Hair Poll Update

So on the heels of yesterday's entry I got a few more comments on my Quest to Grow Long Hair:

• One reader said I should cut my hair and shave my beard, and offered additional encouragement that she's "always right".

• Another reader sent a one-word letter reading "short".

• I remembered that another reader sent me a letter a week ago saying that my long hair makes me look like "a Californian" and that all I need now is a surfboard and a tan.

Funnier yet was that he related his (female) roommate Kim's observation, which is that she also supports my growing long hair. According to John, she said, "Michael has wonderful hair. Many women would kill to have Michael's hair." So apparently I need to be on my guard against female scalphunters.

(Kim actually said in December when I was up there for dinner that she loves the color of my hair and wants to get hers dyed the same color. I'm not sure what she likes about it, as it's always seemed like a rather ordinary - if slightly shiny - brown to me.)

Well, if I do decide to get shorn, at least I can use my "hair today, gone tomorrow" pun.

I spent a good chunk of today chasing around after a feature I was tasked to look into. This involved sending lots and lots of e-mail around, which was kind of educational but not as much fun as actually programming. I also spent some time lining up some new projects. I seem to think of things I ought to be doing or I think would be good ideas to do faster than I can do them.

I occasionally interview candidates for jobs in my department, and late last year I also started interviewing candidates for positions on Project Builder, another group in Apple for whom I am in a sense the WebObjects liaison, mainly because I'm friends with John and Anders and they apparently have some respect for me or something equally unlikely.

Anyway, I interviewed a candidate for PB yesterday and the "feedback session" was today. I think I'm slowly getting better at doing interviews, although I'm still working on developing a good repertoire of questions to ask, and I need to organize my thoughts better for the feedback session. At my last job, employees other than managers didn't often seem to have a substantial role in interviewing, and I eventually took myself out of what little of the process I was in because I didn't feel I was contributing anything given the way things worked. So I didn't really get much practice at doing good interviews until I came to Apple.

It's quite valuable, therefore, to see more "seasoned" interviewers provide feedback. I think I'm at the point where I need to spend some time before the interview pondering exactly how I want to handle my end of it, if I want to advance to the next level.

Interviewing is obviously important: Who you work with can often make or break a job, and the resources that go to a new employee benefit you as much as they benefit him or the company. So it's a job to take seriously. But it's also, I find, not an easy job to learn.

After the feedback session, which ran into what is my group's usual lunch period, I attached myself, remora-like, to the PB team to have lunch with them, which was fun. It actually reminded me in a way of my first few weeks with WebObjects, where we'd go to lunch and everyone else would be talking about some things which I could barely grasp, but not nearly well enough to contribute more than a few smart-ass remarks to. Back then, it was frustrating and often made me feel stupid. Today, I found the experience interesting in that I could recognize it, and was able to realize that yeah, the deeper meanings of their product is not my area of expertise, and that that was okay.

(But it could be if it had to be. After all, I've done it before...)

The PB guys are nice folks and we also discussed some topics on my plate which was helpful.

Later in the day I headed back over there 'cause I'd left some stuff there before lunch, and I played John at a game of pool. I managed to come back from a rather embarrassing deficit to lose by one ball, which was not bad. A little bit of luck at the right moment and I might have won. (Or maybe I had all the luck I deserved. :-)

Have I ever told you my favorite palindrome?

Doc note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod.

Have I mentioned that Hobbes is another of my heroes? I want to be like him when I (finally) grow up (and not only because of this quality of his):

(© 1996 by Bill Watterson, from the Calvin & Hobbes collection It's a Magical World)