100 things, the first part

Most of you have probably seen the web meme or emails going around where people list 100 things about themselves. I always find these to be charming, but I also generally want more information. Over the past several months, I've thought of a few things that I would share. They almost never stop at one sentence, and sometimes they're not completely about me. Therefore, I have decided that I will spill out 100 things, a few at a time. This has the added benefit of providing more fodder for blog posts, which I think we can all agree are sorely lacking around here.

Of course, now that I've started this blog post, I've completely forgotten whatever things I once thought I would write about. I guess we'll just have to see what comes to mind...

1. I am always skeptical when people start sentences with, "I'm the type of person who..." Where this skepticism comes from is not entirely clear to me, but I usually like to get my sense of a person by observation and not by what bits they choose to tell me about. I think it's one reason I've resisted doing a list like this for so long -- what are you really going to know about me at the end of it? And how much do I want you to know anyway? Who are you? (Not you, Mom and Dad, I know who you are. Which raises another question -- how much do I want my parents to know?)
2. I'm the type of person who can watch a TV commercial and end up hating Klondike bars forever. Seriously, they've got these ads now that suggest we should reward men for not being assholes. The announcer says, "Dan actually listened to his wife's story. Give that man a Klondike bar." Fuck you, Dan, and fuck Klondike bars.
3. I have tried several times -- unsuccessfully -- to clean up my language. I do appreciate eloquence and to some extent, I agree with the notion that swearing can make a person seem less intelligent. But there's something so efficient about a good curse word every now and again. I also have a philosophical problem with the notion that anybody ever made up a word you're not allowed to say. What's up with that?

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Why does my porch light burn out bulbs so quickly?

I have searched for an answer on this several times over the past six months and never came up with the real answer. Because my porch light burns out bulbs faster than you can say, "I dropped my keys." On some of the forums Google returned when I searched for answers, people suggested that vibrations would cause bulbs to burn out (doesn't hold up for the compact fluorescents, though, and we've burned through those in less than a month). I was fairly convinced that the suggestion to check for a loose neutral connection would be our "ah ha" moment, but that wasn't it. There were all sorts of suggestions from the harebrained to the absurd and none of them applied to my porch light.

Yesterday, we had an electrician out to give us an estimate on upgrading the service into the house so Jesse can eventually weld things in the garage. As he was leaving, I mentioned the porch light problem. He was half way down the porch steps and without so much as looking at the fixture, said "Oh, that's easy. Someone put too big a bulb in there at some point and burnt out the fixture." And that's it. Within ten seconds, the mystery of the porch light was resolved.

I am hoping that other people who have light bulbs burning out too frequently might end up on this humble blog post and therefore find their own burnt-out bulb problem resolved more quickly than I did. Because replacing light bulbs every few weeks is a huge pain in the rear. Especially when you drop your keys as often as I do.

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Something I once said turned out to be true

Job hunting, as we all know, sucks. It's one of those things that most of us wind up having to do at some point, and most of us would rather not do. One thing I've tried to keep in mind whenever I've been on the hunting end is that time moves far more slowly for the hunter than for those that do the hiring. It turns out, it's totally true. We are trying to fill a new position at work AND get out multiple releases for multiple customers and keep everyone happy and our code bug free or at lease respond to bugs and... well.

We've gotten several resumes, but have not actually called anybody in the last two weeks, although my boss did just email our most likely candidates today. There were a couple of people who seemed to have actually read the job posting and matched their skill set to what we are looking for.

At any rate, this is just to confirm for anybody who is or ever will look for a job: what seems slow to you is not slow at all to the people who are trying to fit resume-reading into their already overworked schedules. They also have to filter out all the spam and the other spam and the myriad people who a) want to help you hire someone in India or b) are in India or c) have an H1B Visa and are trying not to get deported back to India. (Seriously, India comes up a lot when you're hiring a developer). Remember, in all likelihood, they're at least one employee short if they're hiring, and are therefore probably a bit busier than you. They're certainly less focused on finding you a job.

Oh, and if you know anybody who is looking for a web development job (mostly front end, with an eye toward learning back end) in Portland, let me know. We've got lots of work to do.

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