unhandledexception.net Your Birthdate: May 25
You excel at anything difficult or high tech.
In other words, you’re a total (brilliant) geek.
It’s difficult for you to find people worth spending time with.
Which is probably why you’ll take over the world with your evil robots!Your strength: Your unfailing logic
Your weakness: Loving machines more than people
Your power color: Tan
Your power symbol: Pi
Your power month: July
May 28, 2007
What Does Your Birth Date Mean?
May 26, 2007
My Microsoft Interview Experience : Part 1 – Getting Invited to Redmond
In this multi-part series, I will detail my interview process at Microsoft, following which, I got two offers from them, one was with the Operations and Services Management group and the other with Windows Terminal Services group. I have not made my choice yet at the time of this writing (flying back to Montreal at 10000 meters in the air), but I can assure you this is the most difficult part of the interview.
Also, I don’t intend to make this post a repository of Microsoft interview questions because all you have to do is google up a few keywords (there are a handful of sites listing these out – yeah, take a look at them). Also, merely knowing many interview questions won’t make you ace the interview, it will just make you look stupid when the interviewer will call you on a random problem he just thought of.
The reason for blogging it in installments is not to crave attention (personally I don’t quite like the kind of attention Digg provides). Rather, this story may get long, and I don’t want writing it to fall on the back burner. So, without further ado, here’s part one.
I guess by the time I finish writing this I will be back in Montreal. I just finished watching what I had of Heroes, and I’ve only got like 15 minutes of battery left.
I have submitted my CV to Microsoft several times over the last two years, once last year when they came over to CUSEC 2006, during last fall’s career fair at Concordia, and during Microsoft’s “meet the company” event hosted at Concordia last month. I had to skip geology class for that, but I really really don’t regret it.
Following the last event, I was called in the same night for an on-campus interview with a Microsoft employee the following morning. A couple of general questions, along with a whiteboard program. I didn’t think much of it: I had plenty of work to do around that time, it was in the morning, and I was totally unprepared.
About a week later, just before I finish school, I get invited to the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond for a day of interviews in May. Since I have some friends there, I decided to make it a 1-week vacation (Microsoft pays for only 3 nights at the hotel)
So, I arrived in Seattle friday, that gave me a weekend before my interview to spend with my friends, so we went around on Saturday, then Kayaking/Picnic on Sunday. Monday was reserved for last-minute review (totally useless actually), moving into the hotel, and getting a good night’s sleep before the interview.
The interview morning, I go down to get breakfast and ask the front desk for a cab to Microsoft. I was actually quite surprised not to spot other candidates. The funny thing is that everybody around there knows that you are there for an MS interview, so they keep on asking you about it and try to put you at ease. Really nice people!
I promise, part 2 will detail the interview process! I should finish writing it over the next few days.
When the Internet dies…
It happens once in awhile, very unfortunately, regardless whether you have cable or DSL. The Internet dies, the modem’s link lights flash in a desperate attempt to connect to the ailing network.
The question is, what do you do? Just like many people, e-mail is my primary means of communication to the outside world, and I depend on it for my primary source of entertainment. I can’t live a day without checking my e-mail! It’s so essential!
Last Thursday night, my internet connection dies. I call my ISP, Uniserve, thinking it’s another network problem, but surprise, problem’s on my end! They will send a tech within 48 hours to fix it.
48 long hours! I can hardly wait that! What if the modem’s the culprit! Then, I’d have to wait until like Monday to get it replaced? Nah. So I unhook my modem to try to debug it. I hook it to my laptop through ethernet to try to access its configuration, but the thing won’t give me an IP address! I try setting one myself, to access 10.0.0.2 (the private configuration IP), but nothing. Okay, I reset the modem, NOTHING!
At this point, I call back my ISP, and after some checks they agree to replace the modem, which I could go pick up the next day! That’s what I call good service from a small, local ISP. Kudos!
So yesterday night things were back to normal. Now I just hope this thing won’t happen too often when I leave, because I won’t be there to debug this stuff.
May 17, 2007
My Microsoft Interview Experience (Short Version)
As you might already know, I had an interview with Microsoft in Redmond on Tuesday. Well, guess what. I got offers, with both teams I interviewed with, and I now have to pick one. I am really excited! I will be filling in with the details in a future post.
I’m coming back to Montreal on Monday. I guess the next thing is to sign the deal, then figure out the details of moving out to Seattle!
May 7, 2007
Laptop died, got a Mac!
The unthinkable happened last weekend. My TTX laptop totally died on me. I was trying to resume it from hibernate, but the thing kept loading windows and shutting off. Okay, maybe something’s wrong with the hibernation file? I press F8 and “Delete the restoration data”. Then, it shows the windows logo, but before it switches to the GUI, it shuts down. OK, try again. This time, It doesn’t make it past the bios screen and it hangs forever. Maybe the hard drive’s a goner, so I will boot off my trusty Gentoo CD. It just won’t boot anything. At this point, I’m totally screwed, since the CMOS setup won’t even run. I press F2, it says entering setup, but then hangs. So, I went out and bought a memory stick to see if it’s the ram, but nothing changed. Maybe once or twice in like 100 reboots it made it past the BIOS screen!
Now, I have to tell you this summer, I was planning to get a new desktop, in the high-end range, worth about $4k, and I was hesitating between getting a Mac Pro or building it myself. So, I guess the opportunity for me came to explore the “other side”, and I took it. I bought a MacBook Pro today. The 15″ one, with a dual core 2.33 GHz CPU, 2 GB RAM, 120 GB HDD, 256 MB Graphics. One MEAN machine! Of course it comes with all the bells and whistles, like the webcam (which is of pretty good quality must I add), the snag-proof power cable, the illuminated keyboard, etc. The real downside, is that these things set me back over $3000 with the taxes.
So, what the hell is somebody interviewing with Microsoft doing getting a MacBook Pro? Having fun of course! The geeky kind of fun 
And you know of course you can *always* install Vista on this thing… in fact, it’s one of the few machines that will actually run it well!