406 Not Acceptable

A few days later and I seem to have converted two job interviews into two job offers. So my current interview to offer rate is around 71% Not bad! I’ve practically handed in my notice (basically I just mentioned that I have offers and will be accepting one.)

Not 100% on which offer I’ll take. One is programming, which is what I want to do; however, it doesn’t pay that much (for a programming job) and would require me to relocate (and pay rent!) I was told on the phone that I had a very well on the interview and had exceptional assessment marks and that they really wanted me; so perhaps there is potential for a quick ascent within the company. To be fair, after a year with them I could be applying and getting jobs that pay £5-10k more; and they probably know this too!

The other is local so I can continue to sponge a free room for a while and get rich. The downside being it’s not an IT job, so I don’t get the magic of ‘experience’.

I am still at my current borefest for a few more days, so I can continue to post somewhat frequently. I then will have some days off, which probably means I won’t post here… I am still working on my ArrayList implementation, so I can get that finished soon (or not!) At the moment it is just a dynamic array, but I feel like using index list; which should give it some more speed… Or I could even make it use a tree architecture…

Tomorrow morning I have to drive my father to Manchester airport by 7am and then drive back to Alfreton by 9am… ouch. I know it takes an hour and a half to drive to Stockport from where I am, but it should be atleast 20 minutes more to the airport. So that means a 5am start and leaves a short period for me to drive to work… Then I have to deal with an 8 hour day of crummy work. I snuck portable Firefox, Notepad++, and Minesweeper onto the work machines via my now ‘permanently attached’ USB stick. Really needed something to do! It’s rather shocking how bad Firefox 3 ran on a P3 machine with 128mb of ram, my eee used to run it better! I am stuck with only one tab…

I’ve again looked at the blog stats after posting some technical pieces and found they do bring the visitors along. So I’ll be mixing ‘normal’ posts like these alongside some techy stuff.

Maybe I should get some sleep

Had an interview in Stockport today, which I found went rather well. So hopefully I now have my foot in the door… The job doesn’t really pay that well, but hopefully it will later down the line!

I had another interview on Thursday, which didn’t go as well as my preparation wasn’t as thorough. I made myself a 2 page ‘interview cheat sheet’ based on the most popular interview questions. I felt this really helped and will probably come in handy another day. I’ll be really happy to get out of the POS boring job I currently have. I can’t believe how crummy it is working in a call centre! It does help with the ‘give an example where you used your customer service/communication skills’ style of question though!

Got to drop off my dad at the airport at 6/7 am on Monday, not really happy about that. I don’t know my schedule until tomorrow, so for all I know I might be expected at 8am!!!

I am going to show a basic exclusion collision algorithm for J2ME. Whilst the Sprite class has collision detection methods, they are not very flexible and are useless when checking how objects collide. For example, in a bat and ball game you probably will want to know which edge the ball collides with in order to bet the ball to bounce correctly.

Exclusion collision detection is done by checking where certain parts of the two items are in correspondence to each other. Basically if the highest point of item A is lower than the lowest part of item B, it is not possible for the items to collide.

In addition, you can order your method based on which direction you are expecting collisions to usually occur from. This will then be more efficient than even the box detection method offered by the Sprite class.

public boolean collisionBetween(Sprite a, Sprite b)

{

if (a.getY() > (b.getY() + b.getHeight()))
{
//Not collided b is above a

return false;
}
else
{
if ((a.getY() + a.getHeight()) < b.getY())
{
//Not collided b is below a

return false;
}
else
{
if (a.getX() > (b.getY() + b.getWidth()))
{
//Not collided b is to the left of a

return false;
}
else
{
if ((a.getX() + a.getWidth()) < b.getX())
{
//Not collided b is to the right of a

return false;
}
}
}
}

//There is a collision

return true;

}
There might be a parenthesis error in here, as I did this in notepad at work. So I couldn’t check the syntax! From the formatting — which Wordpress kindly destroyed — it looks fine though.

As I said, not much to do here. Sadly the internet is monitored too, if it wasn’t I’d be writing up a bunch of posts on here Geez, after doing tons of work at Tesco, I thought being lazy would fun fun… how I was wrong…

Anywho, 2 interviews coming up!

Yep, that’s basically my job. I am supposed to be taking sales calls, but I seem to be getting about 10 a day. So in the 20-40 minutes between each call I just sit around doing a few ‘Killer Sudoku’. Boring, but I’ll take the money right now!

On the other hand, it seems once I get a job everyone else wants me. So the psychologists did get it right, I kind of feel like the toy no-one wants until someone picks it up. I just took part in an assessment day (aka aptitude testing) this week, have an interview with someone else next Thursday, and turned down a crummy christmas job in retail.

I’ve done aptitude tests before and I felt really good about this one. Like most of these tests you had to answer a load of questions in a short amont of time. I worked out that in the first test you had 15 seconds a question! I was happy to actually complete all of the questions, I didn’t feel that it was actually that hard… despite someone commenting that it was practically impossible! The second one had more questions in the same amount of time, but required reading! I got about 75% of the way through; after scanning the others sheets at the end, it looked like they only managed 50-60% of the way. Whilst it ended with one of those yes/no/unknown comprehension tests, which wasn’t that bad.

I really feel that I passed these tests. Especially when there were a few jobs going and less than a dozen of us taking part. I was actually shocked at how much help some of those taking part needed with the example questions for each section…

So unless something strange occurs, that should be two interviews next week