WynApse

Rant warning... just click on to the next!

I don't know why I punish myself sometimes... I mean I'm *not* looking for a job, I'm *not* looking to leave where I am. It's a good 'showup job' as my buddy Steve says, and close enough to the technology edge that it feels good, not to mention it pays well. The only negative is the hour+ it takes to drive 27 miles on the Outer Loop.

After some email banter back and forth with some Silverlight guys, I kinda/sorta backed myself into a phone interview that took place Friday afternoon.

If you don't know me, I'm 59. I've been doing lots of software for a long time. I generally tend only to keep in easily accessible cache those things that I'm doing right now.

But... nowadays interviewers don't ask about concepts or things that would show how you can think on your feet. Instead the questions they ask fall into these 4 categories:

• Crap I've never heard of -- those were easy "I don't know"
• Crap I've heard of and have no clue what they are -- again pretty easy
• Crap I've used and totally forgotten -- either you take a swag or say you forgot, either way isn't good :)
• Crap I'm currently doing, but the explanation obviously isn't satisfying everyone

At least one of my answers I thought was clever... when asked how I would do xyz I said I'd grab some code from the last time I did it... dang isn't that how we all program?

Yeah... I know these serve a purpose... they weed out the folks like the idiot I worked with that had to come ask me how to null out a null-terminated string.. but she kept getting jobs because she was hot.

They also weed out folks that can really do the work but either aren't hot, or don't have a photographic memory or the damn thing is out of film... I think I ran out of film in the 80's :)

They didn't come right out and vote me off the Island, but the guy asking all the lab notebook questions left his phone unattended long enough that it started beeping and they had to go hang it up or something, so I took that as a sign :)

Like I said, Thank God I have a job... and I hope it stays productive and viable until I go out of scope.

Oh hey guys... that was an OOP comment! ... hmmm it's probably too late!

Silverlight Firestarter/MIX

I've had a few people ask why I wasn't at the Silverlight Firestarter in Redmond. Then I find that these guys actually had their company pay for them to go! .. wow .. I didn't know companies did that. I've worked as an Engineer with a Master's Degree since January of 1977, and not once in 30 years and 11 months have I ever been to anything like that courtesy of my company.

And these same guys are also going to MIX courtesy of their company...

Wonder if it's because of all the crap I can't remember ??

All I have to say is the day you see my name associated with an organization other than WynApse, you'll know that somebody finally coughed up some cash for me to attend something either without having to take vacation time, or because the entry fee was paid.

Silverlight 2.0

On a more positive note, and hey, what else can you do?? ... 2.0 is coming down the line. I've never said I didn't want to do Silverlight with .NET, there was just a lot of 1.0 to go around. We're coming up on a year I've been working with WPF/E and then SL 1.0 bits, and soon it's going to be time to get moving on.

I've cleaned up my workstation: Removed VS 6, the associated MSDN and the Platform SDK, I removed VS2003 and the associated MSDN. I left VS2005 on there, and have VS2008 onboard. WynApse.com has been running for a week on a build from VS2008, so that appears to be working fine.

I've got lots of SL Ideas that require data, and just maybe some of those will be pushed to 2.0 ... we'll see, I think fun stuff awaits!

Have a great Sunday, cuz tomorrow it all begins anew :)