Author: Joey deVilla

Happy birthday to fellow geek, blogger, Scorpio and all-round deep-thinking guy Aaron Swartz! Hey, Aaron, if I had any money to spare, I’d buy you something from your Amazon Wish List. Maybe someone out there with two coins to rub together will.

A quick blurb from the birthday entry in his weblog:

In the US, we have a tradition that when you blow out the candles on your birthday cake, you should make a wish. Every year, as far back as I can remember, I’ve wished that I would see another birthday. It’s not that I’m afraid of dying, I just liked living.

Well said.

If they ever form a superhero team called “Aqua Teen Hacker Force”, my money’s on Aaron for its leader.

Cory’s given me so much Googlejuice that I’m only too happy to return the favour. (This is why I sometimes refer to the world of blogs as “the Sycophantic Web”.)

He appears in an interview in today’s SXSW Festival Tech Report. A sample question:

A lot of Canadian expatriates such as yourself are doing wonderfully creative and innovative things in terms of new media and the Internet. Do you have any explanations or insights here? Is there something in the water north of the border?

Yes, we are taking over. We will eventually own the entire world.

Actually, Bruce Sterling thinks there is something unique about the Canadian perspective. In the introduction he wrote for my new short story collection “A Place So Foreign and Eight More” that is coming out in March, Bruce points out that being Canadian gives you a built-in window to the creepiest kind of alien of all, which is the alien that is almost just like you but is completely different.

I don’t if you saw it, but there was a story titled “The Uncanny Valley” that went around the blogging universe in October. According to this bit of research on human perception and cognition, people of all cultures respond very positively to humanoid artifacts, so long as they aren’t all that humanoid. So, Mickey Mouse or other sort of furry objects or certain robots are ok. But, that kind of warm response decreases sharply as the object becomes more humanoid. Then there is a point at which an object becomes too humanoid. If it looks a lot like a human but it isn’t quite a human, then people react to that with complete revulsion: think of zombies or of the cenotaphs in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. So, the creepiest alien of all is the thing that you can recognize as being you, but isn’t you.

I agree with Bruce. I think Canadians have this built-in point of view on America. Because you guys talk like us, you look like us, you listen to the same music as we do. Your culture is a lot like ours. But you are different in a lot of really strange ways. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Marshall McLuhan came out of Canada. I think that that was an almost inevitable occurrence. Because it takes being at 30 degrees off true to really see something clearly. It is hard to see something clearly when you are in the belly of it.

I also think that Canada had a couple of advantages at the beginning of the new economy. Socialized medicine allowed people to quit their jobs much more readily and pursue freelance life. So, there are a lot of people like me who dropped out of school and quit their jobs and just went off and did freelance Internet stuff without having to worry too much about the consequences. I think that fostered a kind of extended adolescence where people didn’t have to get involved with button-up corporate stuff. People could remain a lot more free and more inventive and more innovative as freelancers than their American compatriots.

One of the great things about having a weblog and friends with lots of Googlejuice pointing to your blog is that old friends from way back can find you. One such person is Rob “King Floyd” MacDougall, a guy who used to write with me at the Queen’s University humour newspaper, Golden Words (My good pal George Scriban also wrote for the paper). Rob was one of the paper’s best writers, and unlike me, he never wrote anything that ended with threats of libel suits (I got four in my seven-year career, one of which was from the leader of a group called “Students for Free Speech”). When some of our other writers were falling back on jokes about getting drunk or the tired crutch of top ten lists, Rob was writing clever little articles that made you laugh and think at the same time. He found me through the The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century and sent me this lovely picture:

Hello again, Rob, and I’ll write soon!

Update (Wednesday, November 18th at 4:00 p.m. EST): see this entry to see what happened afterwards.

On the day of my birthday, I had an 11:15 interview with a recruiting company up in the office park wasteland where I used to work. In fact, their office was in the same building as OpenCola, my former place of work, the place from which I was unceremoniously let go because they “couldn’t find a role for me.”

“You don’t remind returning to ‘the scene of the crime’?” asked the headhunter.

Not if it increases the odds that I’ll be earning a living soon.

I drove up there in the Birthdaymobile. Until Sunday, the black ’98 CR-V that I’ve been using since the start of the year was a spare car that my parents had. It used to be Dad’s, then my sister’s, then passed over to me on a sort of extended loan. The lease period had expired, and Mom bought it outright and gave it to me for my birthday. Thanks, Mom!

(I might “Chinamize” it slightly once I’m employed again. I am, after all, an Asian boy. Perhaps a little tint on the window, and Bad Badtz-Maru seatcovers…)

In order to secure this interview, I answered 12 essay questions emailed to me. I presume that these were meant to see what kind of programmer and person I was. I answered questions from technical critques (“What do you like about .NET?” “What don’t you like?”) to geek-cultural knowledge (“Who is Kent Beck?” “Who is Don Knuth?”) to philosophical (“What is it about programming that draws you to it?” “What is your interpretation of the meaning of life, the universe and everything?”). Nine pages of answers later, I had secured this interview.

The company for which the recruiter is looking for candidates is a nice one with a long history, very big American clients with deep pockets and almost no chance in hell of ever disappearing and is run by incredibly smart people. They treat their employees well: well-appointed office spaces designed for actual productivity, sensible 40-hour weeks and a policy of avoid heroic hours, a comfy lounge with pool table, and every week a chef comes in to prepare a gourmet lunch for the staff. Best of all, they’re crawling distance from Big Trouble in Little China, my house.

About fifteen minutes into the interview before my Schmoozer-Sense told me it was time to close the deal.

Me: I think I’m the guy for the position. Would you agree?

Headhunter: I’m going to recommend you for sure. I think you’ll do well over there.

Me: So what happens next?

Headhunter: Well, standard procedure for them is to have two interviews. The first is a simple get-to-know-you. It’s all personality, to see if you fit with the rest of the team. They’re strong on personality. That’ll be the easy one.

Me: I take it that the second interview is the technical one.

Headhunter: Probably not “technical” in the way you’re thinking. The second interview is an hour-long presenation. You make one in front if the president and some higher-ups.

Me: An hour?

Headhunter: Well, it depends. The Q&A sessions could go long. I think one presentation took up to three hours with the Q&A.

Me: Uh, do I get a budget for this presentation, or do I recoup my time costs by selling a “Joey’s Interview: Behind the Magic” TV special?

It’s certainly a hirer’s market out there. I don’t ever recall having to jump through so many hoops to get a job. I’m half-expecting them to make me walk across burning coals, face off against other candidates in the evening gown competition or challenge one of the Iron Chefs as the final trial.

(If we do the Iron Chef thing, I’m going to pull a Bobby Flay and stand on the cutting board and claim victory. Hell, I’ll pee on the losing chef’s face too.)

Photos of me and my friend Katie in her “Marge Simpson” wig, taken at a Hallowe’en party at my friend Liz’s place last Friday.

Prepare to get cosy!

88 people have responded “yes” to the invite.

Bring booze, folks!

If you’re interested in human rights in China, be sure to check out the latest two entries in The Happiest Geek on Earth:

• Mr. Baranowski Goes to Washington: Paul goes to D.C. to make a statement in front of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
• You’ve Got Dissent!: A RAND paper on Chinese dissident use of the Internet and Beijing’s counter-strategies.