Life with CG: November 2008 Archives

So the still life has been put off due to illness. The day after I set it up, I caught a cold. I spent this past weekend making up sick time that I took during the week. I've just gotten over it and now I'm faced with the holidays and a desperate need to clean my house. The good news though is that I'll have Thanksgiving to myself (eating turkey with Dad a week early), which gives me four solid days to crank out some new work. My mom is sending me some creepy dolls she picked up while antiquing in Kansas and that should give me more than four days of painting (and lighting) material. Apparently one is a dummy that looks like Chucky. I also picked up a book last night on lighting for photography, just to refresh myself on the basics and maybe pick up one or two new ideas.

So I've covered the suffering part. What does the silence refer to? ILM, that's what. And frankly it also refers to some of the suffering. I'm not even hearing crickets from them right now. I sent two messages last week and no response to either. I really hope if I'm no longer in the running that they'll just say so. Until they say anything, however, they will continue to hear from me.

On another note, apparently I'm not completely unemployable... I was offered a job by Sony last week. I ended up turning it down. And it wasn't because I was confident I'd get an offer from ILM; quite the contrary. Given how I felt about my interview performance, and the deafening silence from them since, I have yet to be confident about that. It was mainly because they only hire for the length of the production and I just can't see selling 2/3 of my stuff and moving all the way out there to be out of a low-paying job in a year. Now chances are I could successfully campaign to get on the next production, but who wants that kind of stress? I would much rather spend my energy doing my job to the best of my abilities rather than worrying about how long I'll be able to keep it.

I used the situation to nudge ILM to at least let me know if I was still in the running. Not a word. I wrote them again after I turned down the job, and explained that I am also in a better position to wait for the ideal job now because my contract at Collin County will likely be extended another couple of months (true--I found out the day after I got the offer). Still no response. I really hope they're just busy and that they're not the type of people to hold your future in their hands, make a decision to drop it and then just walk away without a word. I've dealt with that before. It's extremely disrespectful. And it goes against every fiber of my being to not communicate, to not even say, "I got your message, I'm really busy but I'll get back to you soon." I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt for now though. If they're really recruiting like crazy, then they're busy like crazy. I'll send them a nice Happy Thanksgiving message on Monday and hope for the best, at least until I find out that all hope is lost.

Seriously, I'm a big girl. I can take "no" for an answer. What I can't take is no answer for an answer.

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.