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robotech_masterWell, yesterday was an eventful day.
On Monday, I spoke to a recruiter who wanted me to come in for an interview. The office was on the far north end of Indianapolis, only half a block away from the Keystone Crossing mall and theater where I saw The Wind Rises a couple of weeks ago. Along the course of preparing for it, my brother Alex suggested I should make things easier on myself by renting a car to take me there.
I was skeptical at first, but then I checked out the prices and found I could get one for about $41 (after liability insurance and taxes, $61) from Hertz. It wasn't at all a bad price; what's more, this would mean I could combine the job interview with a number of other things throughout the day. So I ordered a car, then come 9:30 a.m. yesterday morning Alex dropped me off at Hertz to pick it up: a burgundy-colored Honda Civic. Not a bad little buggy.
Along with me, I brought this spiffy little gizmo: a combination instant mounting bracket, charger, and FM transmitter for my phone, so that I could use it for music and GPS along the way. This represented the first time I was ever to be able to use real GPS while driving anywhere. More on that later. It turned out I didn't need the FM transmitter part after all; when I paired the phone to the car with Bluetooth, it included streaming music capability, too. (Nice.)
Once I had my ride, I drove up the street to Chick-Fil-A and had me a spicy chicken biscuit breakfast meal. (I don't agree with CFA's corporate stance on some things, but those spicy chicken biscuits are just so darned good…) After that, I headed to the Meijer's next door to grab a couple of things, most notably beer (I was about out).
While I was pulling into Meijer's, I got a call—from a different recruiter, who had emailed me the day before. He had another position he wanted to talk to me about, which was downtown. I learned more about the position, expressed interest, and promised to zip off a resume and writing samples to him as soon as I got home. Then I headed over to Sam's to grab some snacks and, as it turned out, more beer. (There was a Sam Adams IPA 24-pack, reasonably priced.)
Got back to Alex's house about 11:30, at which point I knew I was going to need to hustle if I was to make it to the 2 p.m. interview on time. It was about a 45 minute drive. Luckily I had a resume nearly ready and writing samples ready from a previous application. I put them together and sent them off. Then I got into the new suit I'd gotten as a birthday present (hereafter to be referred to as my "birthday suit") and off I went at about 12:45.
The drive was uneventful except for a phone call I tried to answer but somehow missed. They didn't leave a voicemail or call back, so I figured it must not have been too important. I arrived at the interview place at 1:30, went up to the office, and learned that they had wanted to reschedule the interview because they had accidentally double-booked. (Turned out that was probably what that missed call was about.)
However, since I was there anyway, the fellow went ahead and talked to me for a while, giving further details about the position. I think I impressed him; I asked a few good questions about specific details of the position that showed I had been listening and was thinking about it. After that, I spoke to the recruiter who had asked me to come in. She was a very nice and helpful lady, and she even gave me a couple of potential leads for other sources of tech writing contracts in the Indianapolis area that I might look into if this one didn't pan out. She wanted to know about other opportunities I might be looking into, and I mentioned there was one, and she asked that I keep her informed about how it worked out.
I was finished at about 2:30, so I checked showtimes for movies at the art theater. There was one I wanted to see, but its next showing wasn't until 5:15, so I had some time to kill. I went back over to the mall, wandered into the Tesla dealership and rubbernecked at the neat-o electric cars for a bit, then went upstairs to the Microsoft store. A sales clerk there was delighted to show me all the awesome Windows 8 tablets, and I watched another sales clerk playing a Kinect jet-ski racing game, holding her hands out in front of her and leaning back and forth to control the ski.
At that point, it occurred to me that I was in the same general area as a Fry's Electronics, a place where I had never been before. I'd hoped Alex might take me there sometime, but given that it was about 25 miles away from home it didn't seem too likely to be soon. Now, though…I had my chance! So I returned to the car, asked my Waze GPS app to show me how to get there, and off I went.
Driving with GPS was an amazing experience. Before, the closest thing I'd had to it while I had a car was Google Maps for my iPad and iPod Touch…which would show directions and location, but wouldn't tell me aloud where to turn. So driving was an exercise in trying to divide my attention between the road and the map, and hoping I didn't miss the turn. But with Waze, all I had to do was type in the name of the store, it would find it, and then show me how to get to it. (I could have used Google Navigate, too, but Waze does the whole gamification thing, and uses crowdsourcing to report possible traffic hazards.) And I didn't even have to keep looking at it all the time; it would prompt me well ahead of time to get ready to turn.
Some people, like my Dad, find that kind of prompting distracting and off-putting, but for me it was reassuring. I literally didn't have to worry about where and when to turn. I didn't even have to know where on the overall map the place was. I just saw how far away it was, and how long it would take me to get there, then I followed the instructions. It was an amazing experience, and it removed a lot of stress and uncertainty from the trip.
Fry's was amazing. If you've never been to one, imagine a computer, electronics, and media store the size of a large Sam's Club. It was immense! I felt like I needed a compass, a machete, and a native guide. And it had a lot of stuff. After looking around for a while, I just wanted to BUY ALL THE THINGS. In the end, I spent about an hour there, picking up a few small little gimmicks I'd been wanting for a while—a cheap HP Bluetooth mouse to use with my Nexus tablet (on sale for $15), a $30 Motorola Bluetooth earpiece for my phone (it was 50% off its normal $60, so it was a steal), another USB wifi card to see if it works any better with my laptop, and a couple pairs of capacitive-screen-compatible gloves. (Funny how you see those everywhere now. It wasn't so long ago the only way to get them was to make them yourself.)
After I was done there, I was starting to get hungry, and I wanted some kind of dinner I wouldn't have to worry about slopping onto my expensive suit, shirt, or tie. Pizza seemed like the order of the day. So I told Waze to find me a pizza place, and chose one with a high star rating and a name that sounded good: Wise Guys Pizza. And Waze took me there! The pizza place was great; $10 got me three large cheese breadsticks and dipping sauce, plus a personal-sized pizza. By the time I had (very carefully) eaten the breadsticks, I was full enough that I could only eat 1/4 of the pizza! (I boxed up and brought home the rest of it, and had it for lunch today.)
While I was there, an email came in from the recruiter for that second job, the one I'd sent my resume and samples for. The client wanted to do a phone interview with me. We scheduled it for 11 a.m. today.
After that, it was getting on toward 4:45, so I had Waze guide me back to the movie theater. I made it in plenty of time for the movie, which was Tim's Vermeer. It was a remarkable movie.
You see, for 350 years, people have wondered how the Dutch Old Master Johannes Vermeer was able to paint his remarkable realistic images. Not only were they extremely lifelike and incredibly detailed beyond what any other painter was capturing at the time, but the use they made of light was only possible to get if you used a lens to capture the image precisely. And inventor Tim Jenison was convinced that was precisely what Vermeer did. The movie chronicles Jenison's several-year effort to reverse-engineer just how Vermeer did it, then prove it was possible for him to have done it that way by duplicating the effort and painting his own version of one of Vermeer's paintings.
And that's exactly what Jenison did. He built a duplicate of the studio set Vermeer painted. He learned how to grind a lens the way they did back in the 17th century. He set up a system of mirrors and lenses to duplicate what Vermeer must have done...and then he painted. Jenison was not an artist himself, but he didn't have to be—the lens rig he created made it almost as simple as painting by numbers. It nonetheless took him months of often agonizing detail work to complete the painting. It was an amazing story, and the wealth of detail demands a viewing on the big screen. The movie was narrated by Penn and directed by Teller of the stage magic duo Penn and Teller.
After the movie let out, I had the idea of swinging by Trader Joe's. They make some products you can't get anywhere else, and there aren't any of them near where my brother lives in Greenwood. It was another place I'd been wanting to go, but didn't expect Alex could take me. So—you guessed it—Waze to the rescue again! I picked up a number of their inexpensive 22 oz "Boatswain" brand beers, a couple boxes of their "Fiberful" granola bars, and—just for the heck of it—a bottle of "Two Buck Chuck" (well, "Three Buck" now, at $2.99) Charles Shaw red table wine.
Then there was one more place I needed to go to complete the trifecta: World Market, home of a zillion different international candy bars and other products. As it turned out, they were having a sale on >12 oz beers, so I snagged four of those too. (I'm not going to be running out for a while, clearly.) Also bought a number of different international candy bars, three boxes of Jammie Dodgers cookies (I was curious about them given their appearance in a Cory Doctorow novel), and then as I was almost ready to leave, I came upon their nostalgia sodas display and found, right there staring me in the face, Moxie.
Moxie was one of the first carbonated soft drinks, and is the actual source of the slang term "moxie" heard in countless gangster movies. Also, one of my friends says that his great grandfather actually invented the stuff. So I've been curious about it for a long time. I grabbed three bottles, and a bottle each of three other nostalgia sodas that looked interesting. Then it was time to head for home.
The drive back was just as uneventful as the drive in. I got home about 9:15, unloaded groceries, then parked the car outside. Got to bed about 11, woke up about 5, couldn't get back to sleep, so at 6:30 I drove the car back to Hertz, gassed up, and parked it, and Alex brought me back home again.
At 11, I spoke to the client, a very nice lady. We hit it off pretty well, and the position has a number of things to recommend it to me over the one I actually interviewed in person for. The upshot is, I'll be starting a short-term contract assignment on Monday, with potentially more to follow. Fingers crossed that this goes well!
Anyway, that's the story of my adventures yesterday. Looking forward with trepidation to this coming Monday. It's going to be a different, possibly difficult experience getting back into the harness…but this time it's finally going to be a job that makes full use of my talents. I can hardly wait.
On Monday, I spoke to a recruiter who wanted me to come in for an interview. The office was on the far north end of Indianapolis, only half a block away from the Keystone Crossing mall and theater where I saw The Wind Rises a couple of weeks ago. Along the course of preparing for it, my brother Alex suggested I should make things easier on myself by renting a car to take me there.
I was skeptical at first, but then I checked out the prices and found I could get one for about $41 (after liability insurance and taxes, $61) from Hertz. It wasn't at all a bad price; what's more, this would mean I could combine the job interview with a number of other things throughout the day. So I ordered a car, then come 9:30 a.m. yesterday morning Alex dropped me off at Hertz to pick it up: a burgundy-colored Honda Civic. Not a bad little buggy.
Along with me, I brought this spiffy little gizmo: a combination instant mounting bracket, charger, and FM transmitter for my phone, so that I could use it for music and GPS along the way. This represented the first time I was ever to be able to use real GPS while driving anywhere. More on that later. It turned out I didn't need the FM transmitter part after all; when I paired the phone to the car with Bluetooth, it included streaming music capability, too. (Nice.)
Once I had my ride, I drove up the street to Chick-Fil-A and had me a spicy chicken biscuit breakfast meal. (I don't agree with CFA's corporate stance on some things, but those spicy chicken biscuits are just so darned good…) After that, I headed to the Meijer's next door to grab a couple of things, most notably beer (I was about out).
While I was pulling into Meijer's, I got a call—from a different recruiter, who had emailed me the day before. He had another position he wanted to talk to me about, which was downtown. I learned more about the position, expressed interest, and promised to zip off a resume and writing samples to him as soon as I got home. Then I headed over to Sam's to grab some snacks and, as it turned out, more beer. (There was a Sam Adams IPA 24-pack, reasonably priced.)
Got back to Alex's house about 11:30, at which point I knew I was going to need to hustle if I was to make it to the 2 p.m. interview on time. It was about a 45 minute drive. Luckily I had a resume nearly ready and writing samples ready from a previous application. I put them together and sent them off. Then I got into the new suit I'd gotten as a birthday present (hereafter to be referred to as my "birthday suit") and off I went at about 12:45.
The drive was uneventful except for a phone call I tried to answer but somehow missed. They didn't leave a voicemail or call back, so I figured it must not have been too important. I arrived at the interview place at 1:30, went up to the office, and learned that they had wanted to reschedule the interview because they had accidentally double-booked. (Turned out that was probably what that missed call was about.)
However, since I was there anyway, the fellow went ahead and talked to me for a while, giving further details about the position. I think I impressed him; I asked a few good questions about specific details of the position that showed I had been listening and was thinking about it. After that, I spoke to the recruiter who had asked me to come in. She was a very nice and helpful lady, and she even gave me a couple of potential leads for other sources of tech writing contracts in the Indianapolis area that I might look into if this one didn't pan out. She wanted to know about other opportunities I might be looking into, and I mentioned there was one, and she asked that I keep her informed about how it worked out.
I was finished at about 2:30, so I checked showtimes for movies at the art theater. There was one I wanted to see, but its next showing wasn't until 5:15, so I had some time to kill. I went back over to the mall, wandered into the Tesla dealership and rubbernecked at the neat-o electric cars for a bit, then went upstairs to the Microsoft store. A sales clerk there was delighted to show me all the awesome Windows 8 tablets, and I watched another sales clerk playing a Kinect jet-ski racing game, holding her hands out in front of her and leaning back and forth to control the ski.
At that point, it occurred to me that I was in the same general area as a Fry's Electronics, a place where I had never been before. I'd hoped Alex might take me there sometime, but given that it was about 25 miles away from home it didn't seem too likely to be soon. Now, though…I had my chance! So I returned to the car, asked my Waze GPS app to show me how to get there, and off I went.
Driving with GPS was an amazing experience. Before, the closest thing I'd had to it while I had a car was Google Maps for my iPad and iPod Touch…which would show directions and location, but wouldn't tell me aloud where to turn. So driving was an exercise in trying to divide my attention between the road and the map, and hoping I didn't miss the turn. But with Waze, all I had to do was type in the name of the store, it would find it, and then show me how to get to it. (I could have used Google Navigate, too, but Waze does the whole gamification thing, and uses crowdsourcing to report possible traffic hazards.) And I didn't even have to keep looking at it all the time; it would prompt me well ahead of time to get ready to turn.
Some people, like my Dad, find that kind of prompting distracting and off-putting, but for me it was reassuring. I literally didn't have to worry about where and when to turn. I didn't even have to know where on the overall map the place was. I just saw how far away it was, and how long it would take me to get there, then I followed the instructions. It was an amazing experience, and it removed a lot of stress and uncertainty from the trip.
Fry's was amazing. If you've never been to one, imagine a computer, electronics, and media store the size of a large Sam's Club. It was immense! I felt like I needed a compass, a machete, and a native guide. And it had a lot of stuff. After looking around for a while, I just wanted to BUY ALL THE THINGS. In the end, I spent about an hour there, picking up a few small little gimmicks I'd been wanting for a while—a cheap HP Bluetooth mouse to use with my Nexus tablet (on sale for $15), a $30 Motorola Bluetooth earpiece for my phone (it was 50% off its normal $60, so it was a steal), another USB wifi card to see if it works any better with my laptop, and a couple pairs of capacitive-screen-compatible gloves. (Funny how you see those everywhere now. It wasn't so long ago the only way to get them was to make them yourself.)
After I was done there, I was starting to get hungry, and I wanted some kind of dinner I wouldn't have to worry about slopping onto my expensive suit, shirt, or tie. Pizza seemed like the order of the day. So I told Waze to find me a pizza place, and chose one with a high star rating and a name that sounded good: Wise Guys Pizza. And Waze took me there! The pizza place was great; $10 got me three large cheese breadsticks and dipping sauce, plus a personal-sized pizza. By the time I had (very carefully) eaten the breadsticks, I was full enough that I could only eat 1/4 of the pizza! (I boxed up and brought home the rest of it, and had it for lunch today.)
While I was there, an email came in from the recruiter for that second job, the one I'd sent my resume and samples for. The client wanted to do a phone interview with me. We scheduled it for 11 a.m. today.
After that, it was getting on toward 4:45, so I had Waze guide me back to the movie theater. I made it in plenty of time for the movie, which was Tim's Vermeer. It was a remarkable movie.
You see, for 350 years, people have wondered how the Dutch Old Master Johannes Vermeer was able to paint his remarkable realistic images. Not only were they extremely lifelike and incredibly detailed beyond what any other painter was capturing at the time, but the use they made of light was only possible to get if you used a lens to capture the image precisely. And inventor Tim Jenison was convinced that was precisely what Vermeer did. The movie chronicles Jenison's several-year effort to reverse-engineer just how Vermeer did it, then prove it was possible for him to have done it that way by duplicating the effort and painting his own version of one of Vermeer's paintings.
And that's exactly what Jenison did. He built a duplicate of the studio set Vermeer painted. He learned how to grind a lens the way they did back in the 17th century. He set up a system of mirrors and lenses to duplicate what Vermeer must have done...and then he painted. Jenison was not an artist himself, but he didn't have to be—the lens rig he created made it almost as simple as painting by numbers. It nonetheless took him months of often agonizing detail work to complete the painting. It was an amazing story, and the wealth of detail demands a viewing on the big screen. The movie was narrated by Penn and directed by Teller of the stage magic duo Penn and Teller.
After the movie let out, I had the idea of swinging by Trader Joe's. They make some products you can't get anywhere else, and there aren't any of them near where my brother lives in Greenwood. It was another place I'd been wanting to go, but didn't expect Alex could take me. So—you guessed it—Waze to the rescue again! I picked up a number of their inexpensive 22 oz "Boatswain" brand beers, a couple boxes of their "Fiberful" granola bars, and—just for the heck of it—a bottle of "Two Buck Chuck" (well, "Three Buck" now, at $2.99) Charles Shaw red table wine.
Then there was one more place I needed to go to complete the trifecta: World Market, home of a zillion different international candy bars and other products. As it turned out, they were having a sale on >12 oz beers, so I snagged four of those too. (I'm not going to be running out for a while, clearly.) Also bought a number of different international candy bars, three boxes of Jammie Dodgers cookies (I was curious about them given their appearance in a Cory Doctorow novel), and then as I was almost ready to leave, I came upon their nostalgia sodas display and found, right there staring me in the face, Moxie.
Moxie was one of the first carbonated soft drinks, and is the actual source of the slang term "moxie" heard in countless gangster movies. Also, one of my friends says that his great grandfather actually invented the stuff. So I've been curious about it for a long time. I grabbed three bottles, and a bottle each of three other nostalgia sodas that looked interesting. Then it was time to head for home.
The drive back was just as uneventful as the drive in. I got home about 9:15, unloaded groceries, then parked the car outside. Got to bed about 11, woke up about 5, couldn't get back to sleep, so at 6:30 I drove the car back to Hertz, gassed up, and parked it, and Alex brought me back home again.
At 11, I spoke to the client, a very nice lady. We hit it off pretty well, and the position has a number of things to recommend it to me over the one I actually interviewed in person for. The upshot is, I'll be starting a short-term contract assignment on Monday, with potentially more to follow. Fingers crossed that this goes well!
Anyway, that's the story of my adventures yesterday. Looking forward with trepidation to this coming Monday. It's going to be a different, possibly difficult experience getting back into the harness…but this time it's finally going to be a job that makes full use of my talents. I can hardly wait.
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Date: 2014-03-20 08:47 pm (UTC)