A carnival of technology

“The network is the computer,” John Gage, Sun Microsystems, 1984

I have trouble throwing things away. I’m not saying that I’m a packrat, though that might be true, but it isn’t the root of the problem. I’m just lazy. I don’t want to be troubled by the idea that I should clean up after myself, and, when faced with the reality of living in a junk-filled sty, I find patches instead of solutions. My cache of useless junk finds its way into closets, tucked away into the crannies of bookshelves, hidden under tables or even just left sitting on top of the table if I don’t need the space right away. The closets are the worst, since they’re full of the boxes of crap I decided to take with me when I moved–some of it from the last move but most of it from the one before, things that I will never use and now never have to think about. I’ll admit that I’ve gotten some use out of the old computer parts. It’s nice to have a spare DSL modem or power supply lying around, but when’s the next time I’ll need a dual Pentium Pro motherboard (hint: never)? I am a hopeless slob and I should be ashamed of myself.

My computing habits are very similar to my real-life habits, perhaps most manifest in the way that I write code. I work from the command-line rather than using one of those fancy IDE things, and when I want to do something outside of the editor–grep for a function call, build the project or something else I’m more comfortable doing in a real shell–I’ll usually just hit CTRL-z to background the editor and move on to whatever else. I don’t always go back to that editor right away, however, or sometimes ever again. I’ll often find myself with a dozen terminal windows open, four of five editors running in each, each of those with who knows how many files opened in split screens. I am sloppy and forgetful and I should be ashamed of myself.

I treat files on the computer in much the same way: just dump everything wherever it’s convenient at the moment and move on. I decided to take stock of my home directory (I’m a dirty hippie Linux user, so this is basically like the desktop in the real world) recently, and I found files there that I hadn’t touched since 2002. Some of them have probably been there longer, but it appears that June 20th, 2002 was the last time I lost a hard drive and screwed up the timestamps when restoring from backup. There was a .maildir from back when I thought that using qmail was an ok idea instead of a stupidly insane idea, or even ran a mail server at home at all; config files for Netscape 4; the Neiman Marcus cookie recipe… The list goes on. Age alone doesn’t account for this, since I make a mess pretty quickly wherever I go. Taking a look at my Windows desktop at work, where I’ve been now been for about six months, I found the following:

• 23 installers for various programs
• 2 unpackaged programs just chillin’
• 2 C# dlls used by a program I deleted a while back
• 1 AVSynth script
• 4 C source files
• 7 zipped program packages (4 unpacked in same directory)
• 1 firmware upgrade zip for a TV set-top box
• 1 saved output from mplayer
• 1 source tarball for one of the zip file programs (also unpacked)
• 4 movies in various formats
• 1 .reg file to undo the mess that winzip makes and doesn’t clean up
• 1 unreadable junk
• 1 empty directory
• 1 shortcut to a program
• 1 text file with some irrelevant data
• 1 thunderbird plugin installer
• 5 network captures
• 1 directory with a single .exe whose purpose I’ve forgotten
• 1 directory with some video files
• 3 directories with standards documents
• 3 more unpacked programs (2 with source)
• 2 VC projects that don’t actually do anything

In all it was nine and a half gigamabytes. In order to try to rationalize such waste, that video directory was where I was messing around with some uncompressed 1080p videos, so that accounts for most of the space. Without those I had only 1.3GB of junk. After deleting everything I would never need again or that was already stored somewhere else I was left with 32MB.

My main problem is that I never clean anything up and I’m only barely aware of it. Looking for ways to help me fix this mess, I came across an old idea that just might do some good: store my home directory in a version control system. Besides providing me a history of file changes and possibly easy backups, it might force me to pay a little more attention to the files I fling around so freely.

David Cantrell took a look at storing home in CVS a while back, and version control systems have come a litte way since then. Most of the list of caveats–symlinks, directory management and funky filenames–is no longer a cause for alarm. Permissions might still be an issue, since version control is still designed with tracking changes to software in mind rather than keeping ssh happy about the read-bits on your keys, but workarounds similar to those used with CVS can work elsewhere.

But then I started to overthink it, as this sort of problem would encourage. Why not use a distributed version control system? Something like mercurial would be perfect. It would eliminate the need for a central server, allowing me to just move the same directory around everywhere while still making backups easy when I feel like it, and it has some nice features, like the addremove command to set the saved state to whatever the current working state is, and that could be easily scripted in a nightly job to remove my active participation from the process, giving me none of the benefits of this crazy idea except for version history, the one I don’t really care about. Whoops.

So I started thinking a little bit more. One of those pie-in-the-sky computing ideas that I actually like is the delocalization of assets. I’ve more often done the opposite, keeping everything, including this website, local, but I’ve been slowly moving in the other direction. Email was easiest, finally catching me up to 1997 or so. From anywhere I can point a mail client or a web browser to Site5 and have everything in the same state it is at home. Where’s it actually stored? Who cares? It’s somebody else’s problem now. I can’t make everything somebody else’s problem, at least not without a lot more trust than I currently have in anyone who could do such a thing, but that NAS device I bought a while back could be a surrogate. Its obvious use is as storage for the things I might have shared with the world in bygone days, but I’ve started using it for other large, semi-organized things that before I’ve kept in my home directory: photos, various documents, things that I’d like to keep handy though I don’t use them every day. Why do I even need a home directory at all?

My solution was just that, get rid of my home directory. I backed it up in case I ended up needing anything out of it and then started over. The configuration files are the most obvious absence, but it turned out to be pretty minor. There are a few files that I’ve carried around for about ever that I quickly carried over–I’d be lost, or at least very annoyed, without my .vimrc, for example–but most everything else I can just configure as I go. Somewhere back in the Peachtree days I joined the rest of the world and started using GNOME, a software suite that gives me some semblance of a real graphical computing environment, and it, like Windows, uses a central configuration database that doesn’t lend itself well to transferring back and forth, but it only took me about a day of fixing minor annoyances before I had everything matching my particular eccentricities again. Maybe this is the way to go, figure out the small handful of things I really need on any particular computer, keep the rest on the network and let everything else be blasted away on a whim.

I haven’t separated computing from locale, but I’ve at least created a more diverse location. My computer is a workstation and a file server, but mail and web files are somewhere else, and some files are on a USB drive or a handful of DVDs or a little keychain stick. The network isn’t all of the computer, but maybe I’ve freed enough computing from the computer that I can take it wherever it needs to go.

I kept some strange habits from my first car. It was a 1980 Tercel, a couple years older than I am and the perfect car to teach a teenager how to drive. It was a tiny hatchback, built like a tank because they figured solid steel was better than your pansy foam and crumple zones back in those days, a five speed, shook like it was going to fall apart if you got going to fast on the highway, no air conditioning, a broken fuel gauge and it had those manual crank windows that we now find so quaint. The lack of air conditioning presented a challenge in those hot Alabama summers, along with, at times, the hot Alabama springs and falls, but I got by. I learned not to mind the heat too much so long as there was some air moving past me, and even now that I have a fancy car with fancy A/C, I’ll more often open up the windows—now much less of a workout, and less of a moving violation when I reach for the passenger side—than sacrifice that bit of power to modern technology. As for the gas gauge, the trip odometer took over that duty. Given a tank size and a rough estimate of the car’s mileage, who needs fancy gauges and lights and all that nonsense? I’ve maintained that habit in my current car. The gas gauge works, but it’s not very useful. Its seems to hang around the full mark for a while, drops into the middle where it makes a calculated, precise movement through the middle quarters of the tank, and then it drops down to E and wiggles around for a while not telling me much of anything. The light comes on at somewhere around the three or four gallon mark, and beyond that I have no way to know how much gas I have left other than by looking at how far I’ve driven.

Gas has been a little weird here lately. The Colonial Pipeline passes through the general area of Atlanta, so a good share of our fuel is pumped up from refineries in Houston, which is all well and good except when there’s a hurricane in the gulf. The last time things were this bad was in 2005 with Rita, which, besides really messing up the Texas coast and an already-devastated Louisiana, screwed up the pipeline that feeds Georgia, causing a run on the gas stations and prompting Sonny Perdue, always the champion of education, to call a couple of snow days early in order to shut down the school buses. Gustav and Ike this year caused a whole bunch of damage, and I feel bad for all of those affected, but what do the hurricanes mean for me this year?

That nasty, smoke belching refinery I passed on the great In-n-Out trip of 2003, along with its neighbors, had to shut down for the storms, and that’s made gas a little scarce around here. The lack of supply drove prices back up past $4, so at first I thought I’d get by buying just a little at a time, purchasing partial tanks in the hopes that prices would soon drop, and not resetting my odometer, which turned out to be a mistake. Whether through a run on the gas stations by paniced people who remember what happened a couple of years ago or just stations legitimately unable to keep up with normal demand, a bunch of gas stations ran out of gas in the past few days. And so did I. After driving around with the fuel light on and a mystery displayed on the panel, I figured it was about time to refuel, and I couldn’t. Everywhere I turned, numbers were removed from station signs and yellow bags covered the pump handles. The stations stayed open, hoping to keep selling doughnuts and beer, and frustrated drivers kept them busy. I ended up going to work today on a mystery tank, trying to remember all the way just how running out of gas was supposed to be bad for fuel injectors and wishing for that 1980 beater. I was able to finally refuel; someone at the office found a station nearyby that still had gas. It had sloppily-written signs taped up everywhere warning of the lack of higher octane fuels, but my low-powered chump engine doesn’t need any of that junk. After waiting in line for a while I pumped 12 gallons back into my confused 13 gallon tank. I guess I might have had enough to make it home after all.

Things were simpler back in the good old days. To play music I just loaded up XMMS, added a couple months worth of mp3s, set it to shuffle and let it go, playing the same dozen songs in a random order. The world has since moved on, and I no longer care to jump through the hoops required to run something like XMMS in this land of tomorrow. iTunes-style media players are now the norm, so the time came to find a new piece of software for my music to call home.

Of music players I’ve tried a few: I started of course with the one that came with GNOME, Rhythmbox (crashy and awful), and moved on from there to Banshee (doesn’t support the tags I need), Quod Libet (too slow with more than a couple thousand songs), Songbird (why the hell is it a web browser?), MPD (why do I need to configure a server?), XMMS with the old gtk libraries (yep, still sucks) and Exaile (tags again), each time pointing the new player at my music library and finding something to kill some time while the import ran, like baking a loaf of bread or learning to speak Mandarin (I now know how to count to ten and tell someone they’re drunk). I eventually settled on Amarok, a media player for KDE that Fedhat can run in GNOME without too much trouble, a player that runs well with a collection of 20,000+ files after I replaced the default backend with a mysql database (sigh), that tries to look a lot like iTunes, that doesn’t allow the full freedom of tags found in something like Quod Libet but generally gets it close enough, or at least close enough that I can stick all those techno mixes under “Various Artists” and leave it at that, a player that does most things pretty alright and is just all around fairly easy on the eyes and fairly easy to use. Finally having a music player that makes metadata worthwhile, I took the time to tag all of my music (Quod Libet actually did come in handy there; the Ex Falso tagger it comes with was very nice for automating most of the tedium), and, since one Gordian knot is never enough, I went ahead and implemented the idea that’s been knocking around in my head ever since I heard it from Olin, my compilers prof: space is cheap, so just rip all of your CDs (above) to FLAC and never worry again about the codec of the week. So now I have a terabyte-and-a-half RAID a quarter of the way filled with a bunch of music sorted, tagged, filed, sealed and signed in triplicate, so what now?

I’ve had a few words, many of them four letters, to say about Web 2.0 in the past. The core tenet of this grand new paradigm is that content is no longer the bailiwick of that oppressive Old World aristocracy, the experts of their fields or the people that can write pretty good; content is generated by the people bringing us all into a bold new network where everyone is connected and no one knows a thing. Despite, however, my bitter words for this affront to literature and human knowledge, there is something about Web 2.0 that I find compelling: tags. A tag is simply a word associated with a thing, like that list of nonsense you see displayed next to Flickr photos or Youtube videos or Amazon reviews. The first inclination is to use such a system as a sort of generic filing system, but it’s no good for that. Tags are at their most powerful and most Web 2.0ish when anyone can add one, and that makes them useless for filing: people are idiots, and you’re going to end up with a lot of imperfect information. And that’s what makes them work. del.icio.us demonstrates this well; I don’t use the site, but I like the idea. If you give everyone the power to tag anything with any label, you’ll end up with a lot of junk, but people tend to have similar ideas for similar things, and eventually patterns will emerge. Ordo ab chao, and that’s really something neat even if I still think that user-driven content is mostly a load of crap.

One of the things that amarok can do pretty well is interact with last.fm, a kind of Web 2.0 music service. The idea is that a bunch of people submit the music that they’re listening to, and based on that and the music you listen to the site can make some guesses on what else you might care to hear. I imagine that the actual algorithm has more to do with advertising dollars than anything, but all the information is there; someone who follows up an album of Norwegian black metal with some show tunes is an outlier, but a hundred people who do that is a pattern.

So I’ve created a last.fm profile, and now we come to my problems with it. One of its functions is to show the world all the crap you’ve been listening to for the past few days, and that’s been something that I need to get out of my head. I used to run a homemade app to do much the same thing back when I lived with Moshe and got tired of him asking what I was listening to, so I’m familiar with the experience of the world knowing I just put together a playlist of eurodance and 90’s skate punk, but I still fear that knowing someone can see it might interfere with my choices. Everybody’s taste in music sucks, and I’m certainly no exception. I need to just forget that the world is watching and let the music play, and I hope I can do that.

Amarok has a couple of ways it can take advantage of last.fm’s information: it can play the last.fm generated playlist, sending back all the information on songs skipped or played, or it can generate a playlist of its own from your local collection based on artists related to the ones you’re listening to. I’ve found a problem with both in terms of diversity. Basing recommendations on a particular song and more recommendations on those recommendations tends to get it stuck in a genre rut. The local mode is especially bad at this: I made a playlist with a handful of songs for which Amarok didn’t have anything in particular to suggest, and then all of a sudden it hit something it could work with and decided that it’s new wave night. The last.fm stream will hopefully be better able to handle local anomalies once I’ve fed it more data. Maybe I’ll get something out user-driven content yet.

Neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night and all that. Let’s see what came in the mail:

• Menu for a new Japanese buffet that was actually mailed for some reason
  instead of just stuck in my door
• Information on a ridiculous proposal to split Buckhead off into a separate
  city
• Economic stimulus check for $600
• Another Buckhead mail sent to someone that doesn’t live here anymore
• Bill from Rural Metro Ambulance for $613.61

Huh. I guess I forgot one. Well, thanks, dysfunctional government. I guess.

So far I’ve gained three pounds. I don’t think it’s working yet.

I have mixed feelings about Wii Fit. It’s not the panacea I knew it wouldn’t be but hoped for nonetheless. Its lack of direction sometimes leaves me confused as to what to do next. And it’s not a substitute for going to the gym. But on the other hand, I think gyms are a scam, and Wii Fit can be kind of fun. If nothing else it’s incredibly useful for making me aware of how out of shape I am. It encourages you, even if you don’t exercise every day, to at least do the daily weigh-in and balance test, and it’ll make a little mark on a graph and let you put a stamp on the calendar to show that you can step up on a scale. If you end up gaining weight between tests, it’ll make you stop and think about it, giving you a list of options to choose from to explain yourself (e.g., too much snacking, not exercising). At first I thought this was meant to just be a pause for reflection, a moment to think about why you’re so dang fat, but no, that reason gets written on that graph right next to your big ol’ weight. Going back through the graph was kind of depressing; every time I passed over one of those red dots my poor, sad Mii would hang his head and say, “I ate too much,” or “I didn’t exercise,” or whatever horrible thing I did that day. Even if it hasn’t helped me lose any weight yet, it at least keeps me thinking about it while I chomp down that second helping of extra salty french fries.

But weight is only half of what the Wii balance board knows about you, and it’s not even the interesting half. The thing looks like a curvy white bathroom scale, but it does live up to its name; it can tell with surprising precision where your center of balance is, and balance is the real concentration of most of the exercises along with a whole section of actual games that use that balance board more like a traditional controller that happens to be controlled with your feet. Some of the exercises critique you based on how balanced you remain throughout, but it’s the yoga where this feature really shines. Sure, you might be able to stand on one foot and stick your finger in your ear or whatever the pose might call for, but it doesn’t count for much if you’re swaying like sawgrass in a hurricane. And I think it’s the yoga that’s really helping. I feel like my gut is in a little better shape than when I started, but my balance is very noticeably better.

When I first used the Wii Fit, my back was about seven kinds of jacked up. Even the simplest pose, just standing there and breathing slow and big, left me aching. I was swaying and shaking and just generally being uncoordinated. I suspect the accident had some contribution to this, since I did notice a couple of oddities while doing the yoga poses: when standing on both feet I favored my left side, and when standing on one foot I was more stable on my right. The latter may seem a little odd, but for that I blame Fitness Forum for doing too good a job. I may have been hopping around on my left foot for a couple of months, but I was only balancing on my right without the crutches during physical therapy. Standing on one foot isn’t something I do much on my own, and while in a cast I was standing on three.

As part of the daily body test, after it weighs you, takes off your rose-colored glasses and adjusts your Mii’s chubbiness to match reality, there are a couple of balance tests and a Wii Fit age based on how badly you do. When I started I came out in the 40’s, my Mii hunched over and gripping his back in pain at such an increase in virtual age, but I’ve since pretty consistently hit 23. The BMI graph is a depressing thing, and I seem to be traveling away from the weight goal the game had me set, but the game has me walking tall and evenly. Maybe the Wii Fit has me doing what my mother couldn’t: stand up straight and quit slouching. I hope with more Wii Fit and more of the bike that I’ll start to shed those pounds and hear more encouraging words from the cheery balance board character, but maybe the improvement in balance is enough to make it worthwhile.

Maybe I should just skip forward to that one who dug up his predecessor and put the corpse on trial. Oh my goodness that dude was messed up. Hopefully this weekend will give me the time and motivation to actually do some reading.

Meanwhile, here’s what’s been going on, told in crappy pictures:

My wallet has been perhaps my greatest act of procrastination. The mauve nylon thing that I used up until today was purchased by my mother (thanks, mom, I think I got your money’s worth out of it) for ten or fifteen bucks when I was in the seventh grade or so. I think it came from J.C. Penny. It could have been first considered worn-out around the eleventh grade, when the velcro stopped working. It came with one of those useless plastic picture holders, which I used for a while to hold credit cards and identification, and after that broke I stuffed every card I had, which turned out to be quite a few, into the one pocket on the side that was sized for that. The seams are coming apart, and that one pocket has stretched to the point that everything falls out if I turn it upside-down. It’s been in this horrible condition for about as long as I can remember.

Pictured above is the old wallet, emptied, next to my new wallet, stuffed full of cards and about eight dollars. Chris was the one who gave me the idea, since he bought one first. The New York Times wrote an article about these things about three years ago, so hopefully I’m not too far behind fasion. I got an All-Ett, which basically claims that the problem with wallets these days isn’t so much all the crap you stuff into them as the wallet itself, so they make thin wallets out of spinnaker nylon. I bought the “European,” perhaps better called its original name, “Junior,” since it would be useless for holding European money, which is a simple billfold having one pocket for cash and two for cards. It’s the smallest that All-Ett has, and I went with that in part to force me to get rid of some of the junk I carry around; I’m never going to visit Taco Mac enough times to get a free mug, I don’t even like Performance Bikes and I think two or three of these insurance cards are expired. I’ve cut myself down to a driver’s license, two credit cards, two kinds of insurance, organ donor information, a Breeze card and three customer loyalty cards, and this both fits pretty well into the two pockets and seems like enough to get by. The wallet doesn’t completely disappear from sensation like the promotional material would have you believe, probably because I’m still sitting on a big wad of plastic cards, but it’s much less noticeable, and it’s not super uncomfortable like the old wallet.

The lack of discomfort and the water resistant material led to another delightful conclusion: I can wear this thing on the bike. In the past I’ve found non-pants places for my wallet while biking, either the panniers if I’m carrying them or that bag under the seat, and I’ve done this for two reasons: 1) (most important) my old wallet was way uncomfortable; 2) (less important) carrying the wallet in my pants meant that paper money was going to be soaked in ass-sweat. The first condition is certainly no longer true, and I decided to try out the second today with a clear sky and a pleasant 86 degrees fahrengrade. The paper money seemed to hold up pretty ok. This will certainly make my lighter trips less annoying.

This leads me into my second topic…

I’m fat. I was probably in pretty alright shape around last August or so, but after I gained about twenty pounds while being extra-sedentrary with my broken foot, most of which I held on to, and now that I’m not biking to work anymore I’m continuing that spiral into flabbiness.

Pictured above is the Wii Fit balance board, which also thinks I’m fat. It even makes my Mii look chubby when I do the daily weigh-in and balance test. So I managed to get a Wii Fit despite the dire predictions of shortages and riots and whatnot, I’m not sure what to think of it yet. The idea of getting me off the couch and in shape while playing a game seems great, but I’m not sure that the Wii Fit will help me with my biggest problem: sticking to it. It’s kind of like Wii Sports in that it gives you a whole bunch of games, or exercises or whatever, that you can play, but it doesn’t give you any kind of plan. So the Wii Fit tells you what to do with each activity but doesn’t plan a workout for you. I’ve only had it a couple of days, so I don’t know how well that’ll go.

Above is the computer I’ve been running as some sort of server since college, and an AMD Athlon with more hard drives than the case was meant to take, a computer that has failed time after time only to be stitched back together and forced into service anew, a computer so flaky that if I drove the load average above 1 for more than a couple three minutes, like if I tried to compile something, the kernel would start to throw errors and random programs would begin to segfault. I’ve turned it off. Taking its place are two new machines: a Linksys WRT54GL wireless router taking over the tasks of routing and local DNS and DHCP services, and a Buffalo Terastation Live taking over the task of storage. What’s neat about these is that they both run Linux under the hood and provide the mean to poke around and change things to fit my crazy whims. What’s less neat about the Terastation is that there isn’t as much the unified community as for OpenWRT, and I keep running into obstacles. The folks over at nas-central gave me enough information to figure out how compile a kernel with NFS support, but the next problem I’ve hit is ACLs. As you might know, I’m pretty big on access control lists, and not having them presents as nasty obstacle as far as how I’m going to bring the CVS and SVN repositories back up. Compiling a new kernel isn’t enough in this case; the glibc in the stock root image doesn’t have the right syscalls.

It’s not hopeless, though as I continue to attack this problem I’m moving further from my goal of replacing computers with appliances that don’t require any maintenance. Maybe I just can’t live without a problem to solve. It’d be nice to be able to install an entirely new, easily updatable system like for the Linksys router, but since, other than being old, the Terastation system is fairly unrestrictive and exists on a hard drive instead of flash memory, the cool thing to do seems to be to use one of the NSLU2 package feeds. After messing around with cross-compiled libcs and finding new and exciting ways to lock myself out of the Terastation, I’ve realized that the chroot environment I use along with ACLs can possibly help; I don’t need a new library on the main system as long as I can get one running in the chroot environment. So maybe that’ll help.

The guy sitting next to me on the flight to Boston crossed himself as the plane was taking off, and that kind of creeped me out. It’s not that I have a problem with Catholics or anything, it was knowing that through that action he was saying a little prayer asking that this metal tube hurtling through thin air at about 500mi/h does not fall out of the sky as would seem right for such a flimsy thing to do. It was unsettling. He crossed himself again when we landed, and that was a lot less unnerving.

I had a fun new experience while going through ATL security. As I was walking into the entrance of the security line, the usually empty turnstile maze that precedes the guy who checks your ticket and ID, a TSA agent walked out of the mass of poles and wires, handed me a yellow postcard and said in full authority voice, “SIR WOULD YOU PLEASE HAND THIS CARD TO THE SECURITY AGENT,” before walking away and disappearing. I assumed, as I think many would, that I had just been signed up for the random anal probe. There was an Indian guy next to me, and he kind of backed up a few steps and gave me a look as if to say, “The hell?” I shrugged and continued the march, resigned to my fate. While waiting in line I had a chance to take a better look at the card. The numbers scrawled on it weren’t codes; they were times. There was an explanation on the reverse side telling me that this card is used as a marker to time the length of the security wait. I was not probed. The wait was ten minutes.

I supposed I should have planned what to do with the three or four hours of free time I had on this trip instead of just driving around looking for stuff, since all of the kitschy museums in Massachusetts are closed on Monday. That GPS thing was useless.

The interview was exactly as horrible as Chris and David made it out to be. I hope I did ok.

In a little bit I’m going to hop in a car and drive to the MARTA station (because the bus schedule is different and confusing since the last time I took it) and hop on a plane up to Boston, land of clam chowdah and a tea-soaked harbor and some other stuff. It’s been a while since I’ve flown, so today I’ve been looking over the TSA website and playing a game of What’s Legal to Take on a Plane Today? (answer: nothing). I generally try to travel pretty light so I don’t have to deal with dragging a bunch of luggage around or checking bags or any of that, but this time I bought a bag to check. I figure I ought to shave for the interview, and even if I could find where I put those cartrdige blades I don’t think I could take shaving cream carry on, so into the cargo hold with it. One effect of this is that all of things I usually stuff into one bag are now spread across two bags, so it feels like I’m forgetting something. I hope my new bag doesn’t end up lost.

Happy mother’s day, mom!

“It is expressly understood and agreed that this Release is a settlement of all claims for which the parties released hereby deny all liability and that by this Release, the parties released hereby intend merely to avoid litigation and buy their peace.”

To recap: way back in August I picked a fight with an SUV and lost in the first round by TKO; sonofabitch ran me over and broke my right heel. After several long months of casts and crutches and boots and therapy, I can walk again, the only lingering side effects being that I have a bit more bone down there now than the Good Lord intended, and sometimes I can predict when it’s going to rain. I am pleased with the care I received and thank all of the doctors and nurses and therapists and other medical professionals involved, especially Dr. Funk, the emergency room doctor who either cared enough or was bored enough to call me the next morning with some more information about my foot, mostly because that is such a damn awesome name. I also thank the lawyer who gave me some helpful free advice while waiting in line at the police station, and an extra special thank you goes out to my mom and dad for spending a weekend in the A making sure I didn’t starve to death or drown in a pile of filth. I probably would have tried something extra stupid and broken my foot even worse if it weren’t for you two. To everyone, muchas gracias; I couldn’t have done it without all of you.

Fast forward to the future is now, and I’ve finally got all the co-pays settled and all the forms filled out and State Farm is ready to send me a settlement. I won’t share the math unless you really care for me to—I’m never sure how rude it is to bring in money numbers—but basically State Farm is prepared to write me a check to cover this nebulous remainder of medical expenses, lost wages and whatever else may arise, and after I’ve paid my medical insurer their chunk, I’ll have a couple few grand of peace buyin’ money left over. The law says that this is compensation for things I’ve already paid or still owe, so it doesn’t count as taxable income, relieving my fears that I’d have to start thinking about 2008 taxes right after paying for 2007. So what should I spend it on? One idea I had is to get a new computer; I’d like to just throw out my rickety old workstation and ricketier old server and replace them with one of those OpenWrt routers for the internets link and maybe a laptop for everything else. Maybe I should replace my 90’s TV with one of them new-fangled high def things. Or maybe I could do something boring like make an extra big car payment or give it to charity. What do you think?

I got a new job. I’m now working for Telchemy, a company that does VoIP and other kinds of real time network stream monitoring, and it’s been pretty neat so far for the week that I’ve been there. But I’m not about to start blogging about big important things; who cares about the big important things in life? What about the stupid minutae?

Telchemy is in Duluth, and that’s been taking some getting used to. Autovin’s office was also, by my elitist city reckoning, way out in the ass end of suburbia, but Duluth has a different feel to it than Roswell. The drive is only about five miles longer, and I’m still going opposite of the trafficy direction the whole way, but crossing those county lines while I go up 85 seems like a big deal. Most obviously there’s no MARTA service in Gwinnett. There’s the GCT and some GRTA buses that go up that way, but I haven’t yet figured out the maze of transfers or the schedules it would take to use them, so for now I’m off the bike. This is going to be difficult, both because I don’t like to spend money on gas and because I know from the broken foot what sedentary time does to my waistline. Unless I figure out the bus routes I’m going to need to figure out another way to exericse. Maybe I’ll get that Wii step-up-on-the-white-thing game.

Another obstacle I’ve met has been the problem of where to eat. I suppose I should probably be making lunches at home that are healthier and cheaper than eating out, but that seems like a lot of work, so I’ve so far continued my old habits of depending on whatever eateries are in the area. The problem is that I just don’t have a good feel for Duluth quite yet. In Roswell I was able to rotate among a series of small, locally owned shops where people knew my name and often what I wanted to eat, but in Duluth so far all I see is a bunch of strip malls along Sugarloaf and the levaithan of Discover Mills. I tried eating at Discover Mills, but all they have is just pretty much what you’d expect for mall food, and the Popeye’s meal I settled on was about two bucks more expensive than it should have been. The strip malls have all of the usual depressing sandwich and burrito chains that strip malls have, but today’s lunch gave me some hope. As usual I was undecisive but hungry, and I decided to turn the other way, to drive away from Sugarloaf and see where the road would take me. After maybe a quarter mile the road took me to a Korean enclave that I never knew existed. I felt like I was driving down Buford Highway and it was right next the office; it was so awesome. I have no idea what I ate for lunch today—the waitress made a big deal about me trying the bizarre array of side dishes that came with the soup, and one of them, a sort of spicy gelatin, she didn’t know the English to describe, though it seemed to involve acorns. They had SBS on sattelite playing a show with some kind of swordfighting love story, and I’m pretty sure those English subtitles weren’t there until after I’d sat down for a couple of minutes, which made me feel like I was doing right. I have no idea why a bunch of Korean people decided to settle in Duluth, but I’m certainly glad for it. Maybe this place is a little better than the highway would have you think.