It's been about a month since my last post, but not a lot has happened. I've had two phone interviews with ILM. I believe I did better on the first one, which was with one person, than I did on the second one, which was with three people. But these things are never perfect. I've decided I don't like phone interviews as much as the in-person kind. I feel a lot of pressure to fill dead space. They can't see me thinking. So I come off as a rambling idiot because I start answering their questions too quickly, before I've really thought it through. Bummer. Certainly not my best interview work, although I'm not calling it a disaster.
My last phone interview was last Thursday. I don't know why it seems like such an eternity since then, but it does. Probably because I want it. And because I'm out of a job at the end of December.
I was asked a question in this interview that I've never been asked before. "What kind of classes did you take for your minor in Computer Science?" Wow, do you know how long ago that was? (I didn't really want to make an issue of that either. Not that it's relevant to what I'm capable of--that's the point. It's not.) Not that it was a bad question, actually it was a good one. But once you get in the field and start using what you know, you don't think of it in terms of classes anymore. I don't feel like I answered that question well. I answered truthfully, but I was trying to access an area of my brain that's been dormant for many years. I remembered what I still use in a general sense: languages and math. After I hung up I thought, OH YEAH Assembly Language, Data Structures, Calculus... shoot me. Just shoot me.
At least I remembered that graduate level computer graphics class I took my senior year.
Obviously the Viz Lab thought I was well prepared. They gave me a fellowship to attend. Interesting how sometimes I have less confidence in myself than others do. That is, until I'm given a problem to solve. Then WATCH OUT. There's no such thing as a problem that can't be solved. Not in my hands.
Another question was more specifically related to what I did at Multigen, which was about how I approached improving the speed of our radar module. It's amazing what you can forget when you don't see the code for two years. I might have pulled that one out in the end, but in the beginning I was struggling to make sense without giving away export controlled (i.e. federal prison-getting), proprietary information, some of which I couldn't even remember that well. I can say though that I started taking calculations out of the software and moved them one by one into the hardware shaders until we achieved an acceptable balance of speed vs. accuracy. And not only that, but I rewrote the IR Sensor module--and created its sibling, vpCamera--all using object oriented design patterns. That's something I didn't learn in school, but I thank my boss at Multigen (Scott) for encouraging me to learn it and use it. Now, I can't imagine life without it. Although often I have to because of the limitations of Actionscript.
Not feeling very confident after all that, I decided to post a code sample so they could see how I solve problems. First I asked a friend back at Multigen (Presagis) if I could use an excerpt of the code I wrote there. No go. Proprietary, legal would freak, all that. I wasn't even asking for the export controlled stuff, but still I wasn't surprised. So then I started digging in my old programs I wrote for my 2d image processing class at the lab. They were so elementary (and frankly my style left a bit to be desired at the time) that I just didn't feel like it would be putting my best foot forward. So finally I opted for a recent Flash project that not only used some 2d graphics concepts but also a few different custom classes. The artwork sucked but it wasn't mine, and unfortunately I wasn't allowed to mess with it. But the code was sound. My Multigen work was absolutely the most complex and relevant work I've done, but sometimes you just have to make the best of what you have. So I built a page explaining the project, posted the files and sent a link. And now I wait, hoping I didn't just step in it by doing that.
One thing that's really been on my mind though, even more than these other rambling idiot moments, was a tangent I managed to get off on about my work history. My mom thinks I have the most intimidating (in a good way) resume she's ever seen (she was a manager for many years so that's not your basic mom compliment). I, however, am a bit concerned over how many jobs I've had. I do want a place where I can settle down and contribute long term, and by "long term" I mean at least four years, hopefully longer. I have had that a couple of times. I've also found myself in situations I didn't bargain for and couldn't find a way to solve without taking myself out of the picture entirely. When a problem arises, my first instinct is to try to solve it, not look for the door. But sometimes finding the door is really the best thing for all involved. My experience at BWC is the perfect example of that. The needs of the interactive team grew beyond my skill set, and I could not for the life of me find a way to train myself adequately while still providing the service our customers deserved. That also made it very hard for me to try to grow the department where I thought it needed to grow, because I only had a vague sense of what that meant; I did not have the experience at that time to make the right decisions to grow it properly. So what do you do in that situation? You do what I did. You exit gracefully and bring in your own replacement, who ideally is the vision of what you believe you should have been to really succeed in that position. I was very lucky that my friend Melinda was looking for a job at that time. She had the experience and the drive to make it work, and she's doing it. She's running into the same brick walls I did, but she has the tools to plow through them. I did not. So everyone involved is better off, especially BWC. And they were without a body at my desk for all of three days. No harm done.
I never wanted to move around as much as I have. I think that happens more often to those who either don't know what
they want, or are avoiding what they want by doing everything BUT
that. I fall into the latter category, for many reasons I would rather not get into here. And as of this year, I am actively LEAVING that category.
Frankly I'm pretty proud of how all that worked out for me, Melinda and BWC. But you can't put all that on a resume--especially one that's too long already. You hope you can get all the words out in an interview if it comes up. I wasn't able to. But I did say that when all that happened, I had to sit down and take a hard look at where I really wanted my career to go. And now I am finally in a position to no longer be a member of the "doing everything but what I really want to" group. Once I get out of that group, and I hope that's very soon, I do plan to stay out. For good.
Tomorrow it will be a week since I had my last interview. That's really not that long. Sure feels like it though.
So here's the thing. I blew off photography early on because I couldn't control the light like I could in a real studio, so I decided to paint a few still lifes instead, thinking what I couldn't do in real life with light, I could do with paint. Well, maybe I could control the light in my paintings but I couldn't control the paint in my paintings. I was working too small and too fast to really do my best. So I gave up on painting and decided to play with pretty much every light I have in my house. I had already bought some colored light bulbs for my still lifes, so all I had to do was improvise some bounce cards and a barn door for the key light. The hardest part though was rim lighting. The white card you see at the top is actually a 16x20 canvas board improvised into a bounce card. It failed, but it made a nice snake light holder for a back light. The blank canvas on the easel came in really handy too--whenever I set the timer on the camera I grabbed that canvas and held it over the top of the setup. It provided just enough bounce light to put some volume into the shadows.
