It was a very short conversation; my takeaway from it is that Google's interview process is great and very well-regarded among the people who Google hires (selection bias much?) and that the interviewers had decided that I wouldn't fit in anyway, for the reasons I'd already stated (not that this had stopped him from trying to get me to pre-poach my coworkers, ethical dilemma much?). So, yeah, I've been rejected by a company that outwardly prides itself on being innovative and imaginative but privately is actually just about brute-force cog-in-a-machine bullshit, and not getting an offer actually feels liberating because I don't have to second-guess myself about what could have been.

So the staffing lead who's been working with my interview process at Google sent me an email yesterday that showed the usual Google lack-of-ethical-thinking:

Once again, thanks for taking the time to come in and talk to us on Tuesday. As promised, I hope to have news for you early next week in regards to feedback from your interviews at Google. With this in mind, I wanted to drop you a quick email to see if there's anyone else you can think of that you would recommend to work at Google? As we have so many open roles within Software Engineering, anyone you suggest would not be competing with you for a position - but it's an opportunity for you to be working with some of your best previous/ current colleagues. If you don't want me to tell any of the people you suggest that I got their details from you, that's quite ok too (just let me know) - but we'll give you full credit for any successful hires in terms of the Google referral bonus if you start work here (a healthy $4000 per successful applicant).

Any thoughts much appreciated,
[M]

I decided this was a good opportunity to provide feedback about the interview process.

I just interviewed at Google. Everything I'd heard about how weird their interviews are turned out to be true.

I keep wondering what it would take for me to change careers, like to TV/film/commercial scoring or the like. Considering that most TV shows these days seem to just use stock GarageBand loops it's certainly something I'd be capable of excelling at.

This is cool, a bunch of people at Mobileread have done a pretty thorough job of reverse-engineering the Topaz format, and even have rudimentary tools to convert Topaz into SVG, PDF, and XHTML. I'm a bit dismayed that they don't seem to realize how much work went into "just took the book and scanned it, ran an ocr and some corrections/images and put together a huge slow package and called it a salable ebook," but oh well.

We have a couple of open job positions here, one for senior software engineer and one for senior Flash engineer. As always, the disclaimer is that I get a bonus for anyone who gets hired by my referral.

Both are for a small office of Sony Network Entertainment (I think that's what our group is called this week) near downtown San Francisco (very close to the Caltrain station).

Not posting this publicly, for obvious reasons, but here is a thread with the Python-based Topaz DRM stripper. That's the one which requires that it be run from the same PC that the file was downloaded on via KindleForPC. I will not be posting the C++ app which can crack the DRM without knowing the device key, even though it really should make its rounds somehow, because really it's too juicy to not go anywhere.

As I've mentioned in the past, I worked on Kindle. I think I've specifically said I worked on the Topaz format. If not, well, that's what I did on Kindle — I designed the Topaz file format and rendering/layout library, and did a lot of the work and problem-solving on the actual conversion process.

One of the (minor but important) parts of the Topaz format is, of course, the DRM, which has so far eluded being compromised, which is funny because it's actually a pretty trivial "secret-sauce" algorithm which was implemented under some pretty ridiculous constraints (I had limited time to implement it, wasn't allowed to pull in any external libraries, and had to keep it performing quickly without using much memory on an already-constrained device), and somehow it's eluded being cracked for a bit over two years.

Until now.

I had been having trouble with Outlook at work, where I'd been getting messages like "As the meeting organizer, you do not need to respond to the meeting" when someone else sent an update for a meeting I was on. Outlook had somehow gotten the notion that I was the meeting organizer, even going so far as to make it so I couldn't change my own reminder time without it trying to send out notifications to everyone about a "change in meeting time." Of course, the meeting itself on the calendar showed the actual originator as the organizer, but apparently Outlook's messaging and calendar components were out of sync with each other. It was probably caused because I originally accepted the meetings from Thunderbird+Lightning, and then later switched back to Outlook. It didn't help that both affected meetings had been updated since their original receipt.

There were plenty of results on a Google search for the key phrase, but none of them provided a solution (plenty of them blamed everything but Outlook, though). Fortunately, I found a workaround which seems to work for now, but it relies on still having the original meeting request messages available and an external IMAP client (so obviously you need to be able to talk to Exchange via IMAP).

Basically, I just deleted the meetings from my calendar, and then found the original request messages. They still showed me as being the organizer with the added wrinkle that the items were "no longer on the calendar," BUT if I used a different email client (i.e. Thunderbird over IMAP) and moved the items back into my inbox, then Outlook finally saw them as they originally were, and I was able to accept the meetings appropriately.

It's fortunate that both of these long-term recurring meetings happened to have been originated recently, though. If I didn't still have the original meeting request emails, I'd have been out of luck.

Hello Kindle source. I am downloading now to see if this actually includes the stuff I worked on (or at least the client end, although frankly it's the backend processing stuff that was actually interesting).

11:16 Oh, that's just the Linux runtime and all the F/OSS libraries it uses. They're just doing the due diligence in compliance is all. Nothing interesting to see here.

I haven't been particularly posty over here, mostly because I haven't felt like talking about things going on in my life. So, in bullet list form:

Where I work we have a couple of open C++ dev positions, one Flash (primarily scripting in AS2/AS3) developer position, and a senior QA engineer position. All positions are based in San Francisco, CA. If you're interested or know someone who is, email me a resume at fluffy@beesbuzz.biz and I'll make sure it gets to the right place.

Well, several, actually.

One position which I am pretty familiar with is for an experienced C++ developer, ideally with some embedded (well, constrained-memory/power/CPU) experience. Understandings of component-based architecture, SQL, and Java are huge pluses.

We also have several interaction engineering/design openings, including a couple of management things in that area. I don't know the exact job requirements for them though.

All of them are in San Francisco, CA. And, as a disclaimer, I get a (small) bonus for anyone who gets hired based on my recommendation.

I know this is a long-shot on my friends list, but: If you're in the bay area and are looking for a job as a technical writer, we're hiring! Email me your resume (fluffy @ beesbuzz dot biz) and I'll pass it along to the appropriate channels.

Ideally you should be able to read C++ and Java and work with engineers to convert a bunch of class header files into coherent design and reference documents.

Also, as a disclaimer, I get a referral bonus for any successful hires referred by me.