Personal.X-Istence.com

Bert JW Regeer (畢傑龍)

Late nights and Interviews

244 is a Hardware Studio if you are to believe the sign outside of the door, however really it is just an empty workspace/lab where individuals such as myself can sit down and start doing work, or procrastinate. It is open 24/7. Every Saturday a group of ex and current students from UAT gather in the lab and sit down together to work on various projects and to just have fun. We off course have our very own resident pizza connoisseur, and everyone adds to a large pot of cash so that at around 10 PM we all get some of the best pizza available around town.

Last night was another of such nights. Some people were playing MW2, others were working on Java/C# homework and I was working on my next project. My next project is rather interesting in that it has required research on my part as to how to accomplish what I want safely. Being in the lab surrounded by people also working generally gets me working on my projects as well. I've got a general layout of the electronics involved in my head, and I know what I need to do it safely, so now I need to start gathering the parts, sampling certain chips from manufacturers and sourcing other parts that I can't sample.

All of my research gets collected in various locations, right now most of it is still in my bookmarks bar, which is starting to overflow so much that it is becoming a useless tool, I've been trying to look for a tool that can help me organise my projects far more efficiently and in a way that will allow me to add notes to web pages, or at least to links.

My phone screens with the large company I mentioned in my previous post went okay. The first phone screen I was extremely nervous and was unable to really understand the guy on the other because of a bad phone connection (It was his end, my phone had full signal strength). Not only that, but I felt that he wasn't really interested and I couldn't get a good vibe from him. I was so nervous my brain melted together multiple programming languages to create a mish-mash of crap that wouldn't compile unless you happened to write a parser that could take JavaCPythonJavaScriptRubyC++Scheme syntax. If you have done so, well kudos to you! The second phone screen went much better, this interviewer was interested in my Near-Space balloon launches which helped ease my mind, and while on the interview he was able to give me feedback, tell me a little bit about himself and just in general provide some banter while I was trying to program which really helped. Hopefully they average the two of them out, and I get a passing grade. Now the waiting game starts all over though, so I hope to hear back from them within the next week. I really hope I didn't screw it up for myself.