and so it begins.

today is my last day of vacation, before my leap into the working world.

i'm equally as excited as i am nervous.  this is a pretty big deal.

in other news, my Kumatan is doing great.  i've earned enough money from her shows to buy all the expensive home renovations and a good number of the expensive interior items.  i'm focusing more on music for her performances, which seems to be paying off.  with the exception of the doors, the toilet, and the sink, the house is looking pretty nice.  i think my next step will be to save up for the fancy TV and sofa, possibly the bed as well since i don't think the good futon is a music item.  i want to move away from the cheap rugs too, but they're so damn expensive.  also what is with the sinks, why do they cost over 150,000 yen.

anyway, i should be in bed

so, as some of you no doubt know, i start work in three days.

my method of transportation to the office is something i've been thinking about in great detail lately.

i have two choices: my car, obviously, and the VTA light rail. at the time of day i'll be hitting the freeway, it'll probably take me close to 45 minutes to get into mountain view. possibly longer. my car is more comfortable, it doesn't pigeonhole me into a possibly inconvenient schedule, and leaves me with a form of transportation once i arrive. however gas is expensive, as is vehicle maintenance.

the VTA light rail system has a path i can take from the Great Mall in milpitas to about two blocks from the office. it costs $62 a month for a pass, but i could easily burn that much gas in a week and a half. it would mean less wear-and-tear on my car, and i wouldn't spend much, if any, time on the freeways stuck in traffic. as a rider of public transportation i'd be able to listen to my ipod, work on my laptop or play my DS. but it would mean getting up earlier, which means either less sleep or an earlier bedtime. i'd also be at the mercy of the public transportation schedule, and i'd be in deep shit if i happened to miss the train. and considering i'd have to ride the bus or drive to the great mall, the savings i get, if any, would likely be marginal and i'd likely not be helping the environment.

at this point, driving to work seems like the better choice.

just dropped a shitton of money at my car.  it desperately needed repairs, and now that it's all fixed up i feel a lot better about driving it around.

been playing Kumatanchi a lot.  it's actually quite addicting.

i'm tired.

so i finished up the transition to Awesome3 tonight, after seeing that it was out in AUR.  took me about an hour, mostly because it now uses the global configuration file in /etc and i was editing the one in ~/.config, so nothing was changing.  after i figured out that simple fact, i started making some progress and got everything worked out.  so far it looks pretty much the same as awesome2.  there are some slight changes, perhaps the most obvious of which is an integrated systray, which means i can dump trayer.  also the theme system accepts an argument for setting the desktop background, which removes yet another line from my .xinitrc file.

and now it is very late and i have stayed up for far too long.  it is bed time.

well i suppose i should update everyone on this fantastic development.

on monday, i rode into San Francisco again, for an interview with a recruiting agency.  it went well, and it was short, so i got home pretty early.  i sent out a thank you letter to Stratify, to thank them for the interview last week.  then i submitted my resume to Sun Microsystems and hit the sack.

fast forward to tuesday morning, around 10:00.  my cell phone rings, it's one of the interviewers from Stratify.  she says "check your e-mail, i just sent you a job offer."

i print out the form, sign it, and spend two bux faxing it back.  and today, i get a fat stack of paperwork for me to fill out.

i did it.  i'm employed.  starting october 1st, i'll be a full-time employee.

i'm so excited i can hardly stand it.

yeah, switched back pretty quick.

i realized something.  even though my computer would be in dvorak and usable by me, most every other computer out there will use qwerty, and so would my blackberry.  some of them i wouldn't be able to change.  so i might as well not torture myself to learn a new layout i wouldn't be able to get good at due to constant shifting.

anywho, i should hear back from a potential job this week.  the hiring manager spoke to my references, so the next step is to make me an offer.  or turn me down, i'm not going to discount that possibility.  we'll see!

this entry is going to take forever to write, even if it is rather short.

i'm trying to switch to dvorak, and i just finished swapping the keycaps on my model M.

this is just like 15 years ago, when i was still learning how to type.  so slowwwwww.

i may switch back, we'll see.

been playing yume nikki on and off for the past few weeks, ever since i got it running under wine.  i sort of had a falling out a while back, when i accidentally overwrote my 16-effect save file.  i'm slowly building my way back up, this time picking up effects and finding things i've never seen before.  it's a bit of a tricky thing, though.  if i play on fullscreen, i can actually see things.  but the game is crash-happy in wine (especially during the Earthbound level) and if the game crashes, i'm left with a 320x240 viewport and have to manually reset the resolution (or kill X).  if i go windowed, 640x480 gives the game horrible slowdown.  i don't understand why, touhou runs at 640x480 at 60 FPS, and Aquaria runs at a playable rate at an even larger resolution.  hell, i can get ~45 FPS in Portal through wine, at 1440x900.  so i have to stick with 320x240, which is just barely playable.

i tried running the game through qemu, but it had no audio and wasn't as stable.  anyway, i'm still finding the game as relaxing as i did before.  some scenes (see image) still creep me out, but overall i find the art style, the music, the ambience and the solitude more relaxing than any sedative.  as well, the game pulls at my explorative urges in just the right way.  i'm playing it in fits and starts, so i don't get too sucked in and forget to save when the game inevitably crashes.  i'm hoping this time to actually finish it.

bit of an up and down today.

yesterday went amazingly well.  i was interviewed by five people, they all went great.  today i got a call asking for my references - which means i passed the interviews.  at this point, after my references check out, they'll make me an offer and i get to go in for a drug test.  then i'm in!  hooray!  i'm so excited i can't stand it.

today i was planning on revising my resume, just for kicks and to keep things on file with the SJSU career center.  i didn't.  along with a few other things that happened today that i really don't want to get into, around noon my cat came into my room holding a mouse.  i got him to drop it then locked him in my aunt's bedroom to keep him from guarding it.  i grabbed a plastic bag and picked it up.  as i was going downstairs, i heard it shuffle around in the bag.  so i closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and whacked it against our pegboard three times as hard as i could.  it jerked once, made soft squeaking sound, and then went still.  i checked it again about a minute later.  it was officially gone.  it hit me kind of hard, because it's been a while since i killed an innocent creature.  i felt bad most of the day, because i didn't think of a more humane way to end the creature's suffering until much later.  but i am kind of taking comfort in the fact that i did end its suffering and that now it feels nothing.

i also take comfort in the fact that i felt anything at all.  as someone who hangs out in the bowels of the internet, i've been worried the whole experience has jaded me.  feeling bad about what i did means it hasn't, and that's probably the best thing i can take out of this whole experience.

but enough of that depressing topic.  i need to watch some Slayers.

i figure after the massive wave (read: two) of private entries, i should make a public one!

thursday was a loooooong day. i got up at 9:00, and started steeling myself for what lie ahead. i showered, i shaved, i tried to calm down. i made the decision to ride my bike to the BART station - would have been a better decision in mid-spring, when it wasn't 98 outside. i was pretty wiped by the time i got to the station, and it didn't help that i was nervous and didn't sleep too much the night before. about halfway through my BART ride, the job placement company i had the 3:00 appointment with called - my appointment had to be rescheduled. i could have turned around and headed back home, but i decided to head in anyway, for a change of pace. around 1:30, the time i was scheduled for the phone interview with SDL, i got into SF and headed for the nearest starbucks.

the interviewer called a while later. the technical interview didn't go 100%, but i defy anyone to say an interview can ever go 100%. some time later, a friend of mine showed up, and we spent the next four hours or so wandering around the city. then we hit BART and came back home.

i talked with my aunt, she agreed with me that my clothes are way too small. so yesterday, the two of us went out to JCPenny's. we picked out a nice new pair of slacks, a new dress shirt, and a new tie. i tried things on and they looked great. after i finished up, we looked at suit coats on a whim, and my aunt decided to buy one for me, which was awesome. we then went over to the shoe department, and i picked out a really comfy pair of dress shoes. after we got back home, i tried it all on together. it looks fantastic. today i went back to buy a new belt, so now my suit is complete.

tomorrow i have a live interview at a software company in Mountain View. wish me luck!