So my wife and I have a regular sushi restaurant we go to about every Friday. The manager knows us, asks about the baby (who was with a babysitter this night) and so on. We're seated and put in our regular order, but to a new waiter. Now, our regular order includes 2 orders of salmon sushi, which would be 4 pieces. Well, the waiter comes back and says, "Do you like salmon?"

"Ummm....I guess....we ordered.....huh?"

"The reason I ask is that you ordered 2 but I screwed up and put you in for 4." Which would be 8 pieces.

"That's too much, we don't want that much."

"Ok, I'll take care of it."

He then, get this, comes back with $4 cash, sticks it under the menu on the table and says "We're all square." Eh?

Manager comes over to bring us our food and chat. He looks at our order sheet and asks, "Two orders of salmon, right? Not four?"

"Right. I guess there was some mistake when he put the order in."

"Ok, don't worry, I fix."

A few minutes later over comes the waiter to actually scold us! "Guys, that was my manager. That's why I gave you the cash so we'd be all square."

"Oh. You want your cash back? I never asked for it."

"No, keep it."

Manager brings out the 8 salmon, as well as an additional order of shrimp for our trouble, and tells us our drinks are free too. I wonder if we'll ever see that waiter again. :) The thing I find funny is that the only real inconvenience was them bringing us more food than we ordered. It's not like they got our food wrong or didn't bring something. My guess at what happened is that rather than tell the chef his mistake, the waiter put the burden on us to keep it quiet with his $4, and thats what pissed the manager off.

For the first time we actually ended up leaving sushi on the boat.

So now I have a question (for my few fans that will read this :)). You're in a sushi restaurant where the staff all knows you. They've poured free food on you (we also often get samples from the chef, and at the very least extra tea when coming in for takeout). While leaving and saying thank you, they're all bowing like crazy people. Do I bow back? How, exactly? Is it better to not bow at all or to do it incorrectly (and possibly offend)?

I have two freaks. I find that weird. One is DarkKnightRadick, who apparently went a little nuts and 'foed' everybody that sounded like a Linux zealot. Okey doke. He has a large foes list.

The other one is this deblau person, and I have no clue. Has no journal. I don't know anything about his sourceforge project. I can't even find any threads we both contributed to in which I might have pissed him off. The strange thing is that he's only got like 2 foes. So I really wonder what I did to get on that short list.

Oh well.

You were running to catch a train, your daughter in your arms. I was waiting in line at Dunkin' Donuts to get a Diet Pepsi. I heard something fall and turned around to see that your daughter had dropped her pacifier. You didn't notice it, but she did, and I watched her face as you kept walking as she watched it sitting there on the floor.

I should have called out after you. Sure, a binky that falls on the train station floor is disgusting, but you can boil it when you get home. At least, you'll know what happened to it. I know the expression on my own daughter's face when she is playing with a toy and it drops out of her reach. She can't ask anybody to pick it up for her, or even alert you that it is gone.

A few minutes later I did scoop up the binky and go looking for you up and down the station. There were only two trains at the platform so I walked up and down looking in the windows hoping to find you, but couldn't. Too little too late.

So, tell your daughter I'm sorry. I felt horrible when I imagined you strapping her into the car seat and saying, "Where's binky?" just like we do, and it being gone, even though she'd know what happened to it and not be able to tell you. Somebody did find it and try to return it, he just didn't try as hard as he could have.

Ok, one of my guys at work brought this one in a few weeks ago, and now that I've been told I'm gonna be given a similar test I thought I'd post it.

You have an array of 1..N-1 randomly sorted integers in which one of the sequence is missing. Got that? So if N=3 you might have 1,3 and 2 is missing.

The challenge is to determine, in as efficient a way as possible, which number is missing. Give you a hint, the answer doesn't involve sorting the numbers at all.

I really enjoy this show. Just saw it the night before Easter, coincidentally enough. The interesting thing to me is the characters and the story. Honestly I don't care about it having to do with the bible, or whether or not it's true. I just think it's a great story. We actually left right before the last two scenes, because I find them boring (I won't spoil them, just in case). But really I think that it's a play about Judas. He opens the show, and to me, he closes it.

On my list of favorite shows, it's in the top 5. I think Les Mis, Hamlet, HAIR, JC Superstar. How's that for a mix? It's all for different reasons, of course. Comparing Les Mis and Hamlet is just weird. :)

[just experienced this one.]

...you call 411 on your cell phone to get a number that is automatically dialed for you, only you wish that the operator issued a redirect, instead of a forward, so that the number is locally cached on your cell phone for later.

I have a phone that has talking caller id. It is the coolest thing ever, because I can sit on the couch and hear "Kerry, it's your parents" and know that my wife can get up and get it herself. Well, that phone broke, and we're on a quest to find a new phone. I ask my wife, "We want another one with talking caller id, right?" She agrees.

Short story, we go looking in several places, can't find one. The one we have isn't made anymore (though I have contacted AT&T to followup). We get one without that feature.

Undaunted I come home and start surfing. And I find CallCo a company that makes a dedicated box that does exactly what I want (and more!) and can attach to any phone. $60. Nice. I show it to her. "Oh," she says, "So it's another box? I don't think we need that. I think the phone we got will be fine."

I stare, flabbergasted. "Didn't we agree earlier that we really loved this feature?"

"It's nice, but we don't have room for more gadgets."

I look over to the small end table where the phone currently sits. It is surrounded by innumerable pictures and Easter-themed dust collectors. I wisely make no comment.

(When she's not looking I keep researching and discover plans for making your own talking caller id using an old 28.8 modem. Since that box is in the cellar I can theoretically get it running there then string some speaker wire up to the top of the cellar stairs....Mwahahaha...)

Just found out today that I'm INTP (that's Myers Briggs, aka MBTI talk). Interesting in that my career councilor(sp??) would have thought I was an E rather than I, and I thought I was a J, not a P.

The answer to the first question was obvious, to me. "The only conversations you and I have ever had are about me," I said. "I'm perfectly happy and confident to talk about myself all day. But put me in a room of strangers and I won't even have the courage to introduce myself."

The second was more interesting. The way he described the difference between J and P went a little something like this: "J's primarily like to get all the info they can, make a decision, and then once that decision is made, that's that. They'll stay in a career all their life, even if they don't like it, rather than change. P's, on the other hand, are more go with the flow type of people who have no problem constantly changing, because they're always bringing in new information and re-evaluating their decision. Most P's I see have had a number of career changes."

That didn't mean much to me because apparently I'm a P but have only had one real career -- nay, passion -- in life. Namely, hacking code. I think that having primarily been in management for the past fews years I could see where the P begins to shine through. It's perfectly common to have a wonderful plan that will take 3 months, then be told to change it on the fly. I got good at that. I guess if I was more J I would have more difficulty at it. Of course, on the flip side, I also love to dream about having an idea and turning it into a startup, but never will -- because since I'm constantly re-evaluating my position, I never have the confidence in a single idea to say "Yup, this is the one I will bank it all on."

Always interesting to learn about oneself.

When my job search began in January I updated my resume and started sending it out. Then I was told by enough close friends the importance of the "seeding your resume with buzzwords" game that I tweaked and twisted and basically reworked some things to make sure that my resume was more buzzword dense.

And discovered weeks later that I was still sending out the old version. I was upset with myself.

Over the past two weeks I've been using an outplacement service (that my company is paying for). I just discovered that not only does my resume print badly, leaving half a page of whitespace on the first page, but it actually CUTS CONTENT OUT. A whole section of my resume does not print. Now I'm *really* upset. But I got an interview out of that one, so it can't have been too much of a deal breaker. But I do have a new version that prints nicely.

Just today a friend sent me his resume to pass along to a job I wasn't suited for. Which I did. Then three seconds later he said "Shoot, wrong cell phone number", corrected it and sent it to me again. So the first look at this guy that the job gets is a double resume because the first one had a mistake in it.

My outplacement guy tells me that the worst resume story he ever had was when a guy brought his in for assistance, and the admin folks reformatted it into their system and gave it back to him for proofing. He said "You got my email and phone number wrong." so they went back to the original he'd given them and it turns out he had both of them wrong on his original. His original that he had been circulating for 3 weeks. That's gotta suck.

Others?

Tax time is always scary. Last year I had a kid, my wife stopped working, and we refinanced the house (two mortgages down to one). AND, to help with the baby, I changed my exemptions to get more back in my paycheck every week. The stack of paperwork was amazing.

And we still got a tax refund that's about the same as a month's severance pay. Thank you, mortage interest!

AND, while I'm there, she says "Have you looked at sole proprietorship? Because I have a friend looking for web developers." Nice.

Tips:

• Unless you're used to doing it yourself and confident that you're not screwing yourself, pay somebody to do it like American Express. Cost me about $300, which is deductible the next year. And a pro can walk you through a variety of questions you might not have considered, in more depth than a typical software program might. I know that I was never happy with the level of detail I got from TurboTax.
• Research how your tax situation will change during unemployment. For instance I was told that if I put up a web site to market myself then I could actually deduct a portion of my ISP and cable modem costs. And that while my family computer is not deductible, the laptop that I do nothing but develop on might be (especially if I get some 10-99 income).
• If you own, refinance. If you need extra bucks, take it out now and pay off the credit cards.
• If you don't own, look into it. Hell of an investment. Big mortgages are scary but big mortgage interest deductions are cool.
• Have a kid. You know you want one. :)

So I watched E.T. this weekend for only the second time ever. The first would have been when I was 12 years old, and I cried that time. I remember it well, because I tried to convince my mother and older brother that I wasn't crying, I had merely poked myself in the eye.

Wow, this movie doesn't stand up well over 20 years. The dialogue seemed horrible. The plot jerked along, taking random turns. Sure, the idea is a classic, and it deserves the praise it gets for the quality of the story alone. But I mean, really. The mother actually leaves Drew Barrymore home alone when she goes to get Elliott. What is this kid, 5 in this movie? And I never fully understood why ET was dying in the first place, or why he suddenly gets better. Is that red thing in his chest a communicator or a health potion? Who is the "good government guy" and what's his story? How come the bad government guys never caught up to them at the end?

By my adult standards, today, I give it about a 6. As a kids' fairy tale, alot higher.

Got a magazine article proposal accepted today, I'm excited. I wrote a bunch of these a few years ago and discovered that it's easier than you might think. I just wanted to be published, wrote a letter to the editor of a new tech magazine saying "I have experience with ____, would you like an article?" and it turned into a small series. Now that I'm soon to be out of work I decided to see if it was still possible. It's harder now, but I'm happy that my proposal got accepted (no guarantee of publication, but thus far my hit rate has been excellent).

Ya can't make a living on it (unless you're a professional writer), but a few extra bucks in the pocket never hurt. Except at tax time.

Updated: I just discovered that in another sign of the unemployment times, many technical magazines are not paying cash for articles. They're claiming that just being published is compensation enough. Ug. So I guess I don't get any cool computer toys from this deal.

Just out of random curiosity, am I the only geek in the universe that watches pro wrestling? I started as a kid a good 20+ years ago and now it's gotten to the point where the whole thing is like a giant meta-joke. The fun comes in seeing how accurately you can predict everything (such as the rule that the word "tonight" is always followed by "in this very ring." Never just "in this ring", always this very ring.)

Thought of this when I was checking out Google Zeitgeist yesterday and noticed Curt Henning's name on the Top 10. Curt Henning was a pro wrestler for ages who recently died at a surprisingly young age.

"I'm lying in the middle of the ring flat on my back, and I look up to see Mick standing on top of the cage. He's supposed to rip open his shirt and there's this big heart drawn there...but there's nothing. My first thought is, Damn, he forgot the heart. My second thought is, I hope he doesn't land on my face."
-Triple H

So when you look at the "what do I want to do with my life" question, would you say that your approach to the answer is more top down, or bottom up? Do you envision the goal first, then break it down into milestones, then work on those? Or do you take stock of what you've already got and ask, "Ok, where can I go with this?" (I realize that's not the exact definition of topdown vs bottomup but I needed a catchy summary).

I've always wanted a way in Java to determine if there is "live" net connectivity on a given machine. That is, if I have a piece of code that's about to try connecting to a machine other than localhost, is there a way to determine if I should even try?

For a long time the answer was no. But JDK1.4 introduced "NetworkInterface" which has potential. I've already written a little utility that looks at a known set of interfaces (such as wlan0 and eth0 on my laptop). If either one is not null, then it assumes network is available. It seems to work correctly -- I yank out my pcmcia net card and it immediately switches to false, I put it back and it goes true again.

The problem is that doesn't work on Windows (apparently). The interface on my NT machine, "lan0", appears to always exist. And on a desktop machine this makes sense, since technically the interface does exist it's just not connected -- that's a different condition.

Is there a way in windows to "down" an interface, like "ifdown" in Linux?