One thing I forgot to mention in Part 1 of The Interview was that the question doesn’t need to be reserved for technical oriented interviews. Playing with the wording a little bit, allows the question to be suited to just about any type of position. I used this same question technique when I was asked to cross-interview designers for instance. I could see it easily being applied to project managers and many other job types.
The Interview (Part 1)
August 29, 2008
So for those that don’t *really* know me, I tend to be a bit of an introvert (ok, ok, for those that *really* know me, a lot of an introvert), and can have some pretty geeky tendencies at times. But I think the subject matter of this post could be useful to both introverts and extroverts, geeks and non-geeks. I plan to break this entry up into two posts:
- The Professional Interview
- The Social Interview
Now, for the geeks amongst you, drop the “Web 2.0″ definitions of “Social.” That’s not what this is about. This is more of an experiment in sociology then anything else. Anyhow, let’s go ahead and get into the meat of what I’m writing about.
It all centers around this basic question: Read More
The 5 and dime
August 24, 2008
This past Saturday, I did my first real day trip on my motorcycle and it was a lot of fun. Apparently the route I took is called the “5 and dime” by certain people. Basically you take VA State Route 5 (Main St) out of Richmond, head down to the Jamestown Ferry, then proceed through Surry, VA and then come back up VA State Rt 10. Here’s a basic map of where I went (click image to see the route in Google Maps):
Anyhow, I really enjoyed it. I didn’t get a chance to take tons of pictures (obviously that would be a little difficult while driving), but when I was on the ferry between Jamestown and Surry, I met up with a group of nice guys out on an even longer day trip (basically they’d come up from almost North Carolina). It was sort of funny because I pulled up next to them (8-10 Harley’s) on the ferry and as soon as I cut off my engine one of them came over and asked how I was doing, if I was having fun on my ride, etc. Great group of guys. He saw I had a camera and asked if I wanted a picture taken of me with my bike, which I appreciated:
Check out my other photo’s from the trip/ferry ride if you’d like. There are some pretty neat ones. They had one of the recreated ships sailing on the James and I got some pictures of the bikes from that group I met on the ferry as well. Hopefully I’ll get better about taking more pictures when I pull over for pit stops, etc.
I am a Web Developer located in Richmond, VA. Primarily, I work on the back-end of websites utilizing my database and desktop application coding experience from the past to achieve desired results for the user interface. Recently however I have started moving more into the UI realm, utilizing JavaScript and AJAX to allow for better performance out of the back-end systems.
Installed Disqus comments
Disqus has released a new version of their plugin which overcomes some of my concerns about using the service.
A brief bit of background. Disqus is basically a robust commenting system. It allows for threaded comments (replying to specific comments, better facilitating conversation within comments), it allows for community moderation of comments (if someone leaves an idiotic comment, you can vote it down, after x number of votes down, it will be diminished), and it allows you to track threads that you’ve commented on easily either by subscribing to receive updates, or if you make a Disqus account, you can see all the blogs you’ve been commenting on (blogs that use disqus at least).
So anyhow, they’ve had most of this functionality for awhile now. But my major ‘hang-up’ regarding the service was that if I used it here, the comments would no longer be stored in my blogs database (at least not from my understanding). So that means if I ever wanted to uninstall Disqus, or change services, then I’d lose all of those comments. That just sort of sucks if you ask me. One of the major reasons I host my own blog (vs. using tumblr or wordpress.com) is that I want to hold onto the content on my domain.
Anyhow, they changed that with the new WordPress plugin they released. It now gives all the great features of Disqus, and it sync’s comments with your blogs database. So now I get the best of both worlds. I know I don’t rake in the comments here, but still, it’s a cool tool and I’d like to support them. I’d also highly recommend any of my readers checking out the service and if you run a blog of your own, consider using Disqus to power the comments.
So why don’t you check out Disqus? :)