I brought my umbrella to Seattle and didn’t even get a chance to use it. Supposedly Seattle has around 60 sunny days every year, and I chose one of them to tour the city. Well, actually, it was drizzling when I got to Seattle, but by the time I got to the hotel, it had cleared up. All afternoon it was windy and clear, around 15 degrees. (Which is 60 for Fahrenheit lovers, I think.) At this point, my hypothesis is that the forecast for Seattle is always 90% chance of rain, but it says nothing about how long the rain will last.

Ahh, but I’m getting ahead of myself. This is a travelogue post, which, while mundane, seems to be popular with the portion of my readership that automatically skips any post about, say, eta reduction. So let me start from the beginning. I was visiting Seattle at the behest of Microsoft, who became interested in my resume several years after I originally submitted it. They flew me to Seattle to interview for an internship on the Live Search team, testing their … well, I’m not sure I can talk about what I’ll be testing. But testing a thing which is probably software. Admittedly, I would prefer to be interviewing for a permanent job, but Microsoft treats internships as a trial for permanent jobs anyway, and it’s hard to ignore a company that calls you up during a huge recession and offers you any kind of job.

After the flight (with expected unpleasantness in the Chicago airport), I checked into the Bellevue Hilton, which was fancy and full of clear elevators. Fancy enough that the front desk was incensed when I asked how to walk to the bus station and ordered a hotel shuttle to shuttle me there. So about 1 PM, I caught the bus from Bellevue to Seattle and walked around. A lot of people use the busses in Seattle, which is good I suppose, but it also means they are, um, well-used. Specifically, the seat cushions are disturbingly deep and give off a mingled smell of sweat, wet dog and piss as you sink into them. They may be the ecologically friendly way to get around but busses still are second-class in my book.

Downtown Seattle is a decent place to tour as soon as you get down to the harbour. The skyscrapers proper are not particularly impressive, and the Art Museum was Closed For Mondays. But the water is fascinating. I eventually made my way down to the docks and Pike Place Market. Seattle is a bit like Norway-lite: there aren’t any fjords and it’s not freezing, but it is definitely cool, and there are plenty of steep hills sloping down to the water. The stereotypical Seattleite looks Norwegian-esque, too: big guys with shaved heads, maybe an earring or a tattoo. They didn’t look exactly Norwegian, but most looked like they harboured latent Viking tendencies. At least they probably like Metal.

I liked the harbour so much that I walked almost a mile along it to the Space Needle. The Space Needle is charging truly gouging prices these days, but I paid with the mental proviso that I would Never Do This Again, Unless Parents Visit. The view was appropriately exhilarating, and I took some more muddy pictures of the Cascades with my cell phone. (I left my camera at home, figuring that I would only be seeing clouds.) You can see those pictures on Facebook where I uploaded them.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2627694&id=6844046&l=7205c1c4b6

The next morning I met a former professor of mine before the interviews, so I was actually at Microsoft ALL DAY. I almost said “old professor", but Mike can’t be more than 5 or 6 years older than me. Just old enough to have the first edition of Cormen, Leiserson and Rivest. He’s working in the Natural Language Group now, which provides language-type technology to Word and friends—things like spelling and grammar checking. His office’s most interesting feature was the .NET 1.1 Standard Library books he used to raise his monitor. Seriously, it was like a solid foot of obsolete paper. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle I guess.

I was in the middle of talking with Mike’s boss–they don’t have any openings, but always like to know when linguists are thinking about joining Microsoft–when I realised that my interview was in 15 minutes. Once escorted back to the building entrance, I was going to walk to the interview building, but Mike’s boss called a shuttle. The shuttles are mostly just taxis employed by Microsoft to get their employees around the Microsoft campus without walking. I don’t know if it’s the rain, but shuttles seem like a big thing in Seattle. It’s probably the rain; nobody carried an umbrella, and there must be a limit to how much water a jacket can protect you from.

So how did the interview go? As well as can be expected. I’m not to going talk much about the specifics because (1) it wouldn’t be good form and (2) you can find plenty of details online from other people. I’m going to talk about what I learned because if I write it down, I’ll have a better chance of remembering it. As for you, you get the chance to learn something hilarious about me.

Microsoft interviews are, I hope, the standard for tech companies. I wouldn’t want to work for a company that didn’t have an interview process as rigorous as Microsoft’s: I’d be afraid that too many of my coworkers were dunces, and that’s one thing I want to avoid when moving into industry. I hear horror stories from many of my friends about said dunces. (Though many of the stories are actually pretty funny if you’re not involved.)

The interviews go like this: you get 15 minutes to answer “standard” interview questions like “what is your greatest weakness” (yes, I did get asked this), then 45 minutes to answer programming questions. The programming questions vary in length and type, but all of them involve you standing at the whiteboard writing code. The whiteboard is one of the most difficult places to write code, so it’s a good stress test. After the interview, your interviewer confers with the others on the team for 10 minutes and then another team member comes to get you. The cycle repeats 3-4 times for interns and 5-6 times for full-timers. Apparently if you bomb enough interviews in a row then the cycle is cut short.

So what did I learn? First, that I stink at answering “standard” interview questions. They are heavy on personal interaction, and I can’t retrieve good examples from my past quickly. I console myself by imagining that I bet I’m better at these questions than the *average* CS-graduate interviewer by virtue of having spent time in a linguistics department. Second, I learned that I really love recursion. Holy cow do I love recursion! On every single one of the coding questions I saw obvious recursive solutions. Since, after the first interview, I was asked for a specific language each time, the non-Haskell solutions were inconvenient as recursion* and I ended up converting them all to loops. This is another side effect of the interstitial interviewer huddle—I ended up giving solutions in Haskell, Java, Python, C++ and C#. And C# wasn’t even on my resume! Well, the C# I wrote was just Java with “struct” in place of “class". The only language they didn’t ask for was Scheme. :C

Oh, and the third thing I learned was that I need to re-read the graph sections of Steve Skiena’s Algorithm Design Manual. I know the names of most of the graph algorithms, but when put on the spot, I have a hard time recognising which algorithm is needed to solve a particular problem. Of course in real life I could just check the book, but this doesn’t get you any points in an interview, which is trying to stretch you to your limits.

OK, that’s enough interview. Back to the travelogue. Microsoft was an interesting place. They are serious about giving everybody an office. Some of them are kind of boring and standard, but the search team I interviewed with were in offices that kind of looked like they had started life as cubicles. But the walls had glass extensions up to the ceiling to block noise. The front of each cubicle was a sliding glass door, so you could see through to the opposite office AND leave your own office in style. Maybe I am just a sucker for sliding doors.

I didn’t dress up very much for the interview: cargo pants and a tasteful green Charlie-Brown-esque shirt with no collar. I was a tiny bit worried, but not much, because even the people interviewing for the exalted position of Assistant Professor of Linguistics only dress up in slacks and a dress shirt these days. At the interview building, I saw a couple of other candidates wearing full suits and ties. The first one was before my interviews, and I thought, “Maybe he’s interviewing for a marketing job.” Followed shortly by, “I’m not sure my one suit fits anyway because I’ve never worn it.” After the interview, I saw the second guy and I thought “Sucker!”

In fact, it turns out that most people were wearing hooded sweatshirts, jeans and sneakers. The managers I talked to were a little more dressed up, but not much. I guess there must be some Microsoft policy that all people who appear on camera have to wear a Standard Collared Polo Shirt, but that dress code doesn’t apply to the day-to-day working. (Seriously, watch any of their online videos!)

After the interviews, I was really tired, so I ate at the hotel restaurant, Basil’s Fancy Restaurant. Basil was nowhere to be seen, perhaps because there was a conference going on downstairs and a bunch of conference attendees had come up to Basil’s Cocktail Lounge. I meant to walk to downtown Bellevue and eat at a sushi place**, but I was too tired and it was sprinkling again, so I made it through a visit to Seattle without drinking any coffee or eating any sushi.

The plane ride back was uneventful, and my landlord and landlady kindly picked me up from the airport. Then we went to Trader Joe’s, their favourite place in Indianapolis, and they bought various exotic trail mixes and concentrated berry juices. I gawked at all the weird dried fruit.

All told, it was a day and a half of travelling and a day and half in Seattle.

*Particularly the one where a Haskell solution would recursively accumulate IO actions to be sequenced at the end…
**One was called “Sushiya". Sushi bar owners are not creative enough. I mean, In Bloomington, we have one called “Sushi Bar".

Chuck Moore is a weird and brilliant man. He’s the creator of Forth, which would be the language of all machines in the bizarro world for which Lisp would be the language of all programmers.

His writing style in English is something to see. Compact and organised to the point of comedy. Reminds me a little of Rorschach now that I’ve read Watchmen.

He brings his style to the obituary for his wife. You might not get it at first, but it’s touching. Try reading it a couple of times–it’s short but eloquent.

http://colorforth.com/min.htm

Are you truly modern? Can you handle the conflicting messages of the technological world? Then you might like this youtube video:

Age of Aquarius

I probably shouldn’t post when I’m this tired. Oh well. The last LR post is coming soon, probably tomorrow.

Does your point of view change based on whether this video is from 1974 or 2008?

I was really impressed until I saw things I know didn’t exist in 1974. Then it became kind of trivial–not so impressive.

Also, polite conversation in youtube comments!

In conclusion, I am too cheap to buy music so I substitute youtube.

I just switched to Google-supplied university e-mail. Two reasons:
first, I get to keep ncsander at indiana dot edu after I graduate for
free (although it redirects to umail.iu.edu); second, I get 7+ GB (and
counting) of space instead of 0.1 GB (up, grudgingly, from 0.05
GB). I’m sure there’s a catch somewhere; probably after I graduate the
ads that are conspicuously missing from the now-empty sidebar will
come back. Three reasons, actually: address, space, and
reliability. Horde doesn’t work on certain days of the month. I think
it has to do with the phase of the moon.

Wait, four reasons. Among the reasons I switched to “Umail": on
the occasions I am away from my desktop or laptop, I can now use the
Gmail interface instead of Horde, the
high quality Open Source application. (I mean that in a bad way.)
The thing is, after playing with Gmail for a couple of days, I’m not
sure I want to keep using Apple Mail. Gmail’s web interface is pretty
good and its keyboard shortcuts, while not Mac standard, are more
complete. And Mail’s RSS reader, while nice, sure looks outclassed by
Google Reader, although I’ll have to use that a bit to make sure.

Meanwhile, my esteemed colleague in computational linguistics, Josh
Herring, has finally got mutt set up successfully on his Macs,
so now he can use mutt on all his computers. Until yesterday he hadn’t
got mutt to talk to Gmail via IMAP, though. The instructions are not very
clear, either on IU or Google’s side. But I got it to work by sheer
good luck and told him how (you have to specify that you are coming
from umail.iu.edu, not gmail.com, but you still have to set up a
gmail.com password, but you have to do this starting from IU’s Umail
front page).

Now Josh loves mutt (mutt!) so much that he refers to it twice in a
manner similar to those addicted to ed (ed! the standard
text editor). I can’t shake the feeling that there might be something there, if only
the total lack of a mouse interface. I’m going to read up on mutt
this afternoon.

So I am going to decide in the next week or so which e-mail client to
use. At this point I am leaning towards GMail. I like the keyboard
shorcuts I know and I have only learned about half of them. I also
like the idea of e-mail being transparently synchronised between
peregrin and flenser (and vendacious, when I have the audacity to take
a Windows box online). However, I worry about offline access; I might
need to set up my phone too. I also am not sure about backup; Google
is large and nearly omniscient, but not nearly omnipotent. They can
lose things from time to time.

Do any of my kind readers have suggestions? I’m particularly
interested in what problems you have run into with Gmail or mutt,
since I haven’t used either that much.

In other news, it’s finally above freezing in Southern Indiana. Now
maybe some of this accursed snow will melt.