Once again, I’m writing a look back instead of a travelogue. Oh well!

I am not Andy Lester. I do not have piles and piles of advice on getting hired. Every time I go through the hiring process, though, I gain a bit more wisdom to share with applicants. Here is some for you today.

More and more, I’m dealing with lots of mostly-JSON web service APIs. I enjoy this. It’s simple, and tends to work well. I think JSON is a really nice format to work with. I had a discussion with Ingy and a bit of the #yaml gang about things I don’t like about YAML (largely it’s implicit types) and I ended up thinking that YAML wasn’t quite as insane as I’d thought. Still, from the perspective of clarity, JSON blows it out of the water.

If you can’t handle even this light amount of attitude, you probably should stick to … I don’t know what. Support from consultants?

I really liked “Mexican Radio,” the one hit by one-hit wonder Wall of Voodoo. I bought their album, Call of the West, in college, and I liked it, and that was that. I didn’t know they’d been around before or after that album, and hadn’t really thought to look into it.

I see a lot of crazy email content and headers. I should post more of them, just for giggles. Here’s one I found sitting in wtf.msg in my home directory at work:

My house is a three home unit. There are three living units side by side, each with a third of the porch, a third of the yard, and the same amount of space, more or less. Our unit is at the south end of the house. For much, much longer than we’ve lived here, the residents of the north end of the house were unchanged.

I skimmed both the DM’s Guide and the Monster Manual today. I’ve been really busy and I don’t think I’m going to give either one a really good read, although I read one or two chapters of the DMG in full.

Disclaimer: no, I haven’t reread Chapter 9 yet. I just remembered a few things I had wanted to mention.

It’s been ages since I played AD&D 1E, so these memories may be a little confused. As I recall, there was no unified skill system. You had such and such percent chance to be able to climb a rope or jump a certain distance, but they were all just table after table of lookup. Every class had its own table for all manner of common things. When I played AD&D, my friends and I had memorized all kinds of tables, or at least the page on which to look. (I seem to recall that an important lookup table is on p. 91 of the 2E PHB.)