usa job typing

I'm a programmer, and I'm on vacation today. Guess what I'm doing? As much as I'd love to tell you I'm sipping Mai Tais in the Bahamas, what I'm actually doing on my vacation is programming. So it's a "vacation" only in the HR sense – I'm taking official time off work, to give myself some free time to get my computer game back online. It's a game I started writing about ten years ago, and spent about seven years developing. It's been offline for a while and I need to bring it back up, in part so the players will stop stalking me. It's going to take me at least a week of all-day days, so I had to take a vacation from work to make it happen. Why did my game go offline? Not for want of popularity. It's a pretty successful game for a mostly part-time effort from one person. I've had over a quarter million individuals try it out (at least getting as far as creating a character), and tens of thousands of people who've

I had an exciting morning of not getting fired today. Get this: I'm on a trip to Google's Mountain View headquarters, and was glancing at Reddit between meetings, and lo and behold, I was inexplicably in the Reddit Tabloids again, this time for being fired, or so people were speculating (far too hopefully, I might add. Geez.) Needless to say, I immediately put all my other work-related plans on "pause" while I tried to figure out whether I was, in fact, being fired. Can't accuse me of not having my priorities straight! It turns out it was a minor mixup by an automated system, a system that decided to jump-start its own evolution by going directly from brownian motion to VP-level decision-making (2 evolutionary hops total. Hee.). This automated system had apparently just watched the movie Brazil , and thought it would be fun to send me off to Information Retrieval. So my account was disabled, from which lonely data point the Reddit crowd concluded that I