We athletes run around and round

There has not been actual progress on my job-getting. But there's been stuff that feels like progress. Lately I've gotten the feeling that, in board game terms, I've finally built my engine for job-hunting and I'm getting ready to use the engine. For example, last week I dropped a bunch of applications in on LinkedIn's Easy Apply system and scored two interviews.

One's for a medical testing company in Tennessee and that one slightly worried me as that's, you know, stuff you absolutely have to calculate right and that's a lot of responsibility. But the job they're hiring for is not about evaluating tests; it's about reporting and communicating results. That's still important, and important to get done right, but it's a much lower level of stress.

The other --- one that I thought so little about that the night before I was going through my e-mail, trying to work out what the heck company I was interviewing with --- seems like it might finally hit, though. This is a Geographic Information Services position, working for (a company working for) the federal Department of Transportation. So right away we were starting with a job up my alley, and then as we discussed it I learned the job was much closer to what I had been doing for my big project at the old employer. The interview was scheduled, according to the e-mails, for 45 minutes, and it in fact ran just under ninety, which sure seems like a great sign.

Or possibly the interview e-mail was confused. Over the course of things the interview turned to technical details and I understood the programmer was probing my technical knowledge. But I was never clear what level of technical detail he was looking for. At one point it got into what has to be done for an interactive event where you click on a map and get a report on the map item clicked on, and ... I think the interviewer was asking about things like where you set the listener event and what parameters you have to pass where. That's stuff I tend to think about on a higher level and he kept re-asking the question until I got down to, like, well, you send a post query to the server with parameters about the viewport and the click location and what layer and projection you're working with and all that.

The point where I felt most unsure was when he asked if I knew what was meant by 'var self = this' and, like, var, sure; that's how you set the scope of a variable's definition. 'this' you use to later curse yourself for using 'this'. 'self'? I haven't seen 'self' in a Javascript context and owned up to it. It turns out to have something to do with closures; he asked if I knew what they were and I could give a loose high-level definition of them. Closures are a computer programming concept very important to people who write blog posts about computer programming concepts. I've gotten along all this time with only a vague idea what they're good for, if anything, and it hasn't hurt me, unless this costs me this job.

And I'm not sure it will. Like I say, the interview ran long, and it got cozy and informal in some promising-feeling ways, like we were doing some shop talk about obscure map projections. And their big project is exactly something I had done at my old work, like, including using the same mapping software and overseeing the same transition from one version of OpenLayers to a new.

It all felt really good. And I know I've felt good about jobs that I was clearly a good fit for before. But, gads, it's been fifty weeks now; something has to break soon and I really hope it's not me.

Getting more through the day at Canada's Wonderland here, but not nearly done yet. Here's some more pictures.

Thunder Run, built into Wonder Mountain, is another of the park's original coasters, and it's an always popular one with a considerable line. The line does move well, though, since the train has like eight thousand cars in it.

The little roof behind the Thunder Run sign gets people tossing mostly scrunchies and elastic bands onto it, but you can see how people will toss pencils, pens, swipe cards, all that stuff.

As we got up to the level of the launch station we could see upper levels of the trees and what I think is a squirrel drey?

The maker's plaque for Thunder Run with all its manufacturing information.

Crew of the Year signs, and for this actual ride! Thunder Run was thinner in 2012, apparently. Also, aren't these the same years that Drop Tower was Crew of the Year? Huh?

Now, finally, getting on to Leviathan. I love the dragon-tail theme of all the signs.

Trivia: Among the cargo lost to the outbreak of World War II in 1939 was fifteen tons of grass seed waiting to be shipped from Poland to the United States. Source: The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession, Virginia Scott Jenkins.

Currently Reading: All Natural Pogo, Norman Hale.