The Apprentice Columbus Casting Call

So, like a complete lunatic, I decided to head down to the Apprentice casting call at OSU on Saturday morning. The temperature was a balmy 30 degrees with a nice wind, and I was outside with 600 of my closest friends waiting in line to try out for the show.

Why try out? I joked to my director at work about it...and well...he told me he'd give me the leave of absense with no worries. (Unlike the dude on American Idol tonight who got fired and still got unemployment...musta looked REALLY HARD for that job....)

Anyway, it was sorta a joke that started out with some friends at work, and I said, f it...I'm going. So I get there a 7:15, and ended up being 228th in line. I was done interviewing at 12:30. So I don't think that was too bad...I could have been nuts and got there at 5 am, but those guys didn't get out of there until 10:30...so total time was the same. We were outside until 9:30 shivering. It was quite nice to get inside.

Outside the line snaked all over the place. I have pix of that following. There were all kinds off goofballs. One guy in a suit with a lime green shirt. Another guy in an all blue suit, another one in all yellow metallic suit. It was very wierd. But the BEST was the woman in the orange jumpsuit dressed like Martha Stewart. The suit said "STEWART" on the front and "CUP CAKE CORR. FAC." on the back. It was absolutley brilliant. I doubt she'll make it to the next level, but who knows?

When we finally make it to the interview, it's 14 people in a room and one "casting agent" with someone filming us. I had a strong suspicion that someone was watching that video feed, and yet, I still found a way to bomb it. ;) It was horrible topic for me. Oh you see, we had to debate a random topic...ours was legalizing prositution. Which of course I knew stuff about, but didn't feel like I "really" knew it. So I didn't want to spout off about something I really didn't know. Mistake #1. I should have just gone off. Everyone in there was stating how Vegas has it legal, which is complete bollocks. If I had just started destroying everyone's assumptions, I probably would have had a shot at it. Instead I held back, because I wasn't comfortable in the situation...still scoping everyone out. Unfortunately a 10 minute round table discussion gives you about 40 seconds to make an impression.

Unless I get a call tomorrow...I'm not in...and I'm not holding my breath. But tremendous practice for next year...assuming the show hasn't Jumped the Shark....it may already have withe the announcement of the Martha show.

Here's the pix...it was a lot of fun to go...I'd do it again.


Waiting in line at the Apprentice Casting Call

Waiting in line at the Apprentice Casting Call

Waiting in line at the Apprentice Casting Call

Waiting in line at the Apprentice Casting Call

Cup Cake Correctional Facility

I'm just amused

Probably should be upset, but anymore things like this just make me laugh

Why CD101's Modern Rock History Month Rules

At 9:15 on Wednesday, I was driving home from the gym. Because of Front Stage 101, the top of the hour Modern Rock History block didn't start until then.

So with the year being 1980, what did they play? A double set of Dead Kennedys. When was the last time you heard them on commercial radio before midnight? When was the last time, period?

Good to hear California UberAlles and Holiday in Cambodia again. Reminds me of a guy I grew up with named Ben. Ben claims it was my fault for getting him into punk by getting him a Duran Duran record for his 7th birthday. Ben was pretty hardcore into it. He was in a band in college called...erm...well...this is a family blog... OK so I can't say what band he was in, but it has something to do with a certain activity requiring two men and a woman. Let your imagination run wild.

OK, back on topic. Ben used to sit near me in home room, and he knew all the punk. Used to listen to the university radio coming out of Philly and knew all about the Dead Kennedys...used to sing the songs. Had the Dickies and Buzzcocks t-shirts.

I hadn't thought about him in a while...it's very cool to have a band or song (esp. Holiday in Cambodia) bring back memories about a specific person. Unfortunatley, his name is so common, googling doesn't bring back anything relevant.... Maybe he'll see this and say hi :)

Good news for Mill Run Fry's

On Thursday I discovered two things.

The first was that my eye doctor has an office besides the one downtown. Now, I've been in Columbus over 8 years, moved several times. But it wasn't until I ended up talking to the eye doctor a bit more that I found out that they have a practice in Mill Run (5 minutes away).

Now, what's even more interesting is that the office is right next to Mill Run's old Big Bear store. Which if you've popped up in here by searching for Mill Run Fry's Marketplace means that you heard all of the rumors about a new store to replace the old Big Bear.

Apparently they are hard at work in there, the eye doc told me it's quite loud with hammering and such. So this is great news. It's a bit of a Mill Run rebirth, probably due to the new Home Depot and Target going in on the Hilliard just North of Mill Run. With finality that a Fry's, or just a Kroger Marketplace going in, the convienence factor of where I live just went up. The new California Fitness going in there might just help a bunch too.

So all around good news for the Fry's...errrr....Kroger Marketplace at Mill Run

Google Maps

Our friends at Google are at it again with a "super cool" mapping application that blows everyone else away. Not sure how this app works yet...and probably haven't just searched the net enough to find out how.

But it's damn cool!

Howard Lewis Ship - Brilliant, Self Promoting Jackass, or Both?

Check out Howard's latest missive on The Server Side.

I'm not sure what to think of this guy. Every time he lays out a well thought out post, that everyone can learn from, helping to make their own mind about stuff....he ends up ruining it.

He outlines a fine commentary on why people get confused over IoC and/or DI:

I have seen a common thread among people who "don't get IOC" that they confuse an object constructor with the construction of a service.

The object is not the service (it's a key part of the service, but not the service itself). The object's constructor is not the services constructor.

Adding more code never makes things simpler! This kind of heavy weight approach just shifts the design towards more heavyweight, monolithic services. I prefer the opposite ... small, easily testable services with minimal dependencies.

And then proceeds to screw it all up with the following self-promoting lump of crap:

In Tapestry 3.1 (which is built on the HiveMind microkernel), most of my services inject fewer than three collaborators, often just one or two. So, even though there are dozens of individual services, testing is under control because no single service is that complicated. I know the system works because I do very complete unit testing, plus a good amount of automated integration testing.

What the hell is that? Why does this guy repeatedly ruin any good commentary he has by being so brazen to self promote his next consulting gig? It's highly obvious it's what he's doing, despite any claims otherwise. I can't believe he'd be that naive when it comes to posting.

But, just in case he is...Howard, take a clue, and just put it in your sig. At least then you wouldn't be tooting your own horn so much trying to make people think you're so freaking cool. How Tapestry/HiveMind does things is not part of the subject. Maybe you should blog about it and have people click over to your site to learn about it.

Perhaps "take it to email" needs to be updated to "take it to your blog". That's why I'm posting this here and not on that thread! It's not relevant to the thread whatsoever.

Java Weenies Part 2

Checkout this crap.

This is what I mean when I talk about Java Weenies. It's not so much that they're bitching just to bitch. People wax poetic about open source solutions, but don't even want to contribute to the process to make the JCP standards better. It's just bitching upon bitching.

What really amazes me, is the Spring-like features of JSF that are largely ignored by these weenies. The faces-config.xml with it's dependency injection is amazingly powerful. It's a brilliant solution, and yet, people want to complain.

Here's the thing weenies. If you want to keep using Tapestry, or some other technology. Use it! But don't bitch years down the road when a JCP technology has more job postings or more people wanting to know about it.

You see, here's the thing about Tapestry, it's been around for how long now? It's on what version? And how many real users does it have, building real hard core sites? Freaking PHP has more real users than Tapestry!

But here's the thing...I'm glad Tapestry, WebWork, JSF, etc. are around. Competition is good! And admit it, you really didn't want Oracle or IBM mucking in with your OS framework did you?

NO! Wow....then stop bitching. Make constructive comments...but stop bitching and whining. It's not good for interviewing for your next job using JSF.