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Chatham2
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Name: Alan
Country: United States
State: Ft. Lewis
Interests: The unfaltering pursuit of Awesomeness, wherever it may be found.
Message: message me
Member Since:
6/27/2004
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| So I went skydiving Saturday. Expensive, but good.
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| So here's something I found fascinating. McMaster-Carr, purveyors of just about anything you can call hardware, has a warehouse about halfway between here and San Diego, out in Rancho Clara or something. Not that interesting. What is is their distribution scheme. See, around southern California, if you go to any Home Depot or whatever in the morning, there'll be a bunch of day laborers waiting around to try and get some work. What McMaster-Carr does is get a bunch of people, do the background checks and certifies them to work for MMC, and builds a pool of laborers who come by the warehouse in the morning with their pickups. Then they just go out and ask, 'Who wants to take some stuff out to Claremont and Riverside?' or wherever, load the stuff up, then pay them a couple bucks to drive out wherever. So instead of having some delivery truck stop by once a day, load up, then weave through southern California, they just have a ton of small, independent drives going wherever drop off their stuff. Which means you get the stuff you order in amazing time. Like I ordered a fine-threaded insert to reduce a 1/2" to 3/8" last night, and it showed up early this afternoon. The best Joe's had was an order placed at 10 am that showed up before noon.
Amazing.
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| So I've basically been going between being completely busy and doing absolutely nothing for the last couple days. The interview thing went decently; I didn't get called back for a second interview, but they did send a personalized rejection e-mail, and it was sent to me at 10.30 at night, which I consider a pretty good indicator that I don't really want to work there either, since there's no way in hell I'm going to be at work past 7 unless I started at 1 in the afternoon. At the same time, I'm kinda disappointed I didn't completely tank the interview. I mean, it would have made a way better story than 'Yeah, it was okay'.
Actually, the interview was kinda fun. If you don't already know, most consulting interviews consist of the basic interview stuff, plus a case problem. The case interviews are where you get told a problem, and then you have to walk them through how you'd solve it, while they answer questions you ask. There are two types, I'm lead to believe, one where you get a real business problem, like the ones I got, or more abstract ones, like 'How many people cross the bridge from Oakland to San Francisco every day?'. It's kinda amazing, actually, the interviewers' knowledge of the cases, since they don't look at notes or anything but will rattle off statistics and facts.
In the two I got (Oh, did I mention? It was really 2, 45 minute interviews, back to back), I had to figure out if a company who made Lasik machines, amongst other medical equipment, could double their Lasik business in 5-10 years (No, they can't; although they could increase their market share further from the 60% or so it is now, the likelihood of them being able to convince a bunch of new people to get Lasik would either mean convincing a public I don't think will be easily externally influenced more than they currently are, or damaging people's eyes so they need them fixed). In the second one, I had to figure out if this pre-stocked cabinet of lab chemicals that users wrote how much they used down and we automatically restocked it had problems worth looking into solving (Yes; the system has the customers write down and fax in their use every time on whatever paper they have). So it was kinda cool to do that.
Of course, after a full day of classes, an hour and a half interview was kinda exhausting, so I really didn't do anything Tuesday night. Then Wednesday was productive, including 7 hours of work at the studio. But then today, after dinner I put in some laundry then wound up getting stuck on Wikipedia. So 3 hours later, my laundry isn't in the dryer, but I know way more about the Marvel and DC comic universes.
In other news, I keep meaning to write about 2 weekends ago. It was pretty fantastic. I went to my internship Friday and at the last minute we found out that we didn't have the right insurance to rent the costumes the artist needed for his performance Saturday, so we had to cancel. So Mark Allen kinda half asked me 'Well, what should we do?' and I half answered 'We could make milkshakes. I mean, everyone likes milkshakes.'
So we made milkshakes. And Mark Allen found a mariachi band. It was amazing.
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| So I realized that I'm going to be working pretty much the definition of part-time this semester. Yep, between my job at the studio and my internship in LA, I'm going to be working basically 20 hours a week. Give or take a couple hours here and there, but I figure it'll probably wind up averaging around there. So I'm dropping my Poverty class (to go to work, no less), which means only 4 classes this semester.
Oh, I also got an interview with the Boston Consulting Group for a summer internship. I got a call today. For an interview tomorrow. Which is fine, since I'm going to wind up looking like a complete schmuck anyhow, seeing as the rest of the candidates are going to pretty much be finance majors and the hard-core econ types from Pomona and CMC. I mean, the interviews are even at CMC, which is basically now a business school with a liberal arts program (Not actually far from the truth now; they just got a huge donation to add even more finance business programs, so that's basically what's going on). Yeah, so I'm going to be waiting around for my 90 minutes of interview surrounded by finance majors in dark suits who've been studying consulting-interview study guides since November. I don't even own slacks.
On the plus side, I'm pretty confident I don't want to work in consulting. I mean, the guy who called me this morning at 10 sent me an e-mail telling me about where the interview is at 8.30 tonight. Now, he's probably pulling in close to 6 figures, but I just don't think that working 70 hours a week is really worth it. I mean, the most valuable thing I have in my room is this scuzzy old laptop I could get maybe $200 for. After that, I think the next thing is my Nintendo DS/Japanese Dictionary, then the $70 cell phone, then the $43 guitar.
Well, I need to get back to finishing up some discrete math homework....I hate proofs soo much.
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| So I got my new motherboard in today. Which is nice, but it means that I've been working on WikiTXT for the whole evening, and even worse, spending the last hour learning regular expressions in Python, but only to realize that regular expressions can't usually deal with nested elements, like parentheses, or in this case, nested HTML tables.
*sigh*
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