April 2009 Archives

Ok, it's a fair cop - there is a good and rather obvious reason why companies give no feedback after interviews, especially companies from more litigious cultures than Britain. It just didn't occur to me at the time that it might be because they don't want to get sued for saying the wrong thing.

I still think it's a lousy policy. It's possible to give constructive feedback without being discriminatory, assuming of course (as I am assuming here) that discrimination isn't the reason. I can see why it's not allowed though - policy decrees coming from legal don't normally make allowance for social graces.

Of course, in my career I've become somewhat familiar with overzealous legal people making life difficult for everyone; it's really very easy for me to just transfer the blame straight to Counsel. I know they won't mind, or even notice.

I little while ago I was asked by Google to apply for a job. I learned today that I didn't get it. I was pretty excited about the idea of working there, and now I'm rather disconsolate about not getting in. It's not wholly unexpected, I flubbed parts of the interviews, but I thought I did ok. Apparently not ok enough.

Lots of others have written in expansive detail about their experiences, but instead I'm going to honour their (Google's) request to not discuss the interview process. I make one exception: They refused point blank to say why they said 'no' - it 'wasn't company policy'.

This isn't a question of policy. It's a question of politeness. I put a lot of time and trouble into the process, took time out of my work to travel abroad to see them, and quietly waited weeks for their recruitment person got back from holiday before getting refused. It's bad enough to not get the gig. To then be unable to get any explanation as to why is just plain rude.

I'm not trying to shoot the messenger here - if that really is the company policy, then it's the policy that sucks, and not the person following it. Still, I expected better. I am gutted I didn't get in; and I think it's a crying shame that my last experience of dealing with a great company like Google is to feel arrogantly dismissed.

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/video/2240924/bruce-schneier-cloud-security

The laser printer gets it, apparently.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2009/apr/24/gordon-brown-angry

I'm with Broon on this. Laser printers always deserve it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8015623.stm

To steal shamelessly from Douglas Adams: I am above criticising Microsoft in the same way that the sea is not above the clouds; but it's hard not to admire a company with 23 years worth of quarterly sales growth. Quite incredible.

I have a replacement PS3, my venerable launch-day PS3 expired. The extended warranty worked rather well, to be honest. I have a shiny new console, some new games, and some money left over. Can't complain about that.

However...

I had put a 320GB hard drive in the old PS3, and (naively) thought I would be able to slap it into the replacement model and go. Nuh-uh. Complete epic fail on boot. After waiting for something, anything to happen, I had to reformat and reinstall the OS image from a USB stick, then start the tedious reinstall process.

The last backup I had was from 21 January. Restoring it took about two minutes, which is easily explained: It only restored a fraction of my files. At least my game saves were there. None of my stored games were there, nor any of the updates, nor any of my Singstore purchases.

I can redownload the games. That's just a matter of time. Lots and lots of time. The Singstore stuff was harder, I had to call Sony and ask them pretty please if they would sort it out for me. Crap.

I think that it will take me a few days to get fully working again. Until then, every time I put a bloody disk in I get asked to wait for a hundreds-of-megabytes download. Then, when the update's downloaded and installed, more often than not I have to wait ages for the installation. What a royal pain in the arse.

Whilst ranting about installations: If a game as hench as Killzone 2 doesn't need to be installed to the hard drive, then neither should anything else. It's time PS3 developers stopped being lazy just because every PS3 has a hard drive. It sucks to have to upgrade the drive or ration your games due to lack of space on a 60GB disk.

And finally: What the hell is up with the installation time for Bioshock? It takes about 20 minutes, even on my superfast 320GB drive. Why? There's no excuse for that.

Since it wouldn't do for me to be wholly positive about something: NASA Embarks on Epic Delay

If Grace or good Karma allows, the space shuttle Atlantis will fly STS-125, the final servicing mission for the Hubble Space Telescope, on 12 May. I can't think of a better way to remember the shuttles than as the means by which Hubble showed us all the beautiful cosmos.

It's not something I know very much about, but I love the romance of the Apollo era and I have never been a big fan of the shuttles - I've always thought of them as unambitious and uninspiring. I was brought up short, though, by Gene Kranz, who said in a recent TV documentary that the shuttle was the best spacecraft America had built. If Kranz says it, I'm inclined to believe it.

The shuttles will forever be associated with the tragedies. It's easy to forget how brave these people really are; easy to forget that all the cleanrooms and careful inspection and safety procedures in the world aren't going to save you every time. These people know that the remains of two ships just like theirs have had to be reassembled piece-by-piece on a hangar floor, yet they still strap themselves to a tower of high explosives and go exploring. Brave, brave men and women.

So God speed, STS-125, and thank you.

The story itself is pretty interesting. The reason I'm linking to it is the fact that they say, without fanfare, that during the hijack, one of the hostages emailed his mother to tell her about it! I find that incredible. This guy's on a ship at sea, being held hostage, and he can send email. I couldn't send email from Dublin Airport last week, despite having a laptop + mobile broadband and a Blackberry.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/15/pirates-fail-ship-hijack

How much harder it will be to write good sea stories if people have connectivity during a hijack. Starbuck could have emailed the other shipowners and had them chill Ahab the fuck out, without unnecessary bloodshed. Denzel Washington could have emailed someone and asked if he still needed to launch the nukes, obviating an uncomfortable confrontation with Gene Hackman.

Still, I suppose it does make other stories possible. Hostages could use their iPhones to direct airstrikes. Hollywood gold!

www.videosift.com/video/British-vs-American-News-Anchors

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/12/david-mitchell-jonathan-ross-russell-brand

'Soul destroying' is a phrase I've used often. I don't think I've ever really felt the truth in it before - the soul is, after all, something that belongs to a God in whom I don't believe. 'Spirit crushing' is more visceral, less laden with religious baggage, and it sounds so good, at least when Ewan McGregor says it. You takes your cliché and makes your choice.

I've applied one or the other many times, to many different things. Never, in all that time, have I really felt like I meant it. I have hated things, from my head to my toes; and I've regretted things - boy, have I regretted things - but never could I really and truly say that I felt my spirit being crushed by external stimuli. Until now.

It has taken merely the prospect of a new, exciting job to show me the extent to which my existing work is constricting my soul/spirit. I may work in technology, but I believe that creativity is where you put your heart, and there's no heart going into anything at The Big Bank. With a few notable exceptions, I feel surrounded by people who have been round the block a few times too many, and been wrung out by the experience just a few times too often. I don't think they're bad people. I think they're tired people. Tired to the bone. Broken.

I am not going to let that happen to me. Whether or not this current opportunity pans out, I have to move on. Whether it takes ten minutes, six months or thirty years for the ship to sink, those left on the deck are committed to their fate.

As a serendipitous knock-on effect, this new job, should I get it, would involve a move some distance away from where I live today. The thought that that might actually happen quite soon was like removing a heavy backpack after a long walk.  It's not because there's anything wrong with it here (there isn't) and not because I don't have friends here (I do); it's because I can finally escape the shackles of my partner's divorce. In a new place, I will be far away from her pitiful ex-husband; in a new place, I'll no longer have to fume in silence as his kids are constantly disappointed by his selfishness and stupidity.

My partner doesn't have a cynical or spiteful cell in her body. I feel ashamed of my cynical nature when she is shocked at my interpretation of events involving her ex. Unfortunately for everyone, I am right more often than wrong. No matter how low I set my expectations, he falls short. Worst of all, after years of disappointment she is starting to arrive at the very same conclusions. She is becoming as cynical and jaded with the whole sorry show as I am, and that is so terribly sad.

So: For my sake, for the freedom of my spirit, for the integrity of my soul, for the win, for the fun of it, for ours and the common good, I need to get myself the bloody hell outta here as fast as my career will carry me. As one of my favourite antiheroes Nick Succurso might have said: Now would be good. Sooner would be better.