Lili’s bloggy

This semester I’ve had the most travel of my entire life. I had 3 out-of-town interviews: Seattle, Twin Cities (Mineeapolis/St.Paul) and Charleston. Almost every weekend I went out of state, and stayed in different hotels. I learned something about interviews: the more interviews you go through, the more you prepare for the next one, and the more you know about your self. Every time you have to explain to them about yourself, your skills, and answer technical and non-techinical questions, you learn how to solve and divide and conquer your problem.  Even though I was tired through all these interviews, I am really grateful that I had lots of them. I did not pass some of the first interviews but sometimes I made it to the second interview.

At the end I had two offers that I debated for soo long liked so much because of the environments and also (hehe) the $$$. But one offered much higher $$$ than the other one and I saw that my career would grow faster.  I liked the starting date they offered, it made me be able to stay here in Atlanta with Vasily for awhile and we could then move to the new city together. I am afraid going to a new place alone … thinking of living there alone and knowing no one except people at my work.  But now no more, because Vasily will move to the same city after I move. I felt lucky for having everything - a new job, new city and a really nice boyfriend : )

Yipeee ….. I passed my first interview with microsoft and they asked me to come to Redmond for a second one. So i arranged my travel with them .. was really easy to take care of it.

I decided to go on Saturday, which gave me extra days to spend in Seattle and also gave me Sunday to prepare for the interview. Fortunately the Russian was able to company me there, thanks to him begging his dad for a plane ticket using some of the frequent-flyer miles he has collected.  So it was a nice time - spending a little holiday in Seattle, everything for free including plane tickets, hotel for 3 days and car rental.

My car rental

When we got there, we traveled through seattle, downtown, the space needle, the international park … and ended the day in pike’s public market - a really exotic international place.  I liked this fish market soo badly, because it reminded me of my hometown.  They sold lots of fresh fish, and the way they sold them was really interesting: everyone was singing and they threw fish from one person to other like the bartenders from the Coyote Ugly movie. The other cute thing I saw there were lots of flowers shops (I love flowers).  The prices were not too expensive, and they were really cute … not only roses, but lilies, daisies, sunflowers, etc., making the market so colorful and lovely.

However I didn’t like Seattle too much, I prefer San Fransisco still.

We spent all of saturday downtown. The next day, we went around Redmond, nothing much there, just looking around the surrounding area. We ended up eating in an Indian restaurant, and the Nan (bread) was sooo goood, the best Nan I’ve ever had. I love food if you don’t know me well, but I am a bit picky , not like the Russian who can eat everything …. We chatted with the waiter and asked him regarding the living costs in seattle (I like to know how much $$$ I have to ask for, before the interview…)

After our lunch, we went back to hotel and practiced lots of programming problems, just to make sure that I know how to solve them and to explain it clearly. The problem with technical questions is that sometimes you are too nervous and forget everything or maybe you want to solve it right away without thinking through all the possibilities. I read from the internet that Microsoft likes the interviewee to explain or give the algorithm before writing code. So I practiced that a lot, and during my practice, Vasily noticed that I always said "everyting like that" and made lots of assumptions without explaining them. Phew - good thing he noticed and let me know before my interview.

Monday, Vasily dropped me off at Building 19 (the hiring building), and I walked inside (btw, we went a day before to check out the building and took some pictures hehehheheh).

I was nervous, really nervous, and the lady at the front desk asked my name and gave me a nametag and asked me to wait until my hiring HR lady (Marie) came to pick me up. So I waited around 15 minutes until she came out, and she took me to her office and gave me some questions regarding my status and starting date …. she also gave me tips how to "divide and conquer" each question … really nice tips. She also asked me this as a warm-up:

   "Imagine you are a librarian in the Microsoft Library, and
    Bill Gates calls you one day and asks if he can borrow
    a book, and you check the database to see that the book
    is available.  So you tell Bill Gates to come to pick it up,
    but after you hang up, you realize that the book is not on
    the shelf.  What do you do?"

She wanted to know how I will divide and conquer the problem, and then she explained what mistakes I made. After finishing with her, she took me to the interview car, a honda car, really small one, and this car drives all the interviewees around every day.

I jumped into the car, and had a bit of conversations with the driver. He said that every day there are 100 people interviewing with Microsoft …. ooooo my God ….. to make the story short, I had 6 interviews, only 1 lunch break….. Microsoft’s cafeteria is way better than GT’s, and they have 13 different cafeterias!

I was so exhausted after the interviews.  I skipped the dinner with Microsoft because I had to go back to Atlanta since my flight departed at 10 pm, and the interview was finished at 7 - no time for dinner. But I ate a realy expensive dinner at the Seattle airport with the Russian (and Microsoft paid for us).

How you pick your children names? based on your husband/wife name? someone in the family? meaning?

I think everyone should her/his children names unique……..how hard it is?   

Really interesting day today (March 1)…really a good start of the month

Couple interesting researches were discussed inside the class such as: sms stringer bus, and graffiti.

SMS stringer bus would allow us to send sms messages to find out how far or location of the busses, so we don’t have to wait too long or in the cold weather. Yipeee, does not have to find a computer and log in to check the buss again : ) mobile computing and network are really paid off

Graffiti is nice and interesting one too. It would allow us to leave a comment regarding places we have visited or stayed. The users would use PDAs or mobile phone to read or write opinions to/for other people. I remember when I just graduated from my junior high school, I really wanted to leave my name on one of the walls inside the school, however I was not able to. I knew if I wrote something, someone would paint the wall back and my "autograph" would disappear. So this software would able to save those kind of stuff that I wanted to do. This would be a really challenging software to complete

……………………………………………………………………..time to search more about GIS