Here is a video of the law enforcement torch run coming into TD Waterhouse stadium:

Here are a few pictures leading up to and including the opening ceremonies (hit “Next” in the bottom right corner to flip through all pages):

This post is from Ryan Price’s blog.

Special Olympics Summer Games

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This post is from Ryan Price’s blog.

Random Pics

TELUS health space Announcement

It is 7MB and a clip from Global BC news. Should play in most media players, but if you have trouble use VLC.

This post is from Ryan Price’s blog.

TELUS health space

I have seen the calendar in person and its stunning – you won’t be disappointed.

This post is from Ryan Price’s blog.

Support Art with a Heart

Anyway, its up. So go take a look.

This post is from Ryan Price’s blog.

Portfolio Is Up

I don’t understand the purpose of the line, “I don’t need to drink to have fun.” Great, no one does. But why start a fire with flint and sticks when they’ve invented the lighter?

Have you ever been walking down the street and realized that you’re going in the complete opposite direction of where you are supposed to be going? But instead of just turning a 180 and walking back in the direction from which you came, you have to first do something like check your watch or phone or make a grand arm gesture and mutter to yourself to ensure that no one in the surrounding area thinks you’re crazy by randomly switching directions on the sidewalk.

Do you remember when you were a kid, playing Nintendo and it wouldn’t work? You take the cartridge out, blow in it and that would magically fix the problem. Every kid in America did that, but how did we all know how to fix the problem? There was no internet or message boards or FAQ’s. We just figured it out. Today’s kids are soft.

I would rather try to carry 10 plastic grocery bags in each hand than take 2 trips to bring my groceries in.

The only time I look forward to a red light is when I’m trying to finish a text.

A recent study has shown that playing beer pong contributes to the spread of mono and the flu. Yeah, if you suck at it.

Was learning cursive really necessary?

My brother’s Municipal League baseball team is named the Stepdads. Seeing as none of the guys on the team are actual stepdads, I inquired about the name. He explained, “Cuz we beat you, and you hate us.” Classy, bro.

Whenever someone says “I’m not book smart, but I’m street smart”, all I hear is “I’m not real smart, but I’m imaginary smart”.

How many times is it appropriate to say “What?” before you just nod and smile because you still didn’t hear what they said?

I love the sense of camaraderie when an entire line of cars teams up to prevent a dick from cutting in at the front. Stay strong, brothers!

What would happen if I hired two private investigators to follow each other?

While driving yesterday I saw a banana peel in the road and instinctively swerved to avoid it…thanks Mario Kart.

Obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died.

I find it hard to believe there are actually people who get in the shower first and THEN turn on the water.

I would like to officially coin the phrase ‘catching the swine flu’ to be used as a way to make fun of a friend for hooking up with an overweight woman. Example: “Dave caught the swine flu last night.”

Bad decisions make good stories

Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after DVDs? I don’t want to have to restart my collection.

There’s no worse feeling than that millisecond you’re sure you are going to die after leaning your chair back a little too far.

I’m always slightly terrified when I exit out of Word and it asks me if I want to save any changes to my ten page research paper that I swear I did not make any changes to.

I hate being the one with the remote in a room full of people watching TV. There’s so much pressure. ‘I love this show, but will they judge me if I keep it on? I bet everyone is wishing we weren’t watching this. It’s only a matter of time before they all get up and leave the room. Will we still be friends after this?’

This post is from Ryan Price’s blog.

Random Thoughts

In total there were ten of us hired into the Learning Development Program (LDP) I applied for. Nine of us started last Monday and our tenth team member will be joining us around August I believe. Everyone is friendly and we’re all in the same age group. We’ve also met most of the team members who are one year ahead of us in the program. We have at least another couple days of training to go before we get into our first projects.

The way our program works is for the first year we do a series of smaller projects (2-3 months or so). After finishing one project, we will join another one. The new project is likely going to put us into a new roll in a different portion of the business so that after the first year we have an idea of the different teams and projects within TELUS.

After the first year, we move onto what they call “Rotations”. These are a series of two or three larger projects (6 months or so) and are also in different areas within TELUS. After those rotations are finished we should find somewhere we want to be within TELUS for a longer period of time and have an idea of where we want to go with our careers.

Today we were introduced to a few of the projects we can get into, and almost all of them seemed fairly interesting. We submitted our top 3 choices to our manager today and will find out shortly what we’re working on. I’m not sure which are public knowledge and which are proprietary so I’ll just play it safe and not talk about any of them for now.

Looking forward to next week. Oh, and we’re going to Wonderland at the end of the month

This post is from Ryan Price’s blog.

TELUS: One week in

The First Interview
I attended an information session on campus about Microsoft I (obviously) decided to apply. After reviewing my resume I had an interview scheduled with a recruiter that would be at my school for a couple days. I think his name was Cyrus.

This interview I found pretty easy to be honest. There was a lot of emphasis on my past experience. Although I don’t remember everything I was asked, I do remember the following:

• Tell me about the project you’re most proud of
• What’s the best piece of software you’ve ever used? Why?
• What’s the worst piece of software you’ve ever used? What would you change? Why?
• Write a function that takes in a string and returns the number of words in the string. (I was free to use whatever language I wanted)

After the interview was over I was told I would hear back in a week or two if I made it onto the second round. I was fortunate enough to make it onto the second round and was invited out to Seattle. In my particular case I had a pending offer from Telus and so I needed to complete the process quicker then usual.

With just over a week until I had to get back to Telus (who were accommodating and gave me some extra time) and 4 exams in 6 days it didn’t leave me a lot of time. I wrote my 4th exam on Thursday morning and flew out to Seattle that afternoon. It was a lot of travel. I went from London, Ontario to Detroit to Seattle which took about 7 hours with the layover. From there it was another hour or so until I got off the plane and got my rental car (also covered by Microsoft).

I made my way to the hotel, checked in, and did a quick practice run to Microsoft’s campus to make sure I knew where I was going. It wasn’t more then 10 minutes away from my hotel. By this point it was about 1:30am local time; that was 4:30am for me. I set the hotel alarm clock as well as my blackberry’s and went to bed.

I got up around 7:00 for my interview which was scheduled for 8:15 that morning. Had a quick shower and shave, watched SportsCentre, went downstairs and had a quick breakfast and off I went. I got there about 8:00. I read a few reports where people got there early and were embarrassed to sign in that early. Don’t worry about it. In fact, get there a good half hour early as you’ll want time to play with the toys they have.

Once you check in they give you an ID badge, a card for lunch, and an envelope to file your expenses after the trip. Once you’re all checked in you are free to hang out anywhere. They have Rock Band set up, some candy and chips out… I’m sure there was water somewhere too. Personally I went straight for the Microsoft Surface. The wack-a-mole game seemed to be the crowd favourite for us.

Unfortunately I was there to interview, so I didn’t get to spend the whole day playing Rock Band

My recruiter came out to greet me. It seemed to me that her job was primarily to make sure any worries or doubts you have about Microsoft or moving to Redmond are answered and taken care of. For me, since I was coming from Canada, the worry was how the move would work. For the record, Microsoft has an entire department that will take care of the move should you choose to go out there. Another of my concerns was whether or not my girlfriend would be able to get out there as well. They were very accommodating.

Interview 1 – Chris Boyd
Chris was a project manager on MS Project. Specifically, with SharePoint. We walked the maze of hallways to his office. Everyone there has their own office – no cubicles that I saw.

Chris asked me to design a user interface for a task management program for tracking tasks related to any number of projects. After asking some clarifying questions, I sketched out my fairly standard design on the whiteboard. He asked some more clarifying questions, made me defend my design choices, and then asked me draw the database schema for that design.

After that I was asked to design what was essentially a job board for a rural area. As I worked my through it, it was revealed that the job board was going in a developing area where the people may have never used a computer before. In fact, they may not even know how to read or write.

Purdeep
After my interview with Chris I was passed just 3 offices down the hallway to Purdeep (I never did get his last name). This was probably my favourite interview of the day and also the one (not surprisingly) that I think went the best.

I was asked:

• Design an alarm clock for the blind
• Given a job queue with a priority assigned to each job, how would you execute the jobs? What if each job belonged to a group and you had 3 threads to process the job. What if there can only be one job from a group being executed at any one time?
• Describe what happens when a page is requested in your browser? Whats the difference between HTTP and HTTPS? How does SSL work?

As I mentioned, I had 4 exams just before flying out. One of them was information security in which we studied SSL in detail. I think I answered that question with more detail then he had any interest in hearing

Thomas
My next interview was with Thomas (I forget his last name). This was my lunch interview so we started by going to grab some lunch from the cafeteria there. For most of the time during lunch we just chatted away about various things. It was more me asking him questions than the other way around. After a while he asked me how I would improve the cafeteria. Once we finished lunch we went back to his office.

One the projects I had done in the past, a fantasy stock market on the Facebook platform seemed to especially interest him. We spent a good chunk of time discussing various aspects of this project. From there he asked some more questions about Facebook. He had me draw the Facebook UI on the board. We then discussed ways it could be improved and ways that Facebook could grow in the future. I had a ton of ideas here that I felt were solid answers to all his questions.

Now, I knew this was a critical point in the interview process at Microsoft. If you’re sent home after 3 interviews it’s a sign that you’re likely not getting the job this time around. When I was told I was heading to building 36 to meet with some sort of higher-up I was confident I was on the right track.

They had a campus shuttle come pick me up and bring me to my next interview. After checking in with reception and waiting in the lobby for about 20 minutes I was called back to reception and sent back to the recruitment building. Damn.

I had a quick debriefing with my recruiter and was on my way home. I wasn’t sure whether something came up where the person I was supposed to meet with couldn’t make it or if they had taken time while I waited to compare notes and decide that I wasn’t a fit for them right now I was too awesome to handle right now.

In the end I didn’t up receiving an offer. I have accepted another offer at Telus and am excited to start there in the future.

Hopefully this will help others interviewing at Microsoft in the future as so many other people’s reports helped me to prepare and know what to expect. Good luck!

This post is from Ryan Price’s blog.

My PM Interview Experience with Microsoft

So far I’ve had interviews with Telus, IBM, and Microsoft. I’ve been fortunate so far and have made it through to the second round on all.

Telus
My first interview at Telus was a phone interview for the Business Transformation Leadership Development Program a mouthful, I know). It’s essentially a 3 year program that lets you develop and find your niche within their company. The second interview is on Monday and requires me to do a presentation on a project that I’m particularly proud of. I’ll be presenting on the fantasy stock market Facebook application I made two summers ago. This job would be based out of Scarborough.

IBM
I’ve had one interview with IBM so far. The position I am seeking there is “I/T Professional, Interactive Communications”. The first interview here was also a phone interview and was with the manager of the team. They deal largely with middle-ware for call centers. There was also mention that I could be a good fit in another team that deals with the self check-in kiosks in airports. I have a second in-person interview on Friday (a week today). This job would be based out of Markham.

I also have an in-person interview for an SAP/Oracle Consultant a week Monday. This one is two 45-minute interviews back to back and would be based around Ottawa.

Microsoft
Microsoft hires for three main positions when recruiting new grads: Product Manager, Software Developer, and Software Testers. From there they evaluate your skills and try to match your skills to a team that has an opening in their company. I applied for Product Manager, which means I would be responsible for writing the specs of a product among other things.

The first interview was an in-person interview on campus, and was my first technical interview (meaning I was asked technical questions and asked to write a little code as well). The interview went well and I was lucky enough to be asked to come to Microsoft’s main campus in Redmond for a second in-person interview.

Microsoft’s interviews are notoriously tough and I plan on being prepared. From what I have been told and read elsewhere, the process is something like this:

1. First screening process: your resume is evaluated and you are selected for an interview
2. Preliminary interview in your local area or over the phone if there isn’t a recruiter available in your area
3. If selected, Microsoft flies you to Redmond for a grueling day of tough interviews. I’m told it will be 3-5 hours of one hour technical interviews with different people. From what I’ve read online, if you don’t make it past the 3rd hour you’re not likely to receive an offer.
4. If you’re fortunate enough to dazzle the recruiters at your interviews throughout the day, you’re likely to receive an offer at the end of the day

I’ll find out when I’m flying down in another week or two.

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$100 NHL/NFL Challenge Update
I won my $20 bet on PIT Penguins beating the BOS Bruins, which paid $41 ($21 profit).
I lost a $10 bet on DET Red Wings to beat the VAN Canucks.

I have no bets right now, and my balance is currently $186.47

This post is from Ryan Price’s blog.

Interviews Keeping Me Busy

I’ve been interviewing for a bunch of jobs lately at places like Microsoft, Telus, and IBM. They’ve been more work then your typical interview as I need to make sure I’m ready for the technical questions that come up. I’m confident I know my stuff, but in the world of software there’s just always more to learn. I love it.

Hopefully I’ll find a company to call home in the not so distant future and won’t have to worry about job hunting come April.

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As for my $100 NHL/NFL challenge, I lost my last bet. I must have missed something because I actually have an extra $20 in my account, maybe a bonus was released. Anyway, the current balance is $163.87.

Tonight I’m betting $20 on PIT Penguins to beat BOS Bruins (sorry Uncle Rob). I stand to win $40.10.

Go Pens Go!

This post is from Ryan Price’s blog.

Busy Times