My Slice of Reality

So we’re coming up on a month at the new place and I’m left with a strange feeling of disconnect - it’s not home. I come here every day from work, or from a side job and I just sit here. Or sleep. Or watch TV. There’s no real feeling of completeness, of being home.

Maybe it’s because we still have stuff in boxes, a ton of items looking for their own home and it carries over to me. Maybe once I get all my little nicknacks and cables put away in their own spaces I’ll start to feel that sense of being. Or maybe I never will, maybe this place will always be transient; always have a sense of elsewhere.

I’ve lived in alot of places in the past six years, alot of different and disconnected spaces. The only real connection they all shared was the one made by digital signals. I’ve always had my computers, my interwebs and maybe thats what causes the lack of that feeling, the lack of being “home.”

Or maybe it just takes alot of time. I don’t know. I just know I feel angsty, emo, wishing to blast some cheesy Simple Plan or Good Charlotte. Lord, do I need help

What a world wind the past three weeks have been. We finally signed the lease for our new apartment and got everything moved in on the 11th of this month.

Its a decent enough place. Smallish, but two bedrooms, bath, a large kitchen and a washer and dryer make it worth it. The fact that it has a/c (even if only downstairs and not the bedrooms) was even more of a plus.

The downside was that the previous tenant must have been an idiot. She was moved out by the 20th of march but never called to have her Comcast tv and internet service disconnected. This made it rather…difficult to get Comcast do a damn thing in regards to getting us setup and running.

Finally, as of today we have TV and internet. Its like a breath of fresh air. The past two plus weeks or so have been the longest I’ve gone without a net connection in ages. I huggles my internet. Its good to be back.

The quest has finally ended, we’ve found an apartment. While it’s a bit more expensive than we’d like it’s within the maximum we figured we could afford right now. Hopefully, it’ll become even more affordable in the near future when I can find a better job and she starts working full time as well.

What makes the place so nice? Two bedrooms, two full baths. About 1,100 square feet in total that was recently renovated with new carpeting, painting, etc. It also has quite new appliances and central A/C and gas heating.

We’re both looking forward to moving in (hopefully the 19th if the landlord gets back to us on that) and getting out of our respective living situations since neither one is all that optimal right now. Either way, it should be an interesting time in a new household

While attempting to show Laura the wonders of Launchy we ran into an interesting…issue. Apparently its a bit confused by common American slang.

Laura’s beat up old 1990 Subaru Legacy finally got to the point where it was beyond servicing this weekend. Tuesday it started making an extremely heinous noise from the engine bay that was later identified as a bearing in the transmission failing. It only got worse as the week wore on.

Thankfully, the car shopping process had quasi been put into place already and the money was available for buying a new car. However, her parents were the ones who had to pick it out. Not myself, or even Laura who’d be owning the car for hopefully years to come. Nope, the parents who were 200 miles away.

Did I mention they have an unhealthy obsession with Subaru?

Suffice to say, Laura has a new-ish car (1997 Subaru Impreza Outback)¹ that doesn’t quite meet all the things she was looking for. For one, she wanted a 2000 or newer. Also, cruise control that worked and finally one of the clicker-unluck thingies (don’t ask, thats what it was initially called).

Yea, we struck out on all three.However, the car runs, its got a new head unit installed that can interface with her Zune or play mp3 cds built in and in a few weeks she’ll have the clicker unlock thingy that’s also a remote start.

I did a weird thing today; I imported a bookmarks file from almost two years ago to see what was in there. Unsurprisingly there was quite a few common sites. I haven’t really changed my tech hardware or software sites that I read, or gaming, or even adult sites. I’ve added some more web comics and stopped reading a few others, changed a few forums I hang out with and really dropped out of the 3D graphics scene but on the whole it stayed remarkably similar.

Except…except for one area. Blogs.

I think I first tried feed readers my freshmen year of college but I never got into them. I felt so disassociated from the websites I was reading. It also quickly overloaded me; I could track a ton of information but I simply couldn’t process it. So, for the longest time I kept a folder of websites and just loaded them all in one go, grabbed a coffee, and started to read. It worked well considering the folder consisted of about 80 sites; more than I read now in my feed reader (when I load it).

I find that ironic. There was no overload to me reading 80 sites a day through the web browser. Maybe because I paced myself; there was no rush. If I didnt get to a page? Oh well, let it sit till tomorrow.

With a feed reader I feel like I must get through each new updated item the second its posted. It’s like OCD for information. Its simply not scalable and not reasonable but its what flashes through my slightly numbed brain. I wonder where the disconnect comes in.

Whats even more ironic is how the sites I read have changed. It used to be the personal sites; the big fish in the small weblog pong. I wonder how many of them really make a splash on the scene now? They’ve all been replaced by Engadget and Major Nelson. Or maybe they haven’t. It’s been so long since I’ve really followed or cared how should I know?

But reading the voices of Shelly or Derek or Unix Girl or even Noah feels so strange after such a long absence. The voices sound so familiar but thats it; no longer can I match the face I see when I read the words (even if its nothing close to who they really are). Odd; two years doesn’t feel that long.

If you were paying attention this evening you might have noticed that the amount of posts here has expanded by a factor of something like 30x in a few minutes. Don’t be alarmed, I really don’t type that fast. Rather, I imported my old posts from <a href=”http://www.tealart.com”>Tealart</a> where I used to write and brought  them over here to my new home.

If you’re bored feel free to take a wander through the past.

When you’re starting over might as well go in the whole way I suppose. This blog used to be a part of Tealart, then a sub-domain on Tealart and now it’s got its own home. I’ve tried this before with Fatl which was extremely short lived. Maybe with the changes in direction my life has had in the past few months I’ll be able to keep up. Here’s hoping.

It’s been a quiet (if crazy busy) set of weeks here but things might finally be settling down. The 15th will be my last day working for Sun as I accepted a position with another company for slightly less money and one hell of alot less stress.

I don’t think that the job with Sun is a bad job, not by any means, but it wasn’t quite what I was expecting and I never really felt that we had an adequate level of training or, at times, support. It made it very difficult to work through and while I had hoped to last for a year or two it just didn’t work out.

Having said that I learned a hell of alot in the relatively short time I was there. I feel pretty confident that I could do a reasonable job setting up a small NAS/SAN; atleast with Sun hardware. And, if I ever come across a job were they have a ton of Minnows or STK products I should be pretty good!

Life has an odd sense of humor. Last night I needed something to read and I was looking for Heinlein’s Numbers of the Beast but couldn’t find it. Instead, what stood out was William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. I’ve read it before, thought it was ok and set it aside. As is his style, its very graphical and descriptive, deep in its imagery. So deep you can almost taste it.

Until, ten minutes ago, I got to the part where Cayce (the main character) remembers September 11. The chapter where, faced with jet lag, she lets go and brings it all back. The disappearance and possible death of a father, a changing of paths, a changing of a nation, and most of all a changing of fate.

I will always remember that day, as I think most people in this country will; but maybe not for the same reasons. I remember being in chem class and the announcement coming over the loud speaker that “america had been bombed.” I remember skipping my next class and going to the computer labs franticly loading websites but none of the mainstream media pages loading. I remember going to arstechnica and hardocp and checking their forums, then anandtech. The rumors flew and swirled. It felt like I was in a maelstrom.

I remember every class being focused solely on the televisions in each classroom. Everyone discussing, amongst themselves what had happened. Possible causes; possible enemies; possible responses.

I remember how we were supposed to have a soccer game that night, against who I can’t remember. It was canceled. I remember walking out to my friends car for a ride home and thinking: “My god, what a beautiful day.” My head couldn’t get around the displacement. It was like two different worlds; mirror worlds.

In one, there were no planes, no distractions; even the sound of traffic was muted. Birds chirped and flew like normal, the clouds passed effortlessly across the sky but in the other world? Death. Screams of pain, of agony. Tongues of flame and fire and suffering.

Its funny how a book grabbed at random can make memories come back; make you rethink things. I had other things planned for tonight, other things to think of but for some reason these thoughts feel right.

Its late, but I remember.