I haven’t been on here much for a week or two because I’ve been distracted with a little project. I had this idea that job adverts are really boring and depressing to trudge through, so why don’t I make a bot that crawls job sites, pulls out relevant information, and just shows me the ones that might be interesting? And then I had another idea that was something along the lines of “well that’s a search engine, isn’t it?”. When you write extremely boring enterprise software for a living you can forget how fun it is to program things that interest you.

In tangentially related news I had the LinkedIn email last week where it tells you that you appeared in 37 search results and your searchers work for these companies. I usually just open and discard these emails on autopilot, with no memory of actually doing it, but this time I opened it and was greeted by the logo of my old employer. I found that a bit stressful. I ended up having a nightmare about still working there and haven’t really felt like I’ve settled down again yet.

How strange is it that it’s almost a year and a half ago and they still cause me so much stress. Part of me is fascinated to know who performed the search though. In theory it would be the HR lady but she could barely switch her computer on at the best of times. On the other hand I always suspected that she was an android, so maybe she was just overcompensating so as not to arouse suspicious, and really has a direct mental interface with LinkedIn.

And on the subject of androids… Battlestar Galactica! I am now probably about a third to half way into S3. I am finding it alternates between completely gripping, possibly the best TV I’ve ever seen, but then it seems like the writers go on holiday every so often and they have to quickly make up some stories that take up screen time but add nothing to the plot. It’s quite frustrating really.