A six alarm fire near Queen and Bathurst

There is already quite a lot of buzz around the huge fire that basically incinerated a whole block in downtown Toronto. I haven’t heard if anybody was hurt during the massive fire but I sure hope not. I am sure I’ll learn more about it on the news today as I saw two helicopters flying over the area for quite a while. According to blogTO,

Over 50 fire vehicles have joined the fight. Early reports suggest that at least eight stores have burned, one unit has collapsed, and more structure appears to be on the verge of coming down. [...]CityTV reports that National Sound, Suspect Video, and Duke’s Cycle are amongst the shops affected.

Anyways, for those of you out there curious as to what a “six alarm fire” really means, go check out the explanation: How big is a 10-alarm fire?. Here are some pictures of the even from the condo… You can see much closer pictures on blogTO. Let me know if you have more news, photos, etc.

Fire at Queen and Bathurst in Toronto at 10AM
The fire was still going on strong at around 10h30 this morning.

Fire at Queen and Bathurst in Toronto at 2h30PM
Right around 2h30, the fire was under a lot more control, but the water was still going.

My Second Interview with Accenture

I didn’t want to say much about this second interview here. However, seeing as my first post on the subject seems to have helped a couple of people out there, I thought I should share a little something for the second round interviews also.

My second interview was with a different person from Accenture, Montreal. He was really nice, but we skipped the chatting from the first interview and dove right into the subject matter: Behaviour, Behaviour, Behaviour. So I will only give you one piece of advice for this second interview: Prepare at least 5 projects from which you remember a large amount of details (because, yes, they will dig really deep!), and be ready to answer a couple of questions using those projects. I also suggest visiting quintcareers.com’s sample behavioural questions to get an idea of the kind of questions you will be asked. You should be able to find all of the information you need in order to do well in behavioral interviews on that website. You should also visit the section on Second Interview Do’s and Don’ts from the same website.

Just to give you an idea of the kind of questions they may ask you. I was asked to “talk about a time you had to talk about the difficulties you were facing in a project”. They asked me a lot of questions about the said project, what was it, why was it difficult, but they also asked me to explain in detail how I was feeling when I was talking to my employer. Needless to say, it was very difficult to remember.

Oh and one last thing. Don’t ever lie about a project. It’s way better to be honest. I told them at one point that I didn’t remember this project in that much detail. They said “no problem, we’ll change question”. After all, they are not there to torture you, they are only there to find out more about you. If you lie, then all they’ll find out about you is that you are a liar… and that would definitively rule out a third round interview! Having said that, I would recommend studying your past five projects you’ve done and try to remember as much details as possible.

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Phone Interview with Nuance

The phone interview is officially scheduled for Tuesday October 24th at 20h00. I can’t wait because I have many questions in mind already.

Nuance Communications, Inc Things are advancing fast on my job search so far in October. Since I learned from my friend Jean-Philipe, through our common friend Sylvain, that Nuance Communications is looking for a person with a Mathematical and Programming background to fill in a position as a Speech Scientist, I have been super excited about this opportunity. First, I did some research on the subject and talked with Jean-Philipe about the position. I also read a little bit about the company and the science behind Speech Recognition. I had no idea it was such an interesting field of Mathematical applications. Anyways. Then I sent my Resume and nice little cover letter (which was appreciated by the recruiter apparently!).

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My First Interview for Accenture

I just received an e-mail, on Friday October 13th, confirming that I will have an interview with Accenture next Friday. I’m off to study and get ready now. Wish me luck!

Accenture’s logo in a hallway
I received my first e-mail confirming my interview with Accenture, after applying online, about a week ago. Ever since the e-mail, I have been reading news and studying the company’s history for this interview a little bit everyday.

I think one of the best to prepare for an interview like this is to know the company well enough to have an intelligent conversation with your interviewee. That’s especially true in the first round interviews of Accenture, since they focus more on the reasons why you would want to work with them and where you see yourself in the company years from now. So, yes, the best way to know that is to know the company a little more. My idea to study the company was to follow Google Finance’s RSS feed and read any news that came out on Accenture. Here is a brief list of the latest news (You have to have Javascript enabled to see this):

So anyways, here are some details on my first interview with them. I walked in the fifth floor of the Brown Building at McGill and was welcomed by three representatives of the Montreal office. They were really nice and we had a little chat about Accenture and other mathematical problems, which was a really interesting problem that I haven’t managed to solve yet, but that’s beside my point here. The actual interview took place in another room, and so my interviewer took me to that room at which point we started discussing some of my academic achievements right away. The interview was basically a get-to-know-me sort of interview and the questions were separated into four categories: Human Resources, Academic achievements, Life in general (extra curricular activities, etc), and Accenture-related questions. The first part is simply to know my geographical preferences (Would I prefer Montreal, Toronto, etc) and whether I can work in Canada.

I don’t want to go into the specifics of what the questions were, but they were pretty simple questions to get to know me. It was actually very interesting to talk with the interviewer and to get to know the company a little better. I think it would be really interesting to work there. There was also some time for me to ask questions about the job and the life that you can expect to have with a job from Accenture, which sounded reasonably exciting!

At the end of the interview, I had time to chat with the three representatives and is where I learned the most about Accenture. I also learned that the next interviews will be held next Friday, October 20th. I will know if I get the second interview or not on Monday. So stay tuned.

Don’t hesitate to leave a little comment here to share with us your experience at interviewing with Accenture. I may even have some words of advice to give you. Meanwhile, here is the picture of the stock for the past two years at Accenture. I find it pretty interesting and revealing to look at the price of the stock of a company.

Last two years at Accenture

Windows Vista: Finally here.

The world’s biggest software maker announced, earlier this week, the final prices for the new Windows Vista, according to an article from Reuters.

The new operating system has been in the making for about 5 years now. It has seen no less than four new operating systems released by its major competitor, Apple : Puma (September 25, 2001), Jaguar (August 24, 2002), Panther (October 24, 2003), and Tiger (April 29, 2005). A couple of months later and it would have also witnessed the birth of the brand new OS from Apple: Leopard.

Personally, I am pleased to hear the news as it will be nice to get a fresh new look from Windows. I am tired of looking at the (now) boring look of Windows XP these days. So let’s hope that Windows did their homework and hired really good designers to make their product more appealing to all of us. The release of Windows Vista might secure microsoft a couple more years of my business seeing as I was wondering if I should switch to Mac for my next desktop. Only time will tell. But, I don’t think I see a switch anytime soon though, I think having a Powerbook G4 as a laptop and a windows-based desktop machine is the perfect setup in the software developing world.

So, in a nutshell, Microsoft has released the RC1 (Release Candidate 1) edition of the operating system to about 5 million people last week and should be fixing bugs for the next couple months. Chances are that there will be no official release date announced for the next couple of weeks, but I am sure glad to hear about this RC1 release.

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