The Unwoven Rainbow

My team at AOL (Dulles, VA campus) is looking for a couple of really good software QA engineers to work on our Social Platform web products: AIM Photos, AIM Buddies, AIM Profiles, and more. These are high-visibility, high-impact roles working with a close-knit, enthusiastic, and intelligent group of people.

The ideal candidates will have a bachelor’s degree and 3 to 5 years experience in QA in a commercial software development environment, with a good bit of experience with (most or all of) the following:

• Manual and automated web UI testing (using Selenium, Watir, and the like)
• Test case generation and management
• Apache / Tomcat, MySQL
• HTML, HTTP, XML, Javascript, CSS, JSON
• Unix / Linux and shell scripting
• Java

If you’ve got the right experience and would enjoy working with us to build and deploy some fun social networking apps, drop me a line at the email on the Contact Me page (see the menu at the top of this page).

Until recently, I had two cars: my real beater, an ‘88 Honda CRX that I bought new (for $14k!) shortly after moving to Texas (just out of college), and a beater-in-the-making, a ‘92 Honda Accord I bought a few years back (for $2.4k) from my mother-in-law.

Last fall I sold the CRX to my neighbor’s son. He is a mechanic, and knew exactly what he was getting — a great old car, tons of fun to drive, but with lots of mechanical issues. He wanted a fixer-upper, and that’s just what he got.

So now I’m left with the Accord (which has about 170k mi). But lately I’ve mostly been biking to work. This means that my car — which used to log roughly 5k mi / year — will now see about half of that.

Recently it occurred to me that — given the likely changes in the global oil market — if my Accord holds out until 200k mi or so, it could well be the last internal combustion vehicle I own in my lifetime. And depending on how other factors play out, possibly the last motorized vehicle I own.

That’s a sobering thought.

But not an entirely unpleasant one.