Interviewed

Today's interviews went pretty well. The next round will probably be in a week or two. Further updates as events warrant.

Interviews

Today I got scheduled for the first of two more rounds of interviews on the way to becoming an actual, honest-to-goodness, permanent employee. This first batch will be on Wednesday, 10-11:30 am, and it will be with people I actually work with here on the Blogger team. After that is the round with the more managerial types, time TBD. Wish me luck!

Blog Design Part III

Okay, I'm taking the easy way on this right now. I definitely wanted to switch to this layout, but I'm still going to sit down and think about colors again sometime. This is good for now, though.

One Dance, Two Dance, Borrowed Dance, Blue Dance

Friday Night Waltz was last night. Unfortunately, the Swing Kids dance decided to be at the same time, which was a bit annoying (since it took people away from waltzing, and since I couldn't go to both), but FNW was still fun. One interesting moment of the evening was doing the Metamora waltz with Tina. Apparently no one remembers how it goes, and everyone decided they should try to follow us, which was moderately disconcerting. I sure showed them, though -- I made mistakes. Ha! That'll teach everyone to follow me. Of course, Tina mostly managed to prevent or fix my mistakes, so we actually did pretty well.

This morning I helped out at Opening auditions, along with a number of other people, dancing with the auditionees so we can help TKJ choose people later. It was interesting to be on that side of auditions for a change. I had a little notebook in my pocket so I could jot down notes on who was who, and anything in particular I noticed about their dancing. Hopefully I didn't make people too nervous by scribbling mysteriously after I danced with them. We're fairly short on guys so far, unfortunately, though not surprisingly. Strange how there are so often extra guys at the social dance events, but far more women at auditions. I wonder if other dance groups find that at their auditions?

This evening was Jim and Laura's wedding, complete with bagpipes, alpenhorn, contra dancing, couple dancing and chicken dancing. Moving Cloud played for the contras, and Joan DJ'd the other stuff. It was really quite a lot of fun. I like it when dancing friends have weddings. Even a fair number of their non-dancing (or less-dancing) friends and relatives joined in the dancing, including the kids, one or two of whom just took to it like ducks to water. That's always wonderful to see. (Dodging the non-dancing kids made for an amusing challenge all evening, as well.) I had a lovely waltz and swing with the lovely bride, an interesting partner-switching tango, and a surprise-polka-swing and a really beautiful cross-step waltz, both with Tina. Overall, it was exactly the way I like weddings to be. A short-n-sweet ceremony followed by good music and fun and happy dancing. Best wishes to Jim and Laura as they start their new life together!

So yes, it's been a very dancy weekend so far. Fun, but I think I will maybe not dance tomorrow.

A boy...

One of our computer programs at Project Read is called Rosetta Stone, and one of the activities on it lets students hear and read words or phrases, then match them from a selection of pictures. We've used it on the Macs for a while, but it's supposed to work on PCs, too. So tonight we were trying it out on our new PC ("new" according to the amount it's been used, not the amount of time we've had it). The first round on level one had four pictures: a boy, a girl, a dog, and a cat.

Computer types: a boy. Computer says: a boy. I click: a boy. Ding! Life is good and I move on.

Computer types: a dog. Computer says: a boy. Uh oh! Panic situation! I click the boy. Nope. The dog. Yep.

Computer types: a girl. Computer says: a boy. The girl wins.

And so on. At this point, were I trying to learn English, this would seem to me like a very cruel joke. Luckily, this was just a test drive, so I just found it funny. It was even worse when I set it to the mode that only spoke the words, and didn't display them. Spot checking the rest of the CD showed a red car, a horse jumping over a fence, and the number six, a man brushing a woman's hair, and two different kinds of fish. All were referred to as "a boy."

I think I'll just stick with the Macs, thank-you-very-much.