While I told a few of my friends that I had been rejected by Google, I never publicly announced this fact. I think it’s a little unfair to my readers here, so, well, here you go, I got rejected. ;)

[We] have scheduled you for 2 technical phone interviews on January 22. The first is with Rob Konigsberg from 1:00pm PT - 1:45pm PT and the second with Rob Clevenger from 2:00 pm PT - 2:45pm PT. They will contact you at […].

Your technical phone interview may include questions from one or more of the following areas: coding, algorithms and design and problem solving. We recommend you spend some time exploring our website to get into the right mind frame. Google Labs is a good starting point. We also recommend you take a look at our resume and interview tips pages as well.

Well, I’m not very good at answering coding questions but we’ll see how it goes.

Starting tomorrow, I’ll only have two more weeks of work left to go. It’s been a lot of fun and I think that we’ve really made something special here, but it’s also been extremely draining on my part. That statement actually carries a lot of weight when you consider the fact that I’m hacking on code day in and day out minus the occasional break here and there to catch up on some Japanese animation.

The next two weeks are going to be pretty fuzzy as we cram in as many presentations, demos, and conference calls as we can to try and find some interested party that’s willing to route some resources this way to turn our project into a reality. We just had one on Thursday and we’re going to be doing another one on Tuesday. I also believe that we’re going to be presenting to our sponsor on Wednesday. We’ve actually never presented to him nor has he ever seen our demo, it’s actually kind of disturbing. So here’s to hoping that he won’t think that funding this Extreme Blue project was a waste of his budget. ;)

I’m typing this blog post inside the ILC (IBM Learning Center) at the moment. It’s pretty much free time for the Canadian teams until the 1530 meet-up of all Extreme Blue teams back at the auditorium. I’m just catching up on emails and CVS updates at the moment. I’m also logged in onto various IM networks and IRC channels, just lurking around.

It’s been pretty uneventful thus far here at the ILC though life’s going to be a lot different when we do our presentations and demos tomorrow. ;)

Alexei’s going to be by with the airport cab at around 0545 to pick me up for our flight to Toronto at 0730. I set my cell phone’s alarm at 0445 and I have to say that I’m pretty awake right now.

And now this is the end of this blog entry since I’m going to shut down and pack this ThinkPad T60p notebook away.

We’ll be having our local expo at IBM Ottawa’s Palladium Lab today. The two Extreme Blue teams from Montreal will be down here with us so there are going to be four teams in total pitching and demoing and answering questions in their own respective rooms. I’ve been told that the other EPIC students also have their own posters as well and I imagine will be talking about what they’ve been working on thus far in their internship. We’ll be leading the first of four pitches, so we’ll be setting the bar for the next three pitches. The bar may be low or it may be high, but at least we can say that we did set the bar for the teams. ;)

All of the work that has gone into our project since the first day on May 14th has finally come to an end, per se. Of course, we’ll still be doing work after the expos, but we’ll be in low gears then for the most part. Anyway, we’ll be doing this local expo today and then an expo in Markham will follow tomorrow in the Toronto Lab along with the other two Toronto teams. After that, we’ll be flying out to New York on Friday and then having a dress rehearsal on Sunday, pitches on the Monday, and the demos on the Tuesday. We’ll then be flying back here on Tuesday night.

So, of course, if you don’t see me on any IM networks or IRC channels, now you know why.

In an attempt to comply with IBM’s BCGs (a TLA, three-letter acronym, that stands for ‘Business Conduct Guidelines’, which ironically when you think about it the company’s name too is a TLA), I have switched my wallpaper.

Igor still disagreed and felt that it was not “work safe” because of Shana’s miniskirt, but quite frankly, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. Compared to some of the other ones in my repertoire, this really would qualify as being one of the more conservative ones. Since I’ve set my presentation scheme to automatically switch to using an Eclipse wallpaper when I hook up to a projector, I should be relieved of any embarrassing situations in the future.

I really do like this wallpaper and can see myself using it even after I’ve left IBM at the end of August.

I was talking to Nitin a few days ago and my wallpaper post got brought up and he noted that I should’ve linked to my “offending” wallpaper in my post. It hadn’t occurred to me that those of you that were reading these posts from an RSS feed wouldn’t really bother visiting my actual site to see my “current wallpaper” on the right column. Besides, my wallpaper may change in the future, so that isn’t really a useful point of reference.

So behold, I present my wallpaper to those of you reading this in an RSS reader below, my “offending” wallpaper.

A week or two ago, one of the technical interns from the other EB team asked me if I’ve ever considered starting my startup after finding out that I’m actually an Eclipse committer. I pretty much just shrugged it off.

Really, the thought has never crossed my mind and I’m really not the kind of person that would do something like this. If someone I know needed a hand, I wouldn’t mind having a lengthy discussion to see whether I was a fit for their new company. However, I just really don’t see myself being the one to take the initiative.

Yesterday I was told to make sure I changed my wallpaper before I start demoing to people because an anime character isn’t exactly the best of ideas. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t reflect well on me professionally, but I guess there’s just no love for Shana here at IBM. :(