Saturday Morning

Saturday Morning

I love Saturday Mornings. I like it when I can just relax for a while. Dear readers I have to confess I am one of the weirdest people in the world. I am strange indeed, I could blame it on the Marines, Iraq, or my engineering education. But it would be a lie, I am just different. Why am I warning you? Because I am about to make a statement that will make you go huh?

I love to clean up.

I know, I know, but it's so relaxing and I like to sit back after the house it's picked up and enjoy how it looks. I am not a neat freak, like anyone that was my roomate in the Marines can atest. But, I don't like messyness. As you can imagine our house it's not always in the best state of cleaningness. We get up early to go to work and school and when we get back Martha is too tired to do anything and I have too much homework to do anything else. But on the weekend I try to pick up a bit.
So there, I said it. So what.

Yesterday my sister gave me a great gift. Kurt Vonnegut's A Man without a country. I read most of it last night and the last few pages just now. I don't agree 100% with him but it's awesome to read his stuff, I would love to have a converstation with that man. I can tell that WWII affected him a lot, I can relate, in a smaller scale. I wish I can just write why I liked it. But is the feeling I get that we all ask ourselves the same questions, some people act like they have it figured out, some do not. But at the end. None of us know a damn thing. We just got here. "Life is no way to treat an animal". "Do you think arabs are dumb? they gave us our numbers, try doing long division with roman numerals". Great quotes from the book.

My first Wikipedia edit

I added a pic and a paragraph to the entry on Ramadi. It's not much, but it gave me some satisfaction that I made some contribution to the World's Free Encyclopedia.

Thursday was a very long day

So Thursday Morning I woke up at 3:30 AM to get ready for a big day. I left home at 4:15, drove myself to the Ft. Lauderdale Airport, caugth the 6:00AM flight to JFK airport in NYC, on the plane I tried reviewing everything I was taught about software engineering at FAU, I tried to memorize pieces of code and concepts, I was very scared. I arrived at 8:40, at 8:45 I was outside the airport trying to catch a cab. the line was extremely long. Then I met Juan.

Juan was a cab driver from the Dominican Republic driving an old Black Town car, I don't know if it was legit taxi or not, but he just asked me I was going to the city and I was in a hurry so I said sure, no problem ( you got to understand there was long line to catch a yellow cab ) So Juan and I talked about life, life in NY, the Mets, Venezuela and Hugo Chavez, how nice it is down in Florida and everything else in between, one hour and twenty minutes later I was in the southern tip of Manhattan in the Financial District walking around in a blue suit amongst a bunch of stock tradin' cowboys. I entered the tallest building in the area and I was very scared.

So I called Martha, but she was at work and could not answer. I called my sister next and she made me feel better. Finally I went up to the 3rd Floor where HR resides and I threw myself in the pool of sharks. Overall it wasn't bad, first there was an orientation, there were 20 candidates competing for I don't know how many positions they had, there were 4 kids from MIT, 5 from Cornell, One from Stevens, One from Purdue, One from the University of Florida, one dude from FAU (me) and the rest were from NYU. So after the orientation we had lunch and a discussion panel with recent hires in the firm. After which we had some sort of Logic Symbolic Processing test, it was some sort of IQ test, I only got to question 28 out of 40 when time ran out. So I don't know how well I did. After that we had a group activity where they split us in groups of 4 and put us in a room to perform a task as a team, I remember those from ROTC and the Crucible in the Marines. But never with 4 people with clipboards evaluating you. Then I had a professional interview and two technical interviews one after the other. They were not as hard as I thought they would be, but they asked me about everything. Operating System, Network, Object Oriented Programming, Computer Architecture, after that. Dinner and farewell, the day went by fast, it was 6:00pm by the time I was done. I wanted to go to a Barnes and Noble and get a good book to read on the flight back, but suddenly I felt very tired, however I didn't want to just go back to the Airport, so I decided to walk around NY for a couple of hours, I didn't know that part of Manhattan too well, so I ended up walking up to where the World Trade used to be. Ground zero they call it. Then I cought the A train to Howard Beach station and the Air train to the Airport. One the subway ride I saw New York in a different light. Too crowded, Too Dirty, people too mean. But maybe it was my tiredness. Truth is, it's an awesome job. I think I did good but I'll find out next week.

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Well, I rambled long enough. It's time for me to go. I have a family function to attend. More later.

J.V.