Google gets its tubes installed

All that traffic requires large tubes.

Interview

A week ago today I got an email almost out of the blue from a company I applied for a job with this summer. I have a phone interview for this job in an hour.

I got somewhat dressed up, since that seems like a good idea when you have an interview of any kind, went to work this morning, make a ton of spreadsheets, had coffee, felt nervous, came home, didn’t want to be dressed up anymore, changed, had some lunch, and now I am drinking tea and Digging.

I have never interviewed with a company like this before, so this will be interesting.

If you know where I live and you follow geek news, you probably know the company I mean.

Stay tuned.

Update: Back to the drawing board.

Online communities

I’m not really into the social networking scene online. You will never see me within a hyperlink’s breadth of MySpace or Friendster or any of those, if I can help it. However, I have been a Farker, and lately I have been Digging. I’ve also signed up for Ze Frank’s The Org, partly just because I love Ze and the site is really beautiful. I also use Flickr, but I have not joined any groups or pools or whatnot.

Basically, if I’m going to join an online community, it needs to have a purpose other than, well, what MySpace is for, for example. I haven’t been on Fark for a long time, and toward the end I really hung around just in the Forum, not on the news threads, but being a Forumite is demanding.

Digg is good for me right now because I can just come and go; it provides a nice clean bookmarking system that I can come back to, and there’s sometimes some good conversation. The highly democratic nature of what makes it to the front page is good too. There are some “friend” functions that I haven’t used yet, but right now I’m just enjoying what the site does at its core. And there are cool little JavaScript widgets like the one you now see at the bottom of the sidebar.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m trying hard to maintain relationships and friendships in the real world right now, and enjoying making friends with people in real like that were acquaintances before. Whether I keep in touch through online means or not, and I’ve always found that difficult in itself. Leftovers of my socially awkward youth, I guess.

However, I have no problem with people wanting online friends. Right now I just feel a bit like Audrey Hepburn’s character in Charade: “I already know an awful lot of people and until one of them dies I couldn’t possibly meet anyone else.”

That said, if you do use any online social networking softwares that you like, I’m open to suggestions. (And you can find me on Digg and The Org as viscousplatypus, of course.)