Smattering of Advice

Actually, the advice I'm referring to is mainly for programmers, but the first piece pertains to all college students. Business Week has a list of the top 10 goofs that interns often make, and I can vouch for all of them being pretty bad. So if you're still preparing for that first internship then that's pretty much a must read. One of the lesser known tips is to go to office social events rather than stick around and work because those things can be really important and it may not impress them for you to decline the invitation. The first step though is getting the position, and a Google employee put up her top tips for preparing for an interview in software engineering, which I still thing is the hardest industry to interview in. I don't know that EE majors have to write drivers or draw circuit designs in their interviews, but we're held accountable for our coding knowledge. It's definitely important to prepare properly though, so I encourage fellow CS majors to read it carefully. The last article I found that I felt was pretty useful goes on my common theme of writing reusable code. His 10 tips are pretty basic, but they really can help out immensely. For further fun reading, check out The Pragmatic Programmer.

One more article for the programmers out there: you should read this if you're confused about functional programming or only know of it on a surface level. To the right here is the black DS Lite as revealed by an employee at a game store in the UK. I had no idea that this had even been made, but apparently it'll be launching in Europe this Friday. It looks like black may be the new white. If you ever wondered what search engines, platforms, and browsers some of the biggest tech players use, then you'll get a kick out of this. It looks like all but Yahoo use Google the most for searching, and only Microsoft employees use IE primarily. Speaking of Firefox, there's a neat printable cheat sheet over here, which I feel is important because any computer geek will tell you that he saves a ton of time with keyboard macros that help him reduce mousing (I actually first heard that term at TI) time. Microsoft is planning to embed Live services in Windows programs, which sounds like they're just trying to support online authentication through your Live ID. Still, I don't see how this would be any more secure than good old encryption, but I'm no expert, just skeptical of this plan. Lastly, if you like magic eyes then you'll love this animated one. I have no idea how that guy made it, but I'd love to see more like it because I used to always buy magic eye books when I was just a tyke.

I neglected to mention it yesterday, but reviews of the new Blu-Ray discs are out there if you really care. It sounds like the worse movies transferred better onto high-definition. AICN's Vern has laid his eyes on The Sciences of Sleep and he enjoyed it. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, you can see the trailer now. I can't make much sense of the trailer since my Internet sucks, but Vern describes a movie that definitely piques my interest. Joss Whedon is still hard at work on the script for Wonder Woman, and I'm glad to see how much effort he's really putting into it. I don't personally care about that series, but if he can make a movie that makes a believer out of me then I'm sure he can make one out of anyone, and he's clearly talented enough to do so. To conclude, I have a couple of new posters. The first is the French version of the Snakes on a Plane, which isn't all that special except that the title sounds so much more dramatic in French. The other one is the final Clerks 2 poster, which really just combines some of the group character ones from earlier this month. Obviously I'm still enamored with how Rosario Dawson looks in it.

I'm going to go with the Tuesday Twosome this week:

1. Do you possess any family heirlooms, and if so, what two heirlooms do you value the most:
Not really. I think my mom keeps some important stuff from my christening in my drawer, but that's about it. I really only treasure the few things my grandmother gave to me like a rosary and scapular.

2. Did you have a childhood hide-out, and if so, describe it:
Just my room. My neighborhood wasn't safe enough for me to create a hide-out of my own, so I just called my room sanctuary since it had locks on the doors (there was a bathroom connecting my room to my brother's).

3. Describe your relationship with your immediate family and how it makes you feel:
It's much better with my brother than with my parents. I just wish my brother wouldn't close himself off to me sometimes. I can tell that there's stuff he doesn't want to tell me because I'm younger than him, and so that causes me to keep things from him, too. I'm on good terms with my parents and all, but it's not like we do a lot of stuff just the three of us. I do sometimes talk to my mom late night, but I don't really talk to my dad about a whole lot of stuff other than like my education and job and car and stuff.

4. Do you and/or your family do anything for the needy, and if so, explain:
We just give donations to the special collections at church. I do volunteer stuff through clubs at school, but it doesn't involve my family.

5. Did you have a close relationship(s) with any of your grandparents? Describe your relationship(s):
Well, only one of them was alive, and that was only until I was 12 so I didn't quite get her yet. She was a very strange person and very needy of attention being so alone. I still feel bad that I wasn't as close to her as I should've been, but I was young and stupid; what can I say. I sure wish my dad's parents were alive though, because they sound like they were pretty awesome people, especially if they raised my dad to be the way he is.