Not necessarily in that order.

Ugly: On call at 5:22 am due to someone abusing the site. After emailing to say that I blocked them, the abuser emailed “Ooops, we’re sorry, didn’t mean anything by it, just for research and all that.” Then while I am letting them sweat and taking my time in replying, bozos call the NOC (in Pasadena, no less, so NOC once removed) and say “Gee, we think we are being blocked, can you check and unblock us? This is really important.” They can suck my left nut and I’ll be halfway to unblocking them at this point. Too bad they are in australia or some other RIPE-allocated backwater, they would need a passport to offer me oral pleasure.

Good: Excellent interview with people from Search. This was my #2 but it is rapidly becoming my number one. In some measure this is because the job sounds more interesting and more important to the company. In large part this is also because…

Bad: Got a Thanks But No letter from the Mail people, so my #1 lead becomes #0. Crap, I was thinking that I had done rather well.

Quick analysis suggests that the Search job is about 2/3 “have done this before” and 1/3 “new material for me”. The Mail job would be have been the opposite, more like 1/3 familiar and 2/3 new. So, as excited as I was about working on spam, it looks like it is not going to happen this year. Unless Postini calls me in the next week or so, but that seems unlikely. The universe seems to be sending me a “Not Now” type of message.