An interesting entry point
June 6, 2005
Casey Muller

Alright, I think it's been long enough that nothing's going to come of this, and I can share the following little story.

A couple of weeks ago, on May 26th, I received a call from a blocked number on my cellphone:

Me: Hello?
Caller: Hi, can I speak to Casey Muller?
Me: This is he.
Caller: Hi Casey, this is (name), how are you doing?
Me: Oh hi, I'm good, how are you?

I have such a bad memory for names that I always pretend to remember the person and hope for the best.

Caller: I'm good, thank you. I'm calling today from Blizzard about a position we think you might be good for.

Okay, so I probably don't know this person, but Blizzard is one of my favorite game companies, so it's pretty exciting. I'm not aware of anybody I know working at Blizzard, but I figured somebody from the Mythica team may have gone to work there and mentioned me.

We talk about the position for a little while (it'd be a graphics programming position with the World of Warcraft team), but since I'm at work, I ask him to email me the details.

Caller: Sure, what's your email address?
Me: Let's see, the best one to use would be c a s e y m r m at alum dot mit...
Caller: Okay, the one on your website here?
Me: Yeah, that'd be best.

Now this is interesting, I guess it wasn't a personal referral, he called because of my website! That's much more exciting; maybe they read my brief outline of Every Front, and they're thinking of adding additional client types or building a new world with that kind of multi-modal interaction. The phone call winds down, and after scanning through a few different logs, I find this entry on TextDrive:

198.74.38.59 - - [26/May/2005:22:03:01 +0000] "GET /self/Casey/CaseyMuller.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 2591 
"http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=graphics+engineer+MIT+games&prssweb=Search&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&xargs=0&pstart=1&fr=FP-tab-web-t&b=11" 
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3"

That's the only occurrence of that IP, which, to save you time, resolves to:

OrgName:    Vivendi Universal Interactive Publishing, Inc.
OrgID:      VUIP-1
Address:    6080 Center Drive
City:       Los Angeles
StateProv:  CA
PostalCode: 90045
Country:    US

In other words, he searched for "graphics engineer MIT games" on search.yahoo.com, and my resume was on the second page. He didn't click anywhere, not even the games category, and just cold called me. I'm happy, obviously, because my resume is good enough to get his interest (thanks Papa), but a little disappointed that it wasn't the content and that apparently that kind of thing works (or he wouldn't be doing it).

Still, an interesting interaction.

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