I GOT A JOB!!!

[David Kramer]

The company is called Compete, Inc. (http://www.compete.com/).  What they 
do is a little hard to explain, but basically they buy completely 
anonymous web click data from ISP's, and do massive matrix arithmetic and 
comparisons to determine what people are doing on your and your 
competitors' websites.  They generate some generic market reports from 
that, but also do custom ananlysis for other companies.  The important 
thing to remember though is that the only unique identifier they get 
about users is a random ID selected by the ISP, so there are no 
privacy issues.  Here are two articles about the company and what they do:

http://www.ismretail.com/articles/2001_11/011105.htm
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/011210/102589_1.html

<GEEK>
The technology is pretty cool too.  Instead of buying a massive Solaris
box or two to do the work, they use a cluster of about 28 dual-processor
Intel boxen running FreeBSD that cost about $2000 each.  That makes the
system very expandable in small increments.  They all have gigiabit fiber
network cards.  They do have a Solaris box for some nfs stuff and a huge
EMS SAN for storing the data (they store most of the data live forever so
they can slice the data any way they need at a later date).
</GEEK>

The job will be a mix of C++, Python, and shell scripting.  At the start 
I'm going to be working on the glue that connects the dozens of little 
subtasks together to accomplish the analysis.  More details on that later 
for anyone who is interested.

They are located on Newbury Street by Exeter, so if anyone is interested 
in resurrecting the LunchBunch group, please let me know.  Given that area 
it will probably be cheaper for me to take the T to another area and eat 
lunch than eat lunch on Newbury Street (The Fridays isn't too pricey 
though).  If you didn't know, LunchBunch was something that Gingi started 
and I took over, where Suspoids and associates in the Kendall 
Square/Park St/South Station area would meet once a week for lunch.  It 
kinda broke up because there were too few people working in that area 
after Akamai, Pega, and Sandstorm started leaking people.

Funny story:
I had my interview there about two weeks ago.  I felt it went very well,
but figured most of the other 80 people who interviewed for it probably
felt the same.  The following week I have by BLU (Boston Linux and UNIX
group) meeting, and the president (Jerry Feldman) says I should use him as
a reference too, since I've been working with him on BLU longer than I
have any boss in the workplace.  So I send his info as a reference to they
guy at Compete, CCing Jerry.  An hour later I get an email from Jerry with 
the subject "Do you know how fucking lucky you are?".  Apparently, Jerry 
and the dude at Compete were old buddies who worked for DEC together for 
about 10 years.  Now, the guy at Compete claims the decision was already 
made by the time he got Jerry's name from me, but I gotta wonder.
As I told Jerry, getting a job today seems to be much more about luck and 
timing than skill, but I have a lot of skill and not much luck.  I guess 
this one slipped through the cracks.

Thanks all who were references or support for me.

---
DDDD   David Kramer                           http://thekramers.net
DK KD  
DKK D  "The great tragedy of science -- the slaying of a beautiful
DK KD  hypothesis by an ugly fact." 
DDDD                                                - Thomas Huxley