Pastrami Dog?

I was driving home tonight and noticed a local Wienerschnitzel advertising a pastrami ... thing ... on a (hot dog) bun. This reminded of exactly one thing: being a kid, in high school or college, and scrounging through the kitchen looking for something to eat. All you find is some sandwich meat and some hot dog buns. There is no bread to make a proper sandwich, so what do you do? You used the hot dog buns. Now Wienerschnitzel has taken this masterpiece and turned it into a product.

Go Disney?

A friend of mine got the following email:

Dear Parent of Chris,
We're pleased to inform you that your teenager has registered with us
and will now have access to the Internet sites of the
Walt Disney Internet Group ("WDIG") including Disney.com, ABCNEWS.com,
ABC.com, ESPN.com, FamilyFun.com and many more!

As a result, we want to make you aware of all of the information below:

1. Participation in WDIG Site Features. Now that your teenager is
registered with us, he/she can participate in all of the features we
make available on our sites to registered guests under the age of 18,
including games, sweepstakes, contests and interactive features on our
sites through which personal information can be made public to the
Internet and shared with users of all ages (i.e., "Public Forums").
// Random B.S. omitted

2. Terms of Use. Use of all WDIG Sites is governed by the
"Terms of Use" posted at the bottom of each WDIG Site.

The Terms of Use contain important provisions governing your, your
teen's and our rights including acceptable conduct on the WDIG Sites,
intellectual property rights (for example, our right to use
information, content and materials submitted to us by your teen) and
other rights available to you, your teen and us. We ask that you
read the Terms of Use and ensure that you understand them. If you
do not want you and your teen to be bound by these terms, you must
revoke your teen's registration. If you revoke your teen's
registration, your teen will not be able to access any portions of
the WDIG Sites that are made available only to registered guests.

Click below to view the Terms of Use:

http://disney.go.com/corporate/legal/terms.html

By not revoking your teen's registration, you agree that you and your
teen will be bound by the Terms of Use in connection with his/her use
of WDIG Sites and you agree to personally ensure that your teen
complies with the Terms of Use. (emphasis added)

If you want us to revoke your teen's registration, click below:

// link removed

How awesome is Disney! Under-age? No problem. Go ahead and register on their site. Then your parents will receive an email and have to read it and click on something to revoke your registration. Or better yet, just use a bogus email for your parents to remove the off chance of them actually reading the email and being responsible.

That is clearly the case here in fact. My friend has no children, so clearly some child picked a random email address that happened to be my friend's. Now if that child will start publishing plans to blow up buildings on a Disney forum page, my friend can be held responsible (per the Terms of Use.) Lovely!

99 Bottles of Beer

First off, if you like programming, you should check out this hilarious site on the venerable song 99 Bottles of Beer.

Ok, now I am assuming that you just spent the last hour or so at that website, but you are back. If you are into Java, one of the most interesting solutions is one that eschews typical control structures (for/while/do loops) and instead uses Java's exception system to sing the song. Actually the way that I came across the site was from an email sent by one of my colleagues. He was amused by the exception based solution. I was amused, too. Obviously such code will perform exceptionally bad (pun intended.)

One of my friends was inspired to do a Python variant that used the same technique:

#! /usr/bin/env python

class BottleException(Exception):
   def __init__(self, i, c):
       self.cause = c
       self.cnt = i
       try:
           a = 1/(99-i)
           raise BottleException(i+1, self)
       except ZeroDivisionError:
           pass

   def getCause(self):
       return self.cause

   def printStackTrace(self):
       print("%d Bottle(s) of beer on the wall, %d Bottle(s) of beer" % (self.cnt, self.cnt))
       print("Take one down and pass it around,")
       print("%d Bottle(s) of beer on the wall" % (self.cnt - 1))
       try:
           self.getCause().printStackTrace()
       except AttributeError:
           pass

try:
   raise BottleException(1, None)
except Exception, e:
   e.printStackTrace()

He and I are both pure hackers when it comes to Python, so there are probably numerous improvements that can be done to that code.

Update: I submitted the Python code to the 99 Bottles of Beer site and they accepted it. You can view it here.

Recruiting

Does anyone enjoy recruiting? Probably not. I've done a lot of recruiting in my career. I've read a lot of resumes, conducted phone screens, and of course interviewed countless candidates. After a while, you think you've seen everything. But every once in awhile, somebody comes along to prove to you that you haven't. I just had an experience like that.

The candidate started off harmlessly enough. Let's call the candidate in question Paul. Paul's resume came to me from a recruiter. His resume was kind of interesting. He had done a nice mix of Java and C++. His overall experience was ok, nothing too unusual. His education was also solid, if unspectacular. I see a lot of Java developers who don't know anything but Java, so the fact that he had done his share of C++ attracted me to him. I figured, what the heck, let's setup a phone screen.

The phone screen went ok. He clearly was unprepared for it and knew nothing about the company that was interested in him. That's a huge negative in my book. If somebody from a company is going to give you a call, you should at least do five minutes of research on the company and read their website. Now if the company doesn't have a site, ok, fine. Or if you read it and you can't comprehend it, that's fine too. But do your homework.

Paul wasn't the first candidate who had not done his homework, so I pressed on. I was immediately struck by his arrogance. He wanted me to sell him on my company before he would do anything else. Again this was unusual, but I usually give a "here's info on the company" diatribe at the end of an interview, so I just went ahead and did it at the beginning.

As things became more technical, Paul again did ok. His answers showed decent experience, though they were definitely lacking depth. I pushed for more detail on a few things, and again got mixed results. I moved on to a design question, and he actually did pretty good on that one.

So at this point, I had formed an opinion on Paul. He was a definite "maybe." I don't like to bring maybe's on-site. Bringing a candidate on-site meant a lot of people spending a lot of time to interview him and then discuss the results of the interviews. Luckily, I have an extra tool to use for maybes: a quiz. It's a simple quiz on programming fundamentals. It's often hard to drill down to fundamentals over the phone. This was the case with Paul, so the quiz was well suited for him.

The quiz is automated. I give the candidate an email address. They send an email to it whenever they feel like taking the quiz. It immediately sends the quiz back to them. They send their answers back. Everything is timed of course. That's key actually. The quiz is easy, but the speed that people are able to answer easy questions says a lot about them.

I told Paul about the quiz and asked him if he wanted to take it. He said ok, so I sent him the instructions for taking the quiz.

Last night as I was getting ready to go to bed, I received an email from Paul. In his email he said that he didn't have the time to take quizzes for every would-be suitor. He felt that his degree from an "acclaimed" (his words, certainly not mine) college should be enough to prove that he doesn't need to take a quiz. So if I wanted him to take the quiz, I would have to pay him $85.

I found this so funny that I almost didn't believe it was for real. I must admit, I have never heard of a job candidate who would demand money for being interviewed. What arrogance! What audacity! It's still almost too much to believe. And his reasoning? Because he went to an "acclaimed" college.

I know a thing or two about educational snobbery. I have been guilty of it myself because of where I went to college. I've never gone this far. For the record, Paul had a bachelor's degree from a public university. I won't say which one, but it's a huge school with over 50,000 students. There's a good reason why his education didn't jump out at me as anything special when I read his resume.

Anyways, I let Paul know that I would pass on his offer and wished him well in his job search.