Jesus, Jazz and Job Offers
Yesterday was St Wenceslas Day. What does that mean? Nothing. Technically, we didn't have class. But I never have class on wednesday anyway.
The decision was made to be the day in which I would go see two sculptures I have wanted to see for a while.
The first, right near Malostranska, is a David Cerny sculpture outside of the Kafka Museum. Two men write out quotes in urine as they piss into the Czech Republic. Website here.
The second was discovered via Geobloggers.
I have no idea if that is the actual title, but I find the sculpture hilarious.
Jesus is right off of Wenceslas Square, so I walked up Wenceslas towards my final destination of Kava Kava Kava. As I near the top of Wenceslas, there is some activity involving a tent, some television camera, a couple of brass intruments and a whole mess of people. Jazz Pro New Orleans, a jazz benefit for the victims of Katrina, was just getting underway. I took that in for a while, loving the fact that I live in a city where music is everywhere. It's marvelous.
Finally got to Kava Kava Kava and commenced downloading of the new Family Guy (which still is not complete) as well as a flurry of e-mails. After e-mails were sent out, I just hung around for a bit, letting my downloads go as long as I could before my battery died.
As I was approaching empty, I overheard this guy ask the barrista for help getting on Wi-Fi. This isn't that unusual for Kava Kava Kava, but this was not the first time this guy was asking for help inside of the past hour. I went over and asked if he would like another computer guy's help. After an hour, he would have taken the help of the accordion guy out front. We sat and tried to troubleshoot his problem, having little side talk about computers, networking, Prague, the Czech women, business and all sorts of other things. For as long as I was sitting next to him at the computer, we weren't able to get online. He was getting frustrated with it all, as he had quite a bit of work to do, so he did the only plausible thing: Get some juice. As he stood up, I asked if he would mind if I tooled around with it for a bit. Between the time he ordered his juice and received it, I had fixed the problem. I shant bore you with the technical details, but it just had to do with some other programs he had running which were causing conflicts. He was impressed. During the course of the conversation we had, he had mentioned that he was in Prague with the intent to go into business in Prague doing web development of established retailers. He had previously worked with a company in Silicon Valley and had been pulling six digits there, but wanted to go into business on his own, and to see the world. So he came to Prague. We talked about scalability issues of various programming languages, portability, front ends, back ends, and everything in between. After I got him online, he asked for my name and e-mail address and then asked if I had ever done a technical interview. I told him I've barely done any interviews. He said that was surprising because I really impressed him through the course of our interaction. He said that if I was interested in coming back to work for him, I had already proven my merit and he would be glad to have an American on payroll.
While I don't really know if I have any interest in following up on this, it was definitely a good feeling to effectively be approached for a job. The signs keep pointing to me doing something with computers...what the hell...I'm a philosophy major. I've taken a grand total of 3 computer related courses in my life, and two of those were in high school, and the college one was just a rehash of one of the high school ones. I don't understand it. Oh well, I can't complain I guess.
Jeff's been in Florence since tuesday visiting Neil Gaiman's daughter. He'll be there until monday. Which is nice for purposes of having the room to myself, but not nice for purposes of working on the presentation he and I are supposed to give on tuesday on Birds, Orphans and Fools. As I was watching the film in class on tuesday, my mouth was agape for a good half of it. I have no idea how we are going to present on it. I don't even know what was going on half the time (the mouth agape half). So we shall see what happens, because Jeff hasn't seen the film yet. I wonder if he knows what he has gotten us into.
The decision was made to be the day in which I would go see two sculptures I have wanted to see for a while.
The first, right near Malostranska, is a David Cerny sculpture outside of the Kafka Museum. Two men write out quotes in urine as they piss into the Czech Republic. Website here.
The second was discovered via Geobloggers.
I have no idea if that is the actual title, but I find the sculpture hilarious.
Jesus is right off of Wenceslas Square, so I walked up Wenceslas towards my final destination of Kava Kava Kava. As I near the top of Wenceslas, there is some activity involving a tent, some television camera, a couple of brass intruments and a whole mess of people. Jazz Pro New Orleans, a jazz benefit for the victims of Katrina, was just getting underway. I took that in for a while, loving the fact that I live in a city where music is everywhere. It's marvelous.
Finally got to Kava Kava Kava and commenced downloading of the new Family Guy (which still is not complete) as well as a flurry of e-mails. After e-mails were sent out, I just hung around for a bit, letting my downloads go as long as I could before my battery died.
As I was approaching empty, I overheard this guy ask the barrista for help getting on Wi-Fi. This isn't that unusual for Kava Kava Kava, but this was not the first time this guy was asking for help inside of the past hour. I went over and asked if he would like another computer guy's help. After an hour, he would have taken the help of the accordion guy out front. We sat and tried to troubleshoot his problem, having little side talk about computers, networking, Prague, the Czech women, business and all sorts of other things. For as long as I was sitting next to him at the computer, we weren't able to get online. He was getting frustrated with it all, as he had quite a bit of work to do, so he did the only plausible thing: Get some juice. As he stood up, I asked if he would mind if I tooled around with it for a bit. Between the time he ordered his juice and received it, I had fixed the problem. I shant bore you with the technical details, but it just had to do with some other programs he had running which were causing conflicts. He was impressed. During the course of the conversation we had, he had mentioned that he was in Prague with the intent to go into business in Prague doing web development of established retailers. He had previously worked with a company in Silicon Valley and had been pulling six digits there, but wanted to go into business on his own, and to see the world. So he came to Prague. We talked about scalability issues of various programming languages, portability, front ends, back ends, and everything in between. After I got him online, he asked for my name and e-mail address and then asked if I had ever done a technical interview. I told him I've barely done any interviews. He said that was surprising because I really impressed him through the course of our interaction. He said that if I was interested in coming back to work for him, I had already proven my merit and he would be glad to have an American on payroll.
While I don't really know if I have any interest in following up on this, it was definitely a good feeling to effectively be approached for a job. The signs keep pointing to me doing something with computers...what the hell...I'm a philosophy major. I've taken a grand total of 3 computer related courses in my life, and two of those were in high school, and the college one was just a rehash of one of the high school ones. I don't understand it. Oh well, I can't complain I guess.
Jeff's been in Florence since tuesday visiting Neil Gaiman's daughter. He'll be there until monday. Which is nice for purposes of having the room to myself, but not nice for purposes of working on the presentation he and I are supposed to give on tuesday on Birds, Orphans and Fools. As I was watching the film in class on tuesday, my mouth was agape for a good half of it. I have no idea how we are going to present on it. I don't even know what was going on half the time (the mouth agape half). So we shall see what happens, because Jeff hasn't seen the film yet. I wonder if he knows what he has gotten us into.