No, the interview did not go well.
The first question was: You have an unsorted array of continuous integers and one is missing – find it. I suggested sorting, that would have worked but was not the solution he wanted, then I suggested a binary map, but that was not the most elegant solution either. With a little help something like o over n or so I determined the min, max, added them up and called a virtual function expectedSum and figured it out.
The next one was worse. Write a C++ function that gets an integer argument and outputs a string hex representation of that number. No functioncalls. Oh, and less than 10 lines. I understood the question. And I wish when I sit in meditation my mind could be as blank as it was when I should have answered. I sputtered masking and bitshifting and xor but did not write a single line.
It was over right then. The SQL question was a nested query, and I did not recover until the shell script questions.
What does the $ sign mean in a bash script … if it is undefined what happens… what does if [ $? -eq 0 ] mean… and a few more, I got these right. Took over an hour, and I am glad it is over…
Month: August 2010
Well, there was a heated discussion about that in California. Leilani was bound to hear it right? And she was so relieved when she got my answer… one of her girlfriends wants to marry a girl. But then it escalated. Well, how do they have babies. And I explained about in vitro fertilization and other medicinal miracles. And boys? There is no way right? If two boys marry they can’t have babies… Umpfh… I was surprised that she got the biology of that right away. I was close to calling gay acquaintance of mine and ask how he got his kids. I tried international adoption and surrogate mothers… no they don’t really sell the babies… they try to make sure they give them to good people nice parents…
7 hours later: I picked up Leilani from the Little Gym. There was a newspaper, and on the front face a photo of 2 men kissing… and they were wearing suits. I had never before seen guys kissing while wearing suits … but Leilani probably had never seen men kissing “Look mommy, the two guys are kissing each other. Are they going to get married?” I felt someone stare at me. Probably the fat lady with the Texas accent and the “We are here to show you how its done” T-shirt who had just complained that Walmart is too far away and they have one at every corner in Texas. I still switched to German, just in case to answer Leilani’s question. And was very happy that I hadn’t dodged the earlier questions.
Bad Aim…
The dropzone… for kids
Lots of friends came, thanks Amy for the picture
Merry Go Round is still a favorite
Still lots of poppies
The Long Nosed Leopard Lizard was huge… we saw quite a few of that kind, but very shy, so we could not get a good photo
A wasp I think
Thistledown
Indian Paintbrush
California Newt
Can you spot the newt here?
“Farewell to Spring” – Clarkia Amoena is my favorite flower. Yes, I took a lot of it’s pictures (that’s about 15% posted here)
The most abundant flower at this season – yellow star thistel
An orchid
I regret that I didn’t photograph Yerba Buena, an herb really abundant on Black Mountain. We only recently learned to identify it but made some delicious tea.
Often Leilani takes crayons or pencils in her pack and draws and writes while camping:
Of course she also takes lots of pictures
The only mushrooms we saw on this trip…
