It could have been the shine that they liked

Followup, job: Last Monday's job interview went well. I got on my interview suit, downed my M150 (a bit sweeter than Red Bull), and drove to Chaz's office for a shine in the lobby. I wasn't leaving anything to chance, and got to get his seal of approval before heading down Congress Ave to the interview. Their team was a bit of balance with a few customer issues going on, but I got to talk with the technical guy, with a business guy, and got to have a few minutes with the director of the internal organization before I was back out the door. The technical interview went a bit long, as someone wasn't in the office and yadda yadda, but I connected pretty well with the guy, even though some of the questions I had to answer on instinct rather than remembering all the programming theory. It took them a few days to get back to me, during which time I sent them thank you notes, and started working with some of their code that's publicly available. Sticking my neck out there, I even told the technical guy about the cause of a minor bug on firefox with their free software wizard. He'd seen it on his product's side as well, so that was interesting.

Thursday brought the call back. The HR rep forwarded me some 'homework' to do for a presentation to them on Tuesday of this week coming, so that's what today is going to be - homework day! A bit of CSS work which I've done already, some javascript work to do, and a business case to put into powerpoint. It's all certainly manageable but I'm not going to call it a done deal.

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Followup, clinic: The clinic had a re-zoning hearing scheduled for election day, but on the day before the hearing got canceled. Seems someone at the clinic side or the city side looked it up, and found that since its a governmental agency buying the land, there's a state law that says the city can't stand in the way if the use is appropriate, and there's a development plan in place. Needless to say, the neighbors were and are totally enraged at this. Chaz and I went to the last board meeting for the clinic to present continued support, and the clinic foes showed up waving copies of the constitution, wearing shirts that say "I vote", threatening to bring in the Texas Rangers or the FBI, and just generally continuing to say "we're not poor and you should have put it by the poor people". During my 3 minute presentation, I was in the unique position of being able to say that in the time since I last presented to the board, I'd been laid off, and for better or worse, might well become a patient of the clinic. I'm amazed that the neighbors have so much energy to just say no, but no energy to go work with the board to perhaps get some things done in concert with them, such as community meeting rooms, or a nicely equipped and maintained playground. They've got leverage, but it's being misapplied. I wonder also why the neighborhoods didn't just find someone else willing to pay MORE money for that land and have it sold out from under the clinic, if it was that offensive to them.

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Followup: parties: Chaz had 24 of his coworkers over for a sit-down dinner on Friday. They threw back the wine like noone's business. Next up is Thanksgiving dinner here, then our Holiday Brunch. I managed to get the hallway painted just in time, so that construction project is finished. Construction dust will finally start disappearing.