sometimes i read The New Yorker. they have an interesting article on commuting in the latest issue. according to census statistics Americans average 51 minutes each way. i drop tessa off at her office in the morning and then go to my office. if we back out of our spot at 7:30 we’ll get to tessa’s office at about 7:50, i’ll walk into my office at about 8:05. going home takes about 40 minutes. i can make it across town in 10 minutes but we spend a lot of time getting on the freeway, then getting from the freeway to our place. so i spend around an hour in the car, give or take, every day. that’s not so bad. when i commuted from tacoma to seattle i wanted to shoot myself most days. i don’t understand how people do it. i got used to it eventually, i guess i gave in. i read a lot, i had an ipod, i never slept.
it seems kind of ridiculous that i’m glad in only takes me 20 minutes to go 5 miles. but it could be a lot worse. new yorkers have an average 28 minutes to work. that means some people have an hour just getting there. and these people live in the same town that they work in. never mind the people that don’t actually live in the city. 3.5 million people are “extreme commuters” that go 90 minutes each way. that’s three hours of your life, every day, getting to and from work. it took a little over an hour to ride the bus between seattle and tacoma. i could never do this. most of these people drive by themselves too. all these people driving their own cars to the same place…
apparently there’s a real estate “joke” that says “drive until you qualify.” that is, drive away from your job until you find an exit where you can afford a house. that has to be one of the more depressing things i’ve heard in a while. that’s a terrible choice, but it’s still a choice. it turns out that time is a purchasable commodity. if you’re willing to spend a little more money, you can live a little closer to work and have an extra half hour with your family every day. i really can’t let that happen. i’m 10 miles by bike to work. that’s a healthy ride every day. much farther than that and it would start to take too long. i like going to work by bike, even though it takes me longer than it does to drive. i probably wouldn’t exercise otherwise. aside from that, if i lived too far to bike i’d probably have a horrible commute by car. and we just can’t have that.
we’re so spoiled in this city where it is possible to live 15 minutes away from your job. it’s one of the reasons i like living here. i hope it doesn’t get to the point where it takes a long time to get to work. i spend enough time at work without having to waste more time just getting there. this means when we go look for a house we’re probably going to be paying a little more. and i’m ok with that. i’d rather have a smaller house closer to work than a big one that i’m never at because it takes so long to get there from work. there is no idyllic place where i could have a house where the stress of commuting and work would melt away as i pulled up the drive. but now that i’ve put this down in writing where everyone can see i’m going to have a 5 acre lot on the water with a giant modern house that’s a 30 minute drive and a ferry ride away from my office.

we’re starting to exercise in earnest again. the weather is getting nicer so we’re more inclined to be outside. i’ll be glad when it’s sunny again. the seasons last just the right amount of time around here. i’m just starting to get sick of the rain and it’s just starting to stop.

i think that i may sell the fix and get a real bike. my cousin says he might be able to get me a deal on a nice road bike. so if i stop eating out for lunch so often i’d have enough in a couple months if i also sell the fix. it’s just not practical for a place with hills. my commute is 20 miles round trip now with hills and such. from alki it was 16 miles and pretty much flat. 4 miles and multiple grades makes for a whole different ride. it’s still up in the air though. we’ll see.

“Providing the HPV vaccine doesn’t promote sexual promiscuity any more than providing the hepatitis B vaccine promotes drug use.”

-Texas Governor Rick Perry defending his executive order that mandates sixth-grade girls be inoculated with the HPV vaccine

a friend also brings up a good point.

Why do people keep thinking kids need an excuse to have sex.
-Brian in response to me IMing him this quote

we have way to prevent a very horrible type of cancer, why are we even discussing whether we should use it? this isn’t an issue of kids having sex, they’re going to whether they get this vaccine or not. following with Mr. Perry, since we inoculate children against Hep.B does this mean we’re giving them permission to start doing IV drugs and share needles with their friends? of course not. but they still might regardless.
it isn’t the government’s place to educate children on sex and drugs. it’s the parent’s responsibility. i’m all for the government making it easier and providing good information to help parents teach their children. but we don’t need to bring the law into this.

my old host was a cheap company called fuitadnet. from all i read they sucked real bad for a while before i signed up but right before i signed up got really good. they were cheap, they had simple service and cpanel, which i like. for a long time i didn’t have any problems. the site hummed along and i didn’t need to talk to the company for any reason. then in the latter half of 2006 they just started getting spotty. i had a multi-day outage and was back up without me doing anything. i thought ok, everyone has hiccups and i’m not paying a whole bunch. i also didn’t lose anything so whatever, right? i guess this is around october 2006.
fast forward to january 2007. they initiate a mass migration of all their servers without so much as an email. yes they posted it on their forums but i don’t read that, why would i? ok fine, migration, that means better hardware right? this took about 3 days and i was completely locked out of my site. tessa was also locked out of her site. she freaked out a lot. she moved to another host as soon as we were back up and running.
fine, shakey, that’s when i posted about finding another host. then this last week they went down again. hardware failure they said. i was black for 5 days before i was able to get to my site and start getting stuff off. i almost didn’t get my databases back and i’m not sure if they ever restored them completely. which is why the comments from the last few posts are gone.
so now i’m on brinkster. they seem solid. they have very responsive customer support and a friend of mine has been on them for a while with no complaints. so there you have it. stay as far away from fuitadnet as you can. in fact, tell your friends not to use them; even if they don’t need web hosting. plant the seed. this company does not deserve anyone’s business. i could not contact their support on the phone or by email so the only option was to lurk their IRC support channel. there was exactly one support guy there that actually got things done. the other five were almost completely useless. after i got my site backed up and moved i asked them to cancel my account, because i can’t do that myself through the billing tool. guess what’s down right now. any charges that are made to me after January 26th i’m going to dispute with my credit card. because that’s the date my service stopped, and now they are preventing me from stopping it. only seems fair.
the lesson learned here: spend that extra buck or two a month for web hosting with a real company.

oh, but you have no idea what i do. there’s a little blurb on the about page but that’s about it. i know you probably shouldn’t talk about your job too much in places like this but there really isn’t anything i could say that anyone would find offensive. we’re all people, we all know we get on each other’s nerves now and then. that doesn’t mean we don’t like each other.

my official title is Applications Support Engineer. the title is apt because we’re not just phone jockeys. yes we answer the phone but we do that because it’s probably the best way to interface with a customer that has a problem. email is great, but sometimes it’s just better to talk to people. we also write code against our product to debug problems with it and write custom solutions for our customers that are too small for our pro-services team to deal with. there’s also some account/project management involved sometimes because as you talk to people and help them with their problems they come to rely on you and only you. you end up making friends. the product is a media management/publishing suite. it’s a fairly complex product and as such needs a bit of support. when i started two years ago everyone did support; developers, account managers, sales engineers, qa. they were really stoked when we got hired. so that’s it in a nutshell.

this is really my first “real job.” sure i did some contract work places but that doesn’t really count. i got in here my first year out of college and i gotta say it’s growed me up some. being in a professional environment teaches you a lot of things. you grow socially very quickly because you have to. i was fortunate enough to get to do that in a company full of very nice people. from the ceo on down everyone has a weird sense of humor and will absolutely give you the time of day. i’m not saying there aren’t other places where everyone is great, i’m just saying i’m happy i found one. you learn that while people are there to back you up, at the end of the day you’re responsible for yourself and the things you need to get done. woo responsibility. never saw that one coming.

working in the tech industry is a wild ride, let me tell you.- some days get so crammed and hectic you just wish you could quit.- but you don’t, because you like it.- you know it’s not always going to be like this.- you know when you pull through people are going to thank you for hanging in there and getting the job done.- you realize that without you some people couldn’t do their jobs.- by showing up every day and doing your best, you’re helping other people to do theirs.- it sounds like sappy crap but it’s true.- it also means that when your COO comes in your office and bets you a pizza that you can’t get something done by end of day, you know you’re getting pizza for lunch tomorrow.

• lost both my cats
• broke tessa’s site…. twice
• started world of warcraft again… for the third time

these things have been taking up a lot of my time, and then i’m just too tired or don’t feel like updating my site.- i’ll try to update more often.- i could start telling you about my job.- that may or may not be awesome.- maybe we’ll try it.

both mine and tessa’s databases were lost.- then recovered.- but they couldn’t rebuild them in the new server location.- so i got access to the old location, backed up the dbs, then restored them myself.- not hard, but still a pain in the ass and not something i should have had to do.

i need a new webhost.- the hunt begins.

new year’s eve came and went, and i hardly noticed.- brian came over and we went to the Celtic Swell for eats and drinks.- i’ve discovered i like whiskey.- we got there too early, got drunk too early.- after dinner we went home and watched a pretty awful movie, Layer Cake.- it’s about a guy that’s a middle-man in the cocaine trade that is about to get out but then gets caught up in something that prevents him from doing so.- it really wasn’t that good.- after brian even left early and tessa and i pretty much dozed on the couch until midnight.- we then turned the tv to fireworks that we could have walked about a mile to watch in person and went to bed.- all in all pretty uneventful.

i’ve got some things i’m going to work on that aren’t so much resolutions as they weren’t prompted by the new year.- i’ve been thinking that i’m not as good as i could be at my job.- and this year i aim to fix it.- this incidentally means fixing some things about myself that just need fixing so i’m guessing my life in general will benefit as well.- i suppose i could break it down into a list but it all boils down to the following:

get things done when you can rather than waiting until they need to be done.

it’s that simple.- if i can stick to this one principle a lot of things will improve.- so far i’m sticking to it.- we’ve cleaned our apartment pretty well; and with the exception of last night been keeping up with chores ok.- at work i haven’t slacked off too terribly much and have gotten quite a bit done.- so far i think i’m doing ok.- and hopefully it’ll stick…