Random Traffic Through Nick's Brain

<dateline> November 17 </dateline> Christmas music. Jangling bells. Dancing Santas. Can’t y’all wait ’til after Thanksgiving?

<dateline> November 19 </dateline> I ordered a beer at John Harvard’s for lunch. I was carded. Woohoo! On another note… apparently, I’m getting old… as getting carded makes me feel young.

Interesting to see someone else’s take on something you’ve experienced.

New job has started. Learning curve is steep. Hopefully I get to start coding soon.

In politics, or at least, in an election, all that matters is who wins.

Cute graphics that insult the winners, or those who voted for the winners, are funny and cathartic, they may actually be counterproductive.
Stop whining. Get out there and win.

Watched Dina’s brother run his first marathon last week. Some notes on watching future marathons. Me? Over-optimize? Never.

• Plan way in advance.
• Plan to be flexible in case your runner is slower or faster than expected.
• Plan subway stops in advance.
• Have a detailed map of the city, the marathon, and each viewing location.
• Make sure your cell phones are charged.
• Have a compass or GPS.
• The cops or volunteers working the marathon may not know the area. Store or restaurant owners or employees may not either.
• If you’re bringing signs, make sure they are very big, colourful and high contrast. Have handles for the signs to be able to carry them easily while walking or in the subway. Have a way to keep the signs from folding and to easily hold them up. Remember, you’ll have to hold it up for up to 10 minutes at a shot. Ouch on the arms and hands.
• TiVo the race.

Dismantled and washed my keyboard today. Feels oddly satisfying.

Lots of little things have been happening of late. Some important, some not. Some have been developing for a while and I haven’t talked about them. Others are just day-to-day things. Currently in the car on the way to NYC to see Dina’s brother run the marathon. Figure it’s a good time to write. Chronological order sounds good.

Monday

I tendered my resignation to my boss-boss (our team doesn’t have a boss until early December). My last day is Wednesday the 10th, after I finish the upgrade project that has made me so miserable. Thankfully, my vacation starts Wednesday afternoon. I get back on Monday, and then have 4 days off before starting my new job on the 22nd.

I’m not noticeably excited about the new job. I think that’s because the current job has drained from me the ability to show or feel excitement about my work. I’m very much hoping that this will change once I start the new job.

I won’t have to answer any more questions from developers who are working on Desktop UI projects, while being told by management that there are no Desktop UI projects for me to work on. No more working on a project that is horribly misaligned with my skillset. No more being on a project for 6 months that will never succeed. I’ll actually be able to code again, and, better yet, it’ll be in C# instead of VB.Net, though I will have to suffer VSS instead of subversion.

I am going to miss working at VistaPrint. It’s an exciting company (and they’re hiring… just make sure you don’t get put on this one project / team). I’m going to miss working with my friends and the other smart and interesting people there. I’m also going to miss the eye-candy, by far the most and best quality of any technical job I’ve worked at.

Tuesday

The squares class seems lower energy and less fun than it was last spring. It’s also a mess organizationally. No one was on setup. 2nd week of birthdays in a row. Finale’s was good, though socio-dynamically interesting.

Wednesday

The C2 class rocks. Thanks to all y’all.

Thursday

Had a minor car accident on Thursday. Lady decided to try and pass through our car while exiting the Fresh Pond rotary. Thankfully, she gunned her engine before doing it so I had enough warning to veer away from her. The damage seems restricted to the front driver side of the car.

Friday

Went to C1 at Bay Path yesterday. Nothing majorly notable. Minor notables:

• A lot of us weren’t in great form. We slogged through. It’s a scary floor when I’m correcting dancers and am right.
• Jaci & I did our normal bratty-kids routine on the ride to and fro. I got her into a fireman carry at some point, which was gratifying. My final retaliation was to hug her as she exited the car at the end of the night. That earned me a puzzled glare.
• In a pathological square, Jaci & I totally messed them up by goofing off while we were waiting for the other square to resolve. No one clapped, then our weak dancers came to us on a Scoot Back with the wrong hands. Oops. We felt better when, on the do-over, they made the same mistake. This time we had the bashful wherewithal to correct them.
• Dana claims she can strip better than I can. I maintain that I wasn’t motivated. Stay tuned for more developments.
• One of the Tech dancers, while walking in tandem with me from the back to the dance floor, said something like, “Wow, you’ve got a really nice ass, Nick.” It was so surreally out of observable character for this person (or most people at Tech) to be overtly checking someone out, let alone to be verbalizing it, that I didn’t know what to say. I guess I should say “Thank you.”, “I’m going to bug you incessantly about this.”, and “Now do I get to give you the once over and compliment you?”

General

• My vacation is next week. I haven’t started packing yet. The be-prepared part of my psyche is battling the travel-light part. The victor is still uncertain.
• We put an offer on a house in the burbs a while back. It was accepted. The inspection indicated that the heating system was fubar. The owners refused to acknowledge that anything was wrong. The deal fell through. All in all, sucky, but we learned a lot about things.
  • Going through an inspection was educational. We know more of what to look for next time. We also have a good home inspector and pest inspector. Though I understand that an inspection is like insurance, it sucks to pay the premium.
  • Shopping for a mortgage was educational. I think I know what we want in one. I know what questions to ask while shopping for one. Best of all, most of the process can be done in email, no talking to these pesky people on the phone.
  • Dina and I worked well as a team. It was good to be reminded that when the chips are down we come together.
  • Dina, who happens to be a Real Estate Broker, would have received the Buyer’s Broker’s commission. We weren’t sure we’d be able to do that. If you’re buying a house without a Broker, come talk to Dina. A cash-back deal can be made.
  • We weren’t afraid to back out of a the deal. On the other hand, this may indicate that we were afraid to commit to the deal. We’re trying not to look at it that way.
  • We like our lawyer.

The first Monday of every month, I go through my web logs for varacalli.com.
Helps me identify 404s, where traffic is coming from, links, etc.

This time, I discovered that (at least) two sites are linking directly to some of my pictures without permission or attribution.
The first, a school in Norway is using my sandcastle picture.
I’m not too worried about that one. I sent them a polite email requesting that they attribute the photo.

The second one is a bit more annoying.
It’s on some MSN group for horse-lovers and is completely misrepresented.
Since they are linking directly, and there’s no easy way to contact the group without subscribing, I’m tempted to replace the image with one of:

• An image containing a warning.
• A blank file.
• A non-image file. Maybe some text?
• A huge image file (a 3,000 x 3,000 pixel single colour GIF is about 8KB).
• Hoax ad for online orderable horse steaks.
• Porn.
• Horse+human porn.