Umbral Echoes Blog

Fox is airing a new show called Moment of Truth.  The premise of the show is that contestants are hooked up to a lie detector, and asked personal questions like: Do you really care about starving children in Africa?  Do you like your mother-in-law?  Have you ever cheated on your spouse?

This show makes me want to vomit.  There is no such thing as a lie detector.  Such a device does not exist.  A polygraph detects someone’s level of physiological arousal — heart rate, breathing rate, the amount of sweat coming out of your pores, blood pressure, et cetera.  The machine does not detect lies.  Police use polygraphs (as I understand it) in a crafty way.  They don’t just ask, “Did you kill this person?”  Because that question will make anyone nervous.  Instead, they mention some words, people, and so forth.  Random stuff.  Except in that random stuff, there are bits relevant to the case that only the guilty person would know.

As a very basic example, let’s say that someone was beaten to death with a tire iron.  The only details that were released to the public were that the person was found dead in a ditch.  So during the polygraph test, they might say to the suspect, “Lawn mower… scissors… wrench… tire iron… screwdriver… chainsaw….”  And so forth.  If the suspect’s vitals spike just when they say “tire iron” (when only the killer would know the victim was killed with that), then it’s likely the person knows something about the murder.

But even that isn’t admissible in court.

Yet talk shows like Maury Povich, and countless others, put people through these “lie detector” tests.  People’s lives are ruined over this — spouses innocent of cheating are shown as “lying” because they’re nervous when the question is asked, and their marriage dissolved.  It is pure idiocy, and it makes me sick.

And now, Fox is making an entire show based around this.  Thank you, Fox.  Thank you for lowering the bar.

I passed the the programming test!  There is still an interview, which will involve technical questions, so my success is not guaranteed (there’s also the question of salary even if I do get the offer), but it’s looking good. 

Turned in the test a few minutes ago. Wasn’t able to figure out the last problem, but the rest were cake. I only hope that I can get partial credit, and pass based on that. I’m pretty disappointed in myself — it was the sort of problem where I knew how to do it logically, but just couldn’t put that into code for some reason. I’m pretty nervous now, and I expect that will carry over until tomorrow since I doubt the test will get graded before the end of the workday today.

So now I play the waiting game and try to prepare myself for the possibility that I won’t get an interview.

EDIT: Oh, and also thanks to everyone who wished me luck!  It’s much appreciated.  And if only I could spend blood points or Quintessence for a bigger programming dice pool.

Tomorrow I’ll take the programming test for White Wolf.  Wish me luck!  I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous about it (if I don’t pass, I don’t get in), but I’m also confident that as rusty as I might be with C++, I’ll at least pass it.

Best. Trailer. Evar.

I ended up going with the Dell after all, and it arrived earlier than expected (which was a pleasant surprise).  So far I’m impressed with the performance — it seems to be at least as good in that regard as my desktop computer.  The 2 GB of RAM helps a lot in that regard.  But I won’t bore you with details of the new hotness.

Last night was the White Wolf company Christmas party, which I went to after the company-only part was done.  Every employee got either an XBox 360 or PS3 (their choice) this year.  Last year, everyone got a Wii.  Ah, the benefits of working for a gaming company.

I also got a chance to sit down a little with Mark Kalmes, head of programming for the World of Darkness Online MMO.  We’d talked before, but I was off-limits due to a gentleman’s “no poaching” agreement between our companies.  Since I’ve made public my desire to go to White Wolf, that’s no longer an issue.   So we felt each other out a little bit — he got a feel for my programming background, and I got a feel for how the development process is organized.  I’ve always gotten along well with Mark, and he told me he’s been given only glowing recommendations for me from everyone he’s talked to, so the programming test is my only real hurtle.  I’m confident that by the time I take the test, I’ll have worked the rust out of my C++ skills, and will verily kick its ass.

In other news (from which this post gets its title), it’s like Spring outside.  Seriously, I can go out in a t-shirt today — it’s in the lower 70s.  wtf?  (Not that I’m complaining, mind you.)

I finally got around to setting up my desktop computer last weekend (I’ve just been using my laptop until now). While I was at it, I decided to go ahead and remove the hard drive that was going bad, and then I got the wild hair up my ass to install Ubuntu Linux (a popular distribution of Linux that actually has a nice user community that answers questions, and is built with ease-of-use in mind).

I downloaded the Live CD, and tried to rearrange one of my hard drives to make room for Linux there. The disk partition editor (GPartEd) froze up in the middle of resizing the old partition… so I rebooted, only to find that it actually did that successfully (regardless of freezing up). Then I tried to format the new area to the Linux file system type… and again, it froze up but seemed to have successfully done it anyway.

From this point, I clicked the option to install, and things went surprisingly smoothly. Ubuntu even has a neat little function that can import your Windows documents and settings. It installed a boot loader, so the next time I booted up I could choose Linux or Windows (I was halfway afraid that it would just set itself to the default OS and make it a hassle to boot back into Windows).

However, it doesn’t seem to include drivers for my wireless network card. But, Linux does have a utility that can make it use Windows drivers. After following the pleasantly complete and no-brainer-copy-paste instructions from the Ubuntu forums, I got that installed, and the drivers as well.

Linux could now see my wireless card, but it didn’t seem to be able to connect to the wireless network. It also gave no status indicator as to what might have gone wrong. And after playing with the settings a few more times… Linux froze. Linux geeks the world over have constantly ridden Windows for locking up, yet Linux does it too. This was a hardcore lockup, too — keyboard was totally nonresponsive, and I had to power off and back on again.

I haven’t tried messing with it since then, but I shall continue to chronicle my foray into using Linux as my desktop OS, for the (imaginary) people out there who might be interested to hear the tale.