I made french toast this weekend and added cocoa powder and chili powder to the liquid. It was good.

and one I would probably not enjoy

@TasteFive If eating chocolate was your job it would kill some of the magic.

well, I gotta head

ciao!

Later.

@rfusca later

I went on a recruiting trip this last week.

during the non-technical part of an interview I asked "Tell me about a time when you took initiative."

@Sobachatina What for?

The response: "Well.... coming to this interview..."

@Sobachatina ha

I suggested he might come up with a better example that everyone I interviewed hadn't also done.

Software positions.

I was interviewing CS, CE, and EE majors.

Graduates?

BS.

I mean were they recent graduates, or did they have work experience?

Sorry- bad answer.

This was at a University. It so happened that I was interviewing mostly interns so they haven't even graduated yet.

We hire the vast majority out of college.

OK, then it makes more sense.

Before they've become jaded.

That is a good question though, I like it.

(btw, there is somebody on eBay selling Scharrfen Berger for $5.75 / 3 oz, but gives no shipping price for Europe, probably at least as much as the chocolate itself. I wonder if it's worth it.)

@Sobachatina I didn't mean to interrupt your interns story, still interested to hear how the students made asses of themselves :)

@rumtscho That's a little harsh- they're nervous- and I wouldn't count that against someone unless they couldn't come up with something else.

It made me laugh though.

I like interviewing- I think it's fun.

I didn't mean to be too harsh, I still remember my first interviews out of university too well.

I just wanted to share the fun/laughing part.

i hate going to interviews. I don't think that I come off well in an interview

I've had the same job since college so I haven't interview much since then.

@rfusca I hate being the interviewed part, and don't care much being the interviewer, but just sitting there and forming an opinion isn't such a bad chore.

the last guy I interviewed with at HP was frankly a little crazy. They gave some technical test and he said that I did very well, missed 1 (somebody else said that their interviewer said the average was 50%)- and I asked 'which one? I'd be interested to know' and the dude just went ape shit crazy! 'Listen! There is one right answer, and its our answer. Don't argue with the test!' ...I hadn't said anything about the test being wrong, i was simply curious...

the interview went downhill from there

I had one interview, when still a student

this was a company which owns airplanes and leases them to big companies like Lufthansa

they had their office in the poshest suburb of Munich

they wanted me to write a Web application for them

a bit of a SCM thing, the customers would have been able to take looks at airplanes and book them in advance over their web page

ya

@Sobachatina who do you work for?

They wanted me as a part-time student employee, that would have been 15 to 19 hours per week

and wanted me to build it in 3 months

"this is very easy" they said

ok...

They showed me some kind of diagram in the interview, it had to be a class model I think

They had built it themselves, or had some McKinsey consultant build it for them

@rumtscho that is how my cousin got hired at his company. they game him some time to submit it. He went out and bought a book, went through the lessons, and got the job. he is now one of there senior project managers.

and showed it to me and said "this is less than 10 classes, it'll surely be possible to complete in 3 months half time"

I was stunned at their attitude.

I would have had to make everything, database, logic and design

not to mention testing and stuff

and their class model was so idealistic

lol ya

1:1 relationship between airplane and engine

I mean, do they really throw out the airplane if the engine has to be replaced?

There's no way I could have made that stuff in 60 work hours.

And it would have been some ugly commuting too.

I said no and they were very unhappy about it.

It looks like they didn't have that many applicants.

i'm sure somebody commited to it

I wonder if they found a student willing to do it, and how he fared.

i started out doing data entry for my current employer, part time as a student, but got done so fast that they gave me other stuff to do and eventually it ended up being internal dev work lol and then here I am

i'm often shocked at how fast chat just bam dies

@rfusca And now they think you can develop with the same speed as entering data?

@rfusca I think we're all doing other stuff all the time.

@rumtscho who says I can't? ;)

I have the screen estate to keep a separate chat window on top so I can see the movement caused by a new message, but sometimes I go afk or don't pay attention. Or just have nothing to say.

indeed

@rfusca From what you told me about your workload, you probably can. Still, it is not a good thing to let management know it :)

Or rather, if you can do it by engaging all your reserves, it is a bad thing if management starts believing it is your regular speed.

@rumtscho lol ya, i always get high marks on productivity. lately they've been setting deadlines a little too tight though. We had a production release on Friday and they were still testing about an hour before release - and it was an incredibly complex process. Luckily no errors found in prod yet

@rumtscho ya, but at the same time - i HATE what the other devs do. They let them think it takes insane time for simple things. "I need a single field thats already in the source data stream added to this report" "that'll be 65 hours to develope and 40 for testing"

"ya, ok, that sounds normal"

sigh

The way you told it last time, it sounded like they relied on there being no errors. That's the bad part in my opinion, not requiring you to work without slacking off.

my company does the most insane things

@rumtscho ya, thats in that one large system. I also develop for another one of our apps.

@rfusca OK, that's the other extreme. Surely, it is even plausible if you are working on a product like Windows, but you probably aren't.

@rumtscho definitely not. Thats like a 10 minute change lol

@rfusca There was a great post by Raymond Chen once. In Windows, changing one line of code could easily amount to man hours of work, because it has to be translated to all possible languages, made compatible with all kinds of standards, and then tested for all different languages with all the different types of hardware.

so here's one insane thing...they just figured out that its a good thing to do some form of log rotating (my idea) so that you don't end up with 150gb logs . But they've got it on a daily rotate and if you need to start a new log manually...there's no service you restart or anything, they want you to change the date on the server to tomorrow, temporarily.

Which somebody did today and caused a panic and all sorts of alerts to be generated because it suddenly indicated that all the data on the box was 24 hours old

And of course, you need massive coordination, because all this work is done by different teams.

@rumtscho ya, i read that . Its definitely not us though lol

@rfusca This sounds sad. As in, they have no experience with IT themselves, but don't trust you the developers.

Although, maybe your coworkers aren't to be trusted, if the 100 hours for a field change is a common example of how they work.

and even more scary is that our DBA of the last 5 years doesn't understand the difference between our db isolation level running in Read Committed vs Serializable and thinks that everything is default repeatable read inside a default transaction :(

its just an insane company to work for IT wise....its like a bunch of guys slowing discovering shit that everybody else knew years ago (this is strictly our division though, the rest of the company is much more sane)

Is your manager a recent business school graduate who is trying to prove his worth by leading a seemingly easy internal project?

I've seen all kinds of bad stuff happen in such a situation.

nope. My particular manager has been with the company for like 20 years. The manager over the particular application I've been referring to has been there near 10 years.

Luckily, I was only involved as a consultant (I got an internship as a QA consultant after I said no to the airplane database development).

nice

But even though this means I've seen more IT horror stories than usual, I think that wherever you go, you're likely to have to work with somebody too dumb to do his job, like your DBA.

You just learn to work around it.

I have a friend who told me about their sys admin

@rumtscho btw, how'd the stew turn out overall?

@rumtscho ya, dumb people are a plague

management said he had to block facebook and youtube on the corporate network

and he blocked them

until somebody noticed by chance that he had just entered the landing pages of the sites on some blacklist or such

which meant that facebook.com still functioned perfectly.

lol

Lol, this automatic link parser.

https://facebook.com

I'm fortunate to not work with anyone unqualified for their job. So- logically I must be the one.

and they've been using it forever

you know what my management told me a few years ago? I had to tie network blocking of facebook and such into our time clock system such that if somebody is clocked out on lunch or break, then they can access it - but not if they're 'on the clock'

and this guy hasn't even thrown a look into the logs to notice it.

lol awesome

@Sobachatina Maybe you just got lucky and your whole team including you is awesome.

@Sobachatina so again, where do you work? lol

Or maybe you just haven't hired the wrong BSc yet.

@rumtscho Yep. Let's go with that.

@rfusca This doesn't sound too bad. Even if they are ignorant, they try to be fair to you.

@rfusca National Instruments. This posts violates several of my personal internet information sharing rules. I hope you appreciate our slightly less anonymous friendship.

The one thing I hate above all is an unfair boss.

@rumtscho ya, but thats not exactly simple to do lol

@Sobachatina lol i'm sorry. You simply could have said "I'd rather not say"

feel free to delete the post if you like ;)

@rfusca Yes, I understand that. Still, it shows some level of caring for the employees.

@rumtscho eh, i guess lol

If he doesn't have the knowledge about what can be reasonably expected of developers and how a well managed process should look like

and if he doesn't believe your suggestions

maybe he will believe external consultants?

@rfusca I just want you to appreciate the magnitude of your request. :)

@Sobachatina then i appreciate it ;)

Hey room owner. Can you delete that post? I can't anymore.

i think it has to be an actual mod

Ah well.

@Sobachatina I can't delete messages, only mods can.

it is waaaaaaaaay too easy to find out personal info on people though

Maybe you can flag it for a moderator, if you don't mind the mods finding it out about you.

@rfusca Sure, it's terrible

@rfusca While this is true I try to keep personal information separate from this username.

I read a big German magazine on IT

@Sobachatina sure

they made an experiment once

You could piece together who I am but it would be a much more difficult search than by my name.

went to a random IT specialist

well looks like I missed alot

some developer or similar, anyway a person who was expected to know his way around computers

and asked if they may try to cyberstalk him and publish the information they found

@Sobachatina ya, i'm easy to track online and i'm ok with that

In the preliminary interview, he said he's OK with that

and said he believed that there wasn't any overly sensitive information available about him on the internet

they did the research

starting with only his full name

they quickly had the usual professional stuff, but of course it wasn't anything problematic

and then they found some small link to a personal account somewhere

and from there, they had everything

they could piece together his home address, his wife's name, his children's names

also where wife&children go to work and school

at which time everybody leaves home on a workday

The first three pages of my user name are all me but the most sensitive is a video of my daughter playing with some homemade bots. Various forums including this one. You could find out a lot about what I like but, at least on the first three pages, there is no connection to my name.

when the whole family is away for church or visiting the grandparents

google.com/…

and then they had his fotostream on flicker or somewhere

who am i

@rumtscho Of course- most of that you could have found that all out- just not from the comfort of your home.

lol

so they could make a list of all the electronics in his house

Sometimes it is good to have a very popular name

and they had a good reconstruction of the layout of his home

So they had practically all the info they needed for a burglary or kidnapping

And they didn't even know him before. They couldn't have gone to his city administration to request records on his past or similar, because they hadn't known which city he lives in before he started.

@rumtscho I hate it when people phrase studies like that in an alarmist way. Most of that information could have been had 60 years ago from a phone book and the rest from a casual stroll past the house.

Admittedly it is easier now but it still isn't scary.

@Sobachatina Are you sure?

Which phone book would you start with if you don't know the city?

And even if you knew it

you would need days of stalking

If you were looking for a real person then you would have an idea where to start with the city.

Perhaps days of research- and more days of stalking for times, etc.

waiting for family members to come out, make sure that the child is his child and not the child of his third floor neighbour

and you wouldn't get pictures of the inside of the home. A burglar would probably love those.

I suppose. I consider pictures of the inside of my home to be protection from burglary.

Or a Facebook announcement saying "We'll be in Mallorca for the first three weeks of August"

@rumtscho Sure- only an idiot would post that to the general public.

The person in question was really creeped out when he saw everything

and he didn't allow them to publish the information after all.

He only allowed them to tell what they had found, but not the actual names.

@Sobachatina your voice is totally surprising to me

:)

This is you talking behind the camera I suppose

So suave and masculine.

Yep.

lol

I don't know what I imagined it to be like, I only know your real voice is nothing like what I imagined.

i'm assuming the video with the rocket is actually you

you can't be too paranoid...there's a shocking amount of info under that username

And the fourth hit is SA... we should be proud of that.

Lol, I had forgotten that I had a Wikipedia account at all.

Don't think I ever made anything with it.

But it's on the first page of googling my username.

I check it every once in a while. Time to do it again apparently.

doesn't matter, wikipedia domain ranks wicked high

Really, I have all kinds of accounts I don't remember. What did I need a DeviantArt account for? I'm sure I never created anything worthy of DeviantArt.

@rumtscho lol

The link is also called "llama badge" but the page to which it points says that I don't have any llama badges, whatever they are.

lol searching my screen name probably gives more info about me than my real name

It used to be that I was the only thing you would find for sobachatina.

Now I'm only about half of the first page.

:(

@Sobachatina But you chose a common name.

?

I wanted to ask you where you photographed the nice cathedral

when I realized it's some Russian girl's photostream containing the picture of a mongrel dog lying on the street.

lol

:)

@rumtscho- Are you familiar with that bit of Russian grammar?

@Sobachatina I'm not 100% sure.

tina or ina at the end of an animal is the meat from that animal.

Sobachatina is dog meat.

Oh, lol, I forgot that part

Yes, now you say it, I remember it.

Back when I was choosing usernames I found the fact that they had a word for it hilarious.

I confused it with the building of a slightly pejorative form.

Turns out it's an uncommon word to begin with an used to be never found as a username.

Yes, I can imagine that it is uncommon :)

Well... enough about me.

@rumtscho- you don't have anything but programming in the first three pages of your username.

@Sobachatina Does Google show to you something different than to me?

I was amazed to see an account at the Cutter and Taylor forum on the first page

I made the account because I needed to read some posts and they were members only

but I never posted anything there

It didn't show up in my first three pages.

I also didn't know that their domain ranks higher than Yahoo answers or SmugMug

its scary when my 3 year old is playing quietly in her room

There are some lovely pictures on SmugMug though.

@rfusca I agree it's a red flag.

the last 3 times thats happened we've discovered she decided to paint her walls...brown

BTW, if you can track any activity under the programming links, you'll see that it's places where I've created accounts in order to ask questions of the sort "please help me, it's broken"

@Sobachatina I'm glad you like them.

I just uploaded my smallest photo folder when I made the account, to see what it would look like

And the conversion software I used didn't read the sidecar files, so they are with absolutely no post processing there

It is by no means a selection of my nicest pictures or anything.

lol

Time to go catch the train. I'm glad we've had this bonding moment.

ciao

@rfusca see ya

@rfusca ok, so you always say ciao. Are you italian? or do you just like saying it?

i'm still i around, i left earlier, came home and now i'm chilling at home while i make some pie dough

just like saying it

sometimes I say tschus

@rfusca, you are right. The pages under your user name are more interesting than the pages under your real name :)

yup

@rumtscho Not much comes up under my username :( but it is relatively new

And your pictures are beautiful. I feel ashamed for taking worse ones with a technically worse camera.

which pics?

On Flickr.

How did you light the glass?

ok, so i have to ask. Has anyone watched the chew

gosh, i haven't updated flicker in forever

@TasteFive I don't think so. What is "the chew"? A TV show?

@rumtscho yeah its Mario Batali and Michael Simons new talk show

Cool, I should try it out.

never heard of it - the chew

But I've promised myself to post process all my existing pictures before i take new ones.

In May, I was on a beautiful mountain peak in Bulgaria.

lol ya

Not very high, only 1415 m, but with a view to 6 other mountains.

@rfusca its on abc. haven't seen it but I think it aired yesterday so i am just wondering

I shot for a panorama

hmm ic

This would be my first panorama

still haven't tried to make it.

@rfusca, ever stitched a panorama?

@rumtscho a few, not many

How did it go?

And which software did you use?

@rumtscho went ok

used 'Hugin'

Do you have an example somewhere online?

hmmm, none that I can think of

i don't do many at all

i'm not much for landscape in general

i need to figure out a filling for my dark chocolate almond pear tart

@rfusca is it not going to be pear?

j/k

lol

sliced vanilla honey poached pear on top ;)

So, by now you have pastry dough and what?

well there's a almond pastry dough and i'm poaching the pears right now

Are the pears cooked into the chocolate somehow, or placed in pieces as a separate layer?

so you are needing some sort of custard then

ya, i'm thinking a whipped dark chocolate custard of sorts

@rumtscho laid on top

hmm, chocolate and honey?

@tastefive ?

Hmm. I hope that by "custard" you mean the real, egg containing custard and not just milk cooked with starch.

lol, yes, I mean egg and all

I am not going to be much help as I am not a huge chocolate person

chocolate is very dark, so its on the bitter side - the honey helps balance that

Are you melting the chocolate directly into the custard, or making a ganache?

haven't decided yet

And you won't use any other thickening agent, just rely on the eggs to set?

i'm thinking probably a thin ganache that is then thickened somewhat with the eggs and then whipped. I want it to be a bit on the 'light' side, since it will also be one the rich side

eggs + whipping

I would probably do a chocolate coating to the pastry, fill it with a nice vanilla custard and top it with the peaches some extra honey and some nuts.

Never heard of whipping a prepared custard.

now you have :)

@tastefive almond going on top as well

@tastefive thats definitely not a bad idea though, the coating and vanilla custard

Have you made that before? My feeling is that the chocolate will prevent the custard from setting, resulting in a very thin custard.

@rumtscho ya, i've made a chocolate custard before, it works fine and sets fine

@rfusca Either I made a terrible logical error, or you use much less chocolate than I would.

Or much more, so that it is the cooling chocolate that thickens the custard instead of the egg proteins binding.

its pretty chocolately...

its probably a combination of the two

So, you are making ganache with a slight egg content? I suppose this works, and should be more whippable than a "normal" custard.

ya

shrug all I know is that it works

well, dinner calls!

But for my taste, Taste Five's idea is probably better. Separate chocolate coating with the full flavor (a thick ganache for that), and a separate silky custard layer. Then pears and honeyed almonds on top.

I am off, got to start on the polenta

@rumtscho ya, i'm considering that now too - its a solid idea

Then I wish you both a nice time cooking and go to bed.

See ya'll

thats right I said ya'll

tschus

lol