When conducting phone interviews, I like to ask a few technical questions just to make sure that a candidate isn’t trying to blow smoke up my… well we don’t need to be overly illustrative do we?

Akumi’s mother is visiting us from Tokyo for a couple weeks. I have to say, if she decided she wanted to move in, I would not complain.

With my brother-in-law in town from Tokyo, it is important that we survey the local club scene. Serious business. The past two Saturdays we went out to see different DJs at Avalon. I’m not sure I want to go back any time soon.

This is a hilarious video from the Conan O’Brien show.

Ok, I just have to take a moment to rant a bit. We’re currently looking for some mid-level developers as well as a System Administrator. Naturally we posted a job description on Dice.com and craigslist.org. In general I find the best candidates through referral, but occasionaly I’ll get a few good ones through a job site.

My buddy Ed posted some pics from Burning Man this year. This pedal powered Ferris wheel particularly caught my eye. How cool is that!

You gotta love the Japanese for making such interesting products. The company that makes this disembodied arm pillow has sold 1000 units since last December. It’s actually genius if you think about it.

Twiggy is our new Italian Greyhound (not to be confused with a normal greyhound). She’s around two years old (we don’t know for sure) and she has a major case of Attention Deficit Disorder. Fully grown, she’s only ten pounds.

Yesterday was a crazy day. Our production site runs on an older Dell disk array with three logical volumes each set up in a RAID 1+0 configuration. For you non geeks out there, RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks (though some claim the I stands for Inexpensive, I take no stand on this issue).

A little while ago I said we’ve decided to adopt a doggy. Well we did it. On Saturday we got a call that an Italian Greyhound was in need of a home immediately. So we drove out to Visalia (about three hours north of L.A. a little past Bakersfield) and picked her up.

I’m conducting some phone interviews today for a C++ contractor/employee. Man it’s been a long time since I’ve conducted interviews. I wish I kept a list of my favorite questions to ask.

My wife is in the fashion industry and as much as I love her dearly, I’ll never understand the industry. At least she’s a pattern maker and not a designer, so she has no responsibility for this garbage.

RSS Bandit Developer Torsten points out a very long and arduous process for enabling IPv6 in your .NET application. Here is the extremely tedious set of instructions.

My office is 17 floors up with a nice view towards the Pacific. The ocean is a few miles away, so all I see is a sliver of blue on a clear day.

I doubt these guys went out of business, but they’re site has been unavailable since last evening. Perhaps someone bumped into the power switch?

A while ago I wrote up a post on Asynchronous Sockets. Ian was kind enough to send me an email correcting a few niggles with it and in an email exchange, cleared up a few other misconceptions about how sockets (and other IO operations for that matter) really work.

This is too funny. For any foreigners or Chinese press who read this blog, The Onion is satire.