Well, I'm not sure if this is real progress or not, but at least they're not bothering with their own Linux distribution anymore.
I still wonder if Sun really gets Linux or not. When they announced the LX-50, I thought they'd finally come around. But that wasn't the first of many things I hoped to see.
Oh well.
Maybe they're just destined to become the next SGI.
I'm sitting here in the waiting area while some work is being done on my car. It'll only take about 1.5 hours, so it's not worth taking their shuttle to work and trying to find someone to bring me back here at the end of the day.
I popped open the TiBook and checked to see if AirPort could find a wireless network I might be able to leach. No dice. (Obviously, I'll be posting this a bit later.)
Considering how inexpensive it'd be, I'm sort of surprised that the dealership doesn't have 802.11b available for customers in the waiting area. This is Silicon Valley, after all. Let's show some geek pride here! :-)
I shouldn't complain, though. The service department here rocks. Plus, sitting in the waiting area with no network connection pretty much forces me to work on the book--something I've had trouble finding enough time to do this week. Too many distractions and unexpected things kept popping up.
Now if only I had bothered to install MySQL on the TiBook, I wouldn't have to keep writing "TODO: insert SQL here later" in the text.
Later: Grr. Apparently my car has decided that a leaky radiator is more fun than one that holds onto all the coolant. I'll have to arrange for another visit soon so that I can part with $700 or so. As the first major expense in the three years I've had it, that's not too bad I guess.
Now that I think about it, the radiator replacement will probably take three hours or so. Maybe I'll just force myself to sit in the waiting area then too. That should keep me relatively free of distractions so that I can get more stuff done.
A friend of mine has been interviewing for a job at Google. So far the tale has proven both interesting and amusing. But the thing that strikes me most of all (of that which I'm allowed to hear about, of course) is how many interviews--or rounds of interviews have transpired so far.
I think the count is five or six so far.
I used to think that three was the norm. One or two via phone and then one or two on-site. But it seems that Google (at least in this case) is a bit more extreme than some companies. In this case it's something like 3 by phone and 3 on-site.
I may have the numbers off by a bit, but you get the idea. I wonder how much time, on average, they spend interviewing each person. It's gotta be pretty high.
Oh, wait. I remember reading about that somewhere recently... Wonder if Google can help me figure out where.
(time goes by)
I give up. Can't find it. I know it was a magazine piece. Maybe Forbes, Fortune, Wired, Fast Company... Someone like that. But I'll be damned if I can come up with the right keywords to locate it again. And I use too many browsers to try going digging through the history on each of 'em.
Anyone know which article I'm talking about?
Well, just don't think too hard about the fact that I can't find a particular piece of information about a search engine using that search engine--even though I know it's out there somewhere.
Update: That was fast. As you'll notice in the comments, Gregory Williams found the story I was remembering.