Well, Saturday came, and not surprisingly given my recent sleep schedule, I didn't make it to aikido. I woke up in time, but decided I was just too tired to cope. I did get to the map sale eventually, but that ended up being a little bit of a disappointment: if they ever had maps of the Bay Area or the Northeast, they were gone before I got there. What they did have was generally small-area maps ("quads", areas about 7.5 minutes by 10 minutes) of many, many places that I would not recognize and have no interest in visiting. If you needed random corners of Arkansas, Idaho, Colorado, Utah, or Arizona, you were all set.
I have a job interview tomorrow, of all the freak occurrences. Rachel forwarded me a job posted to an email list, and I mailed the guy saying I'd just finished a job with UCSB; today he asked if I could talk on the phone, and was I still at UCSB. I said I was not working, and I worked from home here in Oakland; he responded almost immediately asking if I could come into the office tomorrow. Which, hmm, let me check my calendar, what am I doing tomorrow...oh, right. Jack shit.
The only catch is that this is a telecom sort of company, doing Voice-Over-Internet sorts of things. Now, I learned a bunch about that back in 1999, but I never actually coded anything. And I checked the bios of the management on the company website, and they're all nerd managers from various telecom-oriented companies. Given that the CEO/Co-founder is my contact there, I'm guessing the company is small (in fact I'm only assuming that this is actually a paid job), and it's very possible the execs will be interviewing me...in which they can ask me lots of hardcore technical questions I don't really know the answers to. So, time to study.
Later...
Well, our hero has been plowing through Voice Over IP, a book he bought back in 1999 when he actually did some VoIP stuff. The book is, according to Amazon reviews, actually not that great, but since our hero has no knowledge of the material, it's pretty good.
Our hero is currently stuffed full of arcance acronyms regarding voice packetization and compression, and telephony and Internet backbone standards. Ever wonder how technology really works? Don't. You'll live longer. Go play in the park or something. Leave the arcana to nutcases like me who inexplicably have both the ability and the interest to learn it. *grin*