A post that should have been from last night

I totally skewed some pol's poll the other night. A rather slow-sounding eighteen-year-old guy called me with one of those 60-second polls about local politics, and I didn't have opinions about any of the candidates involved. I should have just said no to the poll or hung up, but I had already answered a question or two by the time we got into the stuff I didn't know, and in the end I humored the poor kid by guessing names. I know perfectly well it's a shitty job to have to cold-call a bunch of strangers and ask them questions, and he probably needed to get a certain number of people to give answers. So next time you read a statistic about local politics, remember it was probably just a bunch of people like me humoring guys like him out of sheer pity. And people like me usually just Google all the names the night before an election and make a decision based on issues.

I have been working, and haven't been feeling entirely recovered from sickness, so I'm taking the night off from working out. (Muscles... turning... to jelly. Shit!) We've been interviewing people for a senior position, and so there have been some interesting talks around the office regarding interview questions. One of the hardest things to measure is whether a person can actually code, so JD and I have decided that ITA Software's policy is pretty smart: write a program and then we'll talk to you. All of which has led to me thinking a fair bit about the "strawberry fields" problem from their job requirements page. I had totally settled on starting witha bunch of little greenhouses and having them merge, until I read the problem definition and realized the program has to accept a limit on the number of greenhouses as well as just minimizing greenhouse cost. Evil!! I guess it's a good thing I already have a job and don't need one of theirs. :b