I’m a programmer by profession and also one by choice. I also have that passion for fantasy and urban fiction that can’t help by color my view of the world. When there are stories that combine these two together, I have to admit, I can very easily fall in love.
Fluffy left for Illinois today. She’s coming back in 48 hours, but somehow I’m going through the same thing I go through when she leaves for a week or a month. Completely and utter burnout. Two hours to get on the computer and just drooling on the computer for better part of an hour watching meaningless television.
Pathetic, really.
I’m hoping to move in the same 48 hours. At least my apartment into the new house. 24 hours after that, I’m going to Illinois myself to pack up the packed boxes that have been sitting in a garage for almost half a year. And then, back to Iowa. Hopefully for good.
I’m excited about it, but I’m also desperately wishing I could fast-forward through the next 5 days. I can’t though, nor is my request for a montage been approved.
I even made the request in triplicate.
As part of my weekend of cuddling and reading books, I got to Anton Strout’s Deader Still. This was a book I was looking forward too and I wasn’t disappointed at all. It is a good solid follow-up of Dead to Me.
I recently read the The Becoming by Jeanne C. Stein. It is an entertaining vampire comes-of-age novel but it didn’t really bring anything new to the table and I really can’t say it is a great novel.
Worked on my commission last night and managed to get through the rewrite of one of the scenes. Just one more, which is much harder since it is going to end up a two page mental battle of a man tied up in a basement. I’m not so great with inner monologues; regular dialogs yes, even trilogues I’m good at, but not monologues. I probably would be terrible at pentalogues though, just because it gets confusing at that point.
I’ll probably get that Sunday and Monday night and send it out right before we move. Or, at least that is the plan as of now.
EDIT: I also got 4 GiB RAM that I ordered last weekend. With that, I upgraded my machine from 1 GiB to 4 GiB and suddenly things are working a lot smoother again. Apparently KDE 4 is a bit too much of a memory hog for just 1 GiB. Not to mention, I can open up an extra 60 windows, just like I like to. And no swapping! Well, at least until I get used to it. RAM with computers is like a bed with cats, sooner or later, it always gets filled.
Fluffy is in town again, just not here. She originally had a photo shoot today, but it got rescheduled for Monday morning. So, she spent the night in the hotel as originally planned and I’m going to visit her tonight for two days of hotel goodness and destressing of the wife.
In anticipation of her playing Scrabble on her phone, something we both like to participate, I got my n810 up and running with some games. So pretty. The problem is, I got it almost working somewhere around 21:30 and messed around with a half hour before I realized I had the “chinook” distribution and not the “diablo” one that most games used.
In frustration, I gave up and took my shower. As I was getting out, I realized I wasn’t letting it go and decided to upgrade and install all the games I wanted and could find.
Somewhere around 00:50, I realized I really, really had to get to bed. I’m tired and exhausted, but I have a bag full of clean clothes, a swimsuit, a n810 to play with, and a stack of book as tall as my hand. And I got paid today.
I’m good.
Yep… I’m good.
Last night, while working on my commission round two (need to expand two scenes), I hit that point where I had to sit back and realize I don’t really have time to do anything more. If I want to move a week from today, I’m going to be packing and finishing up this commission. I’m going on a mini vacation with Fluffy since I promised her a hotel visit with me for a weekend and she asked for it to be this weekend. So, if plans go well, I have basically today, tomorrow, and Monday to pack up.
Two weeks of moving two houses across two states starts today.
Yah, memories!
Saturday, I spent just over ten hours upgrading a friend’s web site and forum. They have fifty thousand members and a quarter million posts on a relatively small computer. And, given the apathy of most of the Internet, they don’t bring in enough to actually upgrade the machine to decent hardware. So, I had to figure out a way of getting a SMF forum upgraded on a 500 MHz machine and not break anything.
I can’t say it was easy. It wasn’t, mainly because their forum attachments sat at 60k+ files and 6 GiB. In one directory. *shudder* Basically, it took more than three minutes to parse the directory contents and the system had a 30 second cut off. So, no maintenance, no downloading, nothing.
The frustrating part is, despite I’m doing everything for him for free, he can make money on it. But, he doesn’t. He doesn’t even follow minor suggestions which I know work, since I’ve seen them work. When I first got involved, I showed him how to save five hundred a month on his forum. The only thing I can do else is make it profitable, but he keeps saying “yah, yah, yah, I’ll get there.” I really hate being blown off that way. Just do it and get it over with.
I’ve slowed down my support of his machine over the years. I’m guilty of not really helping people who don’t help themselves. In five years, he’s had so many opportunities to make money, but all he does it bitch about not getting enough donations.
Hrm, kind of like me bitching about not enough time to write or program. Damn it… I need to change that. Remember, boys and girls, what you hate the most in others is something you probably have yourself.
Now, the one person I can’t do this to is Fluffy. In the last year, our MythTV box has been steadily ignored except for the occasional hard reboot when it locked up. Every other time I visited, I spend a few hours just repairing the thing, but I haven’t really been back to Illinois since it depresses me so much–it hasn’t been home for months. From here, I try to repair it, but the reboots and lack of love finally pushed it over the edge. Last night, it basically imploded. I can’t fix it remotely so I walked Fluffy through disconnecting my 700 GiB MythTV box and hooking up the receiver directly.
In two weeks, it comes to Iowa. I’ll make it work again but I’m frustrated that it died a week before I was about to shut it down to move.
Today, I would seriously like to not do tech support.
Happily, I managed to ascend again in the Kingdom of Loathing. This would be my 15th ascension and not even remotely my fastest. But, still, 30 day hardcore ascension is nothing to sneeze at since I took over double that the first two times. The key part is that I still really enjoy the game and every morning, first thing, I get online to burn through my turns.
Though, I kind of rushed the ascension itself because I was running late to work. Ended up being a “just one more thing” type of morning. Going to be worse in the new house (week from Wednesday!) because I think I’m 10-15 minutes further from work which means I’ll need to get up twenty minutes earlier to get my fix in.
Convention time is coming up for me, including the main one in my year: GenCon Indy. I’m also planning on going to ICON this year, now that I’m back in that territory. And living only eight blocks away, though I’ll still stay at the hotel on principle.
While talking to a friend last year at GenCon, I was reminded of some of the “mistakes” I made at the first GenCon. I saw the same mistakes being made by the other married couples in our gaming group and I decided to put them down so hopefully the random Google search will bring it up and save someone a long drive home in angry silence.
Today has been a relatively good and somewhat frustrating day at the same time. A bit long and wandering though, both the good, the eh, and idle thoughts.