First Snow

So, something I've been doing for about six months and haven't been able to write about here is that I've been looking for a new job. And, again, for reasons of propriety, I can't really talk about why I wanted to leave the 'napse, but suffice it to say that I was feeling like I'd outgrown the place. So I started looking for something a bit less corporate and bit more hip-young-person-new-media-collective, and I think I've found it in the form of Rebel Monkey. They're a startup, they make games, and one of the dudes who runs it is an acquaintance of Randy's from Parsons -- and now I have a job there! Tom tipped me off to their existence. "It seems like it'd be an awesome place to work," he told me, so, after checking out their openings, I applied, and it worked out, etc.

But making the decision to hang up my shingle with them (and unhang it at 632 Broadway) was incredibly stressful. You know me, guys -- I was deeply preoccupied with doubts as to whether I was making the right decision, whether I'd be up to the task of what the new guys want me to do. And I'd spent four and a half years at DataSynapse. Those guys are my friends, even though not all of them live within striking distance these days. My life was totally different when I started there; I was a pretty different guy, and I was certainly less... formed, you know, as a technology professional. So I'm still a bit worried about the whole thing, but the new place seems awfully nice -- the space is beautiful, the contract wonderfully reasonable, and their interview process was extremely low on brainteasers and bullshit. God knows I've had plenty of that over the past six months that I've been looking.

I can't really go into detail, but Google: I want my six hours back.

(Actually, here's a small detail, presented for the benefit of M-Biddy, who likes things like this: A convex hull is a minimal subset of a set of points such that all of the angles in the shape formed by drawing line segments between adjacent points are convex and all the points that don't comprise this shape lie within its boundaries; describe an efficient algorithm for discovering the hull. I think I found one that my interviewer hadn't heard before, but I wasn't able to explain it satisfactorily.)

Moving over to the new place has already started -- as part of the (slightly uncomfortable) agreement I negotiated between DataSynapse and Rebel Monkey, I've been going over there in the early evening for the past two weeks and working 'til around 10:00. That's a 12-hour day! And then I worked all of last weekend, slogging through a Windows networking hell largely of my own devising. I'm a bit exhausted. Tonight while I was in meeting with them, one of their florescent overhead lights kind of exploded, filling the office with burning-electronics stink. It's a startup, it's exciting. My last day at DataSynapse is this Friday. I start, officially, at Rebel Monkey on the following Monday.

Anyway, thanks are due to Vickie Lee, even though I wasn't able to go for any of the jobs she looked up for me; and to Jimmy Tones, who gave me some pro bono career counseling, although I ended up jumping back into for-profit softare instead of running off to work for Barack Obama.

Winter is here, as evidenced by the wind tonight and the snow yesterday. It's going to be Hanukkah real soon, and then Christmas. And then we begin something entirely new.