The interview track

Well, this week has been a double interview week - two different companies, two different places, and both things that I think I'd like to get.
I'm always a bit ambivalent about that, as on one hand - if they both say 'yes' then I'll have to choose - and that's only if they both say yes at about the same time. On the other, if either of both say 'no' then having 'held off' because I had an app in the works already is shooting myself in the foot.

One's storage, ones 'general datacentre (including Storage)'.
The first one has fed back to the recruiter that they were impressed, and would like to make an offer, but need to sort some paperwork first, because of redundancies elsewhere in the business. (Also international). That might take time, so we'll see what comes back - I'm not naive enough to assume that means I've got it though, just that I shouldn't cross it off my list just yet :).

The second - the general datacentre - is birmingham based, which is good. Payscale is attractive, and the 'generalist' side of things appeals from a career development point of view - I'm really very specialised at the moment, which means I can command a premium in my niche, but it's not that big a niche. And a lot of it is central london, and/or 'big companies', just because it's only when your IT environment hits a certain size that it makes sense to have SAN storage, and a dedicated storage management team.

Had a good chat with the guy recruiting, and think I managed to come across quite well. I'd hope to get some positive feedback from them. The thing that's made me slightly edgy about them, is that they're keen on the notion of certifications, and suggested that might end up a prerequisite in any potential offers they made. On one hand, I don't mind taking a job with a rise in 6 months if I do the training.
On the other, if I end up taking up a reduced payscale conditional on my doing it, then I'd find that insulting.
So we shall see there too. If they do come back with positive feedback, that'll apparently need a second interview with HR.

So no hard and fast results as yet, but my CV is looking a bit more shiny, and I've had a couple of interview dry runs. And I don't actually stop getting paid until December, so ... well, yeah. We'll see.

In other news, I've figured out that Chrome is great on a netbook, because it's lightweight, and you can do 'create application link' to create chrome instances per 'thing'. Like GMail or LJ.
It also supports the Facebook 'beacon' option - provided you set 'allow pop ups from www.livejournal.com' under the settings. (By default all pop ups are blocked, and silently, so you won't notice it not working).
Add in gesture navigation, adblock, flashblock and the 'LJ extension' for chrome, and it's quite good, and all importantly lightweight.

Zen Koans, and questions of faith

So one of the ideas I was pondering recently - I had just been to a funeral, and my mind was going in all manner of odd directions.
In Zen Buddhism, you have the concept of the Koan. Which is: "a story, dialogue, question or statement, which cannot be understood by rational thinking, but may be accessible through intuition."

Now chances are if you've run into the term, you've had it get a bit garbled - much like haiku, what it means to 'us westerners' isn't the same as the original meaning, as it gets lost in translation.

I've always rather liked the notion, that you have 'something' that acts as an axis for insight to revolve around. A question for which there is no real correct answer, merely a state of mind or insight which the question frames.

Which lead me to the notion - previous I've rambled a bit about faith. The problem with faith, is there's a lot of circular references there - faith is, because faith is. Define God, and chances are that definition precludes analysis.
So if I ask the question "Is there a God?" then I will get as many variants of an answer as people I ask. And that should be so - to give someone elses answer: "Even though that is true, if you do not know it yourself, it does you no good".

The question and the answer are in many ways irrelevant. The contemplation of the question, and the self awareness one can derive is what's important. Here's where it goes wrong though - Organised religion invites you to accept someone elses answer to the question. How can that ever be right? Atheists are much the same though.
We can argue this question back and forth, and never reach resolution. That's good, as long as whilst we do so, we're open to the self awareness that contemplation of a Koan may lead us to.

Teamspeak 3

We've just moved from Ventrillo, to the new version of teamspeak.
I have to say, I'm just not impressed. You see, I used to use 'CAPSLOCK' as my Push-To-Talk button in Ventrillo. I don't use it normally, and ventrillo has this really amazing 'discard hotkey' option - effectively turning 'off' my capslock key, whilst I was using voice comms.

It seems teamspeak isn't quite so enlightened. Now I'm going to have to use something else. Which is annoying, as capslock is a rather useless key in general, and quite well placed. But I can't really accept toggling ALL CAPS on and off every time I use it.

Or just run it on my netbook or something I guess.