BEEP — still unceasingly — still inevitably BEEP! I gasped and struggled at each BEEP. I shrunk convulsively at its every BEEP. My ears followed its outward or upward whirls with the eagerness of the most unmeaning despair; they closed themselves spasmodically at the sound, although death would have been a relief, oh, how unspeakable! I still quivered in every nerve to think how slight a beeping of the machinery would precipitate that keen, glistening madness upon my bosom. It was hope that prompted the nerve to quiver — the frame to shrink. It was hope — the hope that triumphs on the server rack — that whispers to the death-condemned even in the dungeons of the Inquisition.
Boss: Add spaces here, here and here.
Dilbert: Ok, done.
[a few days pass]
Boss: Change the color here and add color to that thing over there
Dilbert: Ok, done.
[a few days pass]
Boss: Add lines so I’m less confused about where each thing ends.
Dilbert: Ok, done.
[a few days pass]
Boss: This looks very messy and unprofessional. Can you do something to it to make it simpler and use only two colors?
Dilbert: !!!
True story :(
Apple’s headquarters are in Cupertino, CA. Is someone there checking my site out?
I have traffic in my logs from 204.11.104.xxx - Unwired Ltd (wireless broadband in California), as well as from 64.124.85.xxx (Cambpell, CA, which is the town next to Cupertino).
I’ve also seen traffic in my logs from IP addresses owned by customers of Basis Technology…
—–Original Message—–
From: Michael Atlas
Sent: Friday, February 17, 2006 1:52 PM
To: Carl Hoffman
Subject: Oops!
I think I called you “Marc” in passing, my apologies!
—–Original Message—–
From: Carl Hoffman
Sent: Friday, February 17, 2006 2:24 PM
To: Michael Atlas
Subject: RE: Oops!
Bill,
You should see how often I make the same mistake.
Carl
On the X-Googler blog, Doug shares a hilarious story about interviews on Halloween day:
Another Googler did, in fact, tell me once about answering interview questions as Sergey, attired in a full-size cow suit, absentmindedly stroked his rubber udder. In retrospect, a roller hockey getup seems fairly formal by Google standards.
Starting January, I’ll be working for Basis Tech in Cambridge. Their office is a two-minute walk from Alewife on the MBTA, so I won’t have a car this time around and I can’t begin to say how happy I am to not have to pay for gas and insurance. I’ll be doing development and programming projects.
My new apartment is right next to Fenway Park (I can see Jillian’s from my bedroom window). Unfortunately it looks like I’m about .3 miles from the nearest greenline T stop, Hynes Convention Center, and .4 miles to Kenmore. Northeastern’s a .75 mile walk from the apartment. You can check out the location with Google Maps. For coop it will be nice not needing to be on campus, but I’ll probably have to get a bike once summer two semester starts and I’m back in classes again. The most exciting part about my first apartment is that I will be moving my furniture from home into it - my queen size bed, my glass desk, my glass shelves, my nice lighting…all the things that I can’t have in an on campus apartment, not mention the fact that I can paint my walls a color other than eggshell. I’m so tired of white walls and posters trying to cover them up.
I feels like I’m making a big step towards being independent - for real.
At a party last night, the girlfriend of a friend of mine kept telling people when I walked by her, “mikeatlas.com, I’ve seen that shit, it’s hot. mikeatlas.com, talented guy right here people. Photos, art, this kid’s crazy…” and so on. Kinda funny, but I kept saying to no avail, “But…all that art and web design is old, and not really a very good indication of who I am and what I do with my life right now. The most important part is really just the link to my resume!” But those words were drowned out by music and yelling and I realized nobody really cared about it anyway. Perhaps I should consider changing the focus of my site to promote who I am and what my objectives and interests are, rather than to draw attention to some of the webpages I’ve designed or the digital art I did back in high school.
I did some updates to my overall site design, replacing the cartoon with a real picture of me, as well as integrating in an iframe for my playlist instead of it spawning a new window. I suppose the last thing to do is integrate the blog into the theme so this doesn’t need to be in a new window. I probably won’t find time to bother doing that though.
For the first time since I’ve installed WordPress as my blogging tool on this site almost seven months ago, I started recieving comment spams to my entries. I know WP tries its best to hide known URLs but I’m sure there’s some web spiders out there crawling for default WordPress comment text in html pages, so it probably was inevitable that I’d end up being spammed eventually, but at least it took this long so far.
Anyways. I added a simple requirement for comments (for the few real ones I ever recieve anyway) that asks you to enter the word “notspam” into an additional input field. I have a feeling it should jam up any commentbot. Hopefully this is probably a good enough preventitive measure to prevent comment spam here, as I highly doubt and comment bots are sophisticated enough to adapt to unique input fields on specific blogs without human interaction to do the work.
I have a feeling my blog URL is now going to be shared on a “hit list” of WordPress blogs to spam (these things are traded just as gigabytes worth of email addresses are bought and sold on the black market to spammers). At least I know I should be able to implement a simple, dynamic input box requirement, such as simple math questions, like “Answer to X + Y = ?”, where X and Y are some random integer, and the form post handler will check to see if the user did the correct math. Thanks to Pete Lumbis for the idea.
Note to self: parse my resume for any of these words:
Aggressive, Ambitious, Competent, Creative, Detail-oriented,
Determined, Efficient, Experienced, Flexible, Goal-oriented,
Hard-working, Independent, Innovative, Knowledgeable,
Logical, Motivated, Meticulous, People person, Professional,
Reliable, Resourceful, Self-motivated, Successful, Team player,
Well-organized
They are Résumé-Killers: Words or phrases with empty meaning in resumes that don’t add any value to your description.
BoingBoing posts about Northeastern University
After Xeni Jardin faked alumnus status at Stanford to get access to The Facebook, she explored and came up with commentary on the site. Asking to be added as her friend, I did so as a faithful BoingBoing reader should do. I have a feeling she did look at my profile, as well, since her article in the LA Times about the Facebook mentions the Oregon Trail interest group I belong to on my Facebook account (that exists only at the NEU Facebook). In any case, Northeastern’s documentary video on the Facebook also made a special mention. Check it out.
