Bring in the Clowns!

llan: 2+3: Storm Troopers must not be clones. Star Wars lore (non-canonical stories *) suggests that the Empire conscripts from its "citizens" to maintain its rank and file. Cloning could be just seeding the first generation. Accents? Term limits? C'mon. It's bad fiction at best, and that's picking nonexistent meat from the bone. Point 1 is almost interesting; there seems to be a lot of the same model 'droids about. Why should Vader recognize them?

* Yes, I've read two Star Wars books. Please don't hold it against me. I'm a book slut; I will read nearly anything....

Speaking of which, Salon had a recent article about personal intoleration of some authors, to which I add as my most hated authors list: Henry Miller, Kate Chopin (forgive me, Mary Ellen!), and J. D. Salinger, and Joseph Heller. It's a good article, though.

employment

I had a telephone-interview with a fellow at a central-US company who's looking for C programmers with some kernel-level experience. He called me on the phone number I gave the recruiter, my cell phone. It was going decently, until he asked about the difference "between multi-threaded and multi-processor programs." I knew he mentioned programming for MSFT Windows (of which I have zero experience), so I figured there might really be such a thing, so I sheepishly admitted that I had no idea. He congratulated me for my honesty and started describing multi-process (as in "pid=fork(); if (pid)...") execution. The noise on the cell phone made it sound like an extra syllable on "process" and me to sound like an idiot. *sigh* I politely asked him to call me back on a land-line.

After that, he asked me to describe a previous project, and I did it really poorly. So much for effective communication skills.

So, I stomped his first-impression of me into the ground. Since I got that out of the way, I did okay for the rest of the interview.