Umbral Echoes Blog

The old house has sold! Or, at least, it’s under contract. An offer came in last weekend, but it was way low (considerably below the break-even point). So we countered a lot higher. I expected them to take a pass on it, since this is definitely a buyer’s market, and homebuyers have the pick of the litter, as it were. Not only that, but there were other houses in our neighborhood that were selling for lower than ours, and also new houses going up in the neighborhood that were less expensive.

But somehow, regardless of all of that, they accepted the counteroffer, and within the next 7 days or so they’ll have an inspection done. Anything found on the inspection will need to be taken care of, but pending that, we’ll sign over the house on March 4th.

Now what we need to do is have a bunch of friends over to the old house on the day of closing, and have a big drunken party after the buyers have done their final walkthrough. So when they come to their new home, they will have the added bonus of rooms full of empty booze bottles.  A “welcome home” gift, if you will.

The past few weeks have been a time of endings, and new beginnings for me.  In both my personal, and my professional life.  But as they say, that which does not move, dies.

After having talked to some of you, and doing some soul-searching over the weekend, I’ve decided to accept the workshop candidate position at White Wolf.  The programming test shook my self-confidence — I didn’t know that my lower-level programming skills had gotten that rusty.  Had I taken that test 6 years ago, I’d have mopped the floor with it.  And I’ll get to that point again.  I’ve sent an email accepting the position at White Wolf, as well as one to the owners of my current company, OneBookShelf.  It will probably be another 6 months at least before I can make the transition, but that will give me time to hone my skills.

Well, apparently my initial impression was correct.  I am damn rusty.  Too rusty, in fact, for the White Wolf programming team in my current state.  I have been given the option to move into what is essentially a paid internship program, or possibly web work.  The internship thing doesn’t pay great, and with other goings-on, the pay rate will make the budget exceedingly tight.  Going into webwork isn’t exactly what I want to do, though there will be mentoring opportunity there as well, and learning of new technologies.

So, I have some things to consider over the weekend.

Today I did the in-person interview with White Wolf, which consisted of several more technical/coding questions, which I had to answer on the spot.  I honestly didn’t do as good as I think I’m capable of, but I didn’t bomb it, either.  One of the questions I later figured out how to answer, with a leading question from Cary.  One which was apparently supposed to have been given to me, but wasn’t (maybe because they’re trying to shorten the interview process).  I’m mad at myself for not seeing the solution earlier, but ah well.

Tomorrow I should have the final yay or nay result, but I’ve got high hopes after having talked things over with Cary and getting some feedback on my answers.  Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Hope everyone’s holiday season went well.  I was only in Louisville for a few days this year, so I didn’t get to catch up with friends as I usually do.  But at the same time, that let me just worry about attending family events (of which there are always an abundance).  Got some good gifts, but mostly gift cards.  I’m sort of tired of Christmas in general — it’s so damn commercialized, and we’ve been trained to think that if someone is important to us, then we must get them a gift.

We had a New Year’s Eve party at the house last night, which was somewhat low-key.  Cary’s shirt never came off.  Seriously!  We realized that it was almost midnight a minute before, and had to scramble to switch from the Wii over to TV and get one of the stations doing the ball drop — got it with 12 seconds to spare.  Toward the end of the party, Dave Delmont decided that some of us should go to the White Wolf office and play Rock Band.  So we did.

Boy, do I suck at singing.  When I was just singing to sound like the songs, I was doing horrid.  When I actually paid attention to the little pitch bar, I got a better score, but sounded much worse (in my opinion).  But then again, I’ve never pretended to be able to sing, so there’s no surprise there.

I was awakened by an annoying cat after 4 hours of sleep, so here I am at work doing some financial reports and coding.  It never ends.  Hopefully sometime in the next week or so, I’ll get the in-person interview at White Wolf.

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.

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.)

This week, we’re running a promotion at work giving away lots of free RPGs.  For those interested in such things:

ThanksGiveAway Promotion

A selection of products each day, until Friday.  Last weekend, I got the fun of setting up 6 new download servers in preparation for this.  While I was at it, I also spent some of my personal time tweaking a publisher tool for sending out mails, which was received with praise along the likes of, “Shouldn’t you be doing something more important than this?” and, “I hates it!  Make it like it was!!!  Change is BAD!!!!”  The second of which is expected (and somewhat deserved, since the page didn’t work so well when the email list was in the thousands), since every time we do anything, various small publishers invariably liked things better how they were before.

If we’re to believe them, then apparently RPGNow in 2005 was the pinnacle of perfection.

In other news, we finally got a Wii.  I thought it might be useful to have since we’re having the housewarming party this Saturday.  Which you’re invited to, if you’re reading this.  Yes, you too.  But please RSVP if you are coming, so we know how much pizza/beer/etc. we need to get.

But I digress.  The Wii is as fun as the hype claims, though the boxing game is very hard to control.  I perform the exact same motion 5 times, and I end up with a jab-jab-hook-nothing-jab.  Cary bought Zelda, and has been spending lots of time with that — except at the moment, since he’s currently at the White Wolf company retreat and no doubt seeing just how many beers it takes to damage the liver.  Kirstie has been having lots of fun with Rayman, which is a fairly insane game composed of tons of mini-games which involve you (a duck) abusing bunnies.

Don’t worry, these aren’t cute bunnies.  These are bunnies that you’d see in a Roman Dirge or Jhonen Vasquez comic.

All right, back to whipping the servers into submission.