Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

...to septemberlilac and phoenixpdx!!!! Have a great one!!

Done yesterday (20120601 Fr)

In-person interview, at Tableau's Menlo Park office. Involved some whiteboard coding, which I'm not all that good at yet; hopefully I'll get the opportunity to do some more in Seattle. At least I'd spent some time beforehand reading the Java class library docs -- things have changed a lot since the last time I used it. Fortunately I'm still a quick study for programming languages.

Afterwards I went out shopping for printer ink and packing tape -- ended up getting the tape at Office Max, black ink at Fry's and color at Staples. :P

The house is filling up with boxes.

I have, somehow, acquired what appears to be a bone bruise on my left heel. Wearing shoes/boots fixes it, but ouch anyway. I don't *like* to wear shoes indoors.

The links in the notes below are almost all good. Dark chocolate cuts heart deaths -- Yay! Stuxnet, the worm that targeted Iran's nuclear facilities, was created by US and Israel -- duh. And I didn't know there was such a thing as wrap rage, but it doesn't surprise me.

( raw notes )

River: Round the Bend

It's going to be a bit of a wild ride here on the River. I seem to have been drifting for a long time. (I know, I've always viewed my journey downriver as a walk along the bank, but I can damned well mix my own metaphor if I want to.)

And I know that most of what I've written about under this tag has been relationships, friendship, and the care and feeding of geeks. But every once in a while, you have to change direction. And it's happening now.

Grand Central Starport is full of boxes now -- we're moving in less than two months. (How much less is, at present, a matter for some speculation.) I'm also changing jobs. What job I'm changing to is, at present, also a matter for speculation.

I believe I've mentioned alexithymia. I have it -- a difficulty detecting and identifying emotions and other mental states. I believe what's going on now is a mixture of anxiety and stress, mostly. And although I'm getting better at identifying and dealing with anxiety, stress is another matter.

Guess I'm going to learn.

I'm not sure exactly what went into the decision to move from the Bay Area to the Seattle area; economics (cost of living's 25% less) was only part of it. And certainly the fact that I have family and close friends there was a factor. But I don't think that's all of it. Both Colleen and I were ready for a change. Big change. As I said, we'd been drifting. 36 years in the same house, 19 years in the same job... one gets stale, somehow. Complacent.

And, yes, I've always taken the hobbit's view of adventures -- "Nasty, uncomfortable things. Make you late for dinner." It takes a certain amount of concentration to look at that big bend in the river coming up and look forward to finding out what's around it.

The house is full of boxes; we're moving from 1850 square feet of house and 1600 of garage, to a two-bedroom apartment (and some storage in Naomi's garage). The bookshelves have been ravaged. There's an apartment waiting for us in Lake Forest Park, empty of everything but major appliances and potentiality. Potential energy, soon to become kinetic energy.

Is that white water up ahead?