California, 2007

I’ve been wanting this shirt ever since I saw it on PvP.

And now with two days left until Serenity hits the theaters, and I’m trying my best not to switch into drooling fanboy mode.

I didn’t much care about the Star Wars hype machine (I haven’t seen Episode III yet, actually, and I haven’t watched I and II all the way through) but I loved Firefly.

Of course, September 30 is a Thursday Friday. (Dammit, I gotta get out more - I’m losing track of the date…)

Oh, well, it’s probably better to skip the first screenings, they’re probably going to be packed.

So. I have something to watch on the weekend. Dunno if I’m going to get anybody else to want to watch it with me, but hey, if worse comes to worst, I’ll be going into the theater alone.

Fanboy drool and all.

Blew my paycheck on something I’d been wanting for a long time. One more step, one big step back to regaining my old life. Just bought myself a nice little desktop. For work, you know. Sh-yeah, right.

Sure, money can’t buy happiness, but it sure makes it a hell of a lot easier to be happy. And deep down, I’m still a little kid. Oh ok, not that deep down - I still have the emotional maturity of a twelve-year-old. And the attention span of a child of five.

Still… every kid wants his toys. And I just blew my paycheck on a hella expensive one.

So. Once I get my first paycheck, I go online and go shopping for components. Part of the fun is picking out the various parts. Processors, motherboards, video cards. Pretty soon, I’ve boiled it down to either a high-end Sempron or a low-end Athlon64. (No, I’m not buying Intel).

Price comparisons. Speed comparisons. Drawing crude price/performance graphs, and noticing the price jump between the Athlon 64 3000 and 3100 is pretty big. Deciding on a video card - of course, NVidia-based - and it’s a tossup between the 6200, 6600 and 6800. Realize that I’m not going to blow three hundred dollars on a video card, and go with the 6600.

The rest of the decisions went pretty easy after those two. Then of course, I realize I’m a couple of hundred dollars over budget, so it’s time to cut out some of the things I’d been lusting for, but don’t really need.

Cut memory to half a gig. Find a motherboard that’s on special. Briefly flirt with the idea of downgrading to AGP instead of PCI-Express, until I realize that AGP cards are actually more expensive now than equivalent PCI-E ones.

And go online and actually buy the damn thing. It’s insanely easy to keep dragging things onto your shopping card, until it collapses and crushes your checking account.

Ordered on Tuesday, shipped on Wednesday, and four big brown boxes arrive on Friday afternoon. I am torn between unpacking them and doing the laundry. I decide on both - the rest of the afternoon sees me yo-yoing between the laundry room downstairs and running upstairs to swim happily through a sea of styrofoam peanuts.

And I realize I’ve missed this. Putting together a computer. Figuring
out where stuff goes. The crazy unlabled mess of wires that go from the
motherboard to the front panel speaker, LEDs and switches.

As the heatsink bracket clicks down onto the processor socket , it feels like coming home. It feels like this is finally home, a place where I am safe and happy. I have a computer again.

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of throwing the switch for the very first time. You don’t know what’ll happen. You might not have installed the processor properly, or you may have wiped off too much thermal compound. Nothing quite like turning it on, seeing the fans spin up and hearing the beep-beep-beep of the no-video error for the first time on a fresh motherboard.

Oh and the rest of the night is a blur, installing, booting… the sudden terror of flashing the BIOS and realizing it didn’t finish - scrambling to build a boot CD because none of the other computers in the apartment have floppies -  booting off your old Slackware disks (because the ACPI module in the BIOS is screwed up enough that Windows hangs on startup, as well as Caldera DOS) - mount the CD with the good BIOS images, and realizing that the default Slack rescue image doesn’t have enough free space to unpack the image - spending five minutes trying to recall how to create a ramdisk - unpack the image and dd it to /dev/fd0 - pull the CD out and reset, fingers crossed, fingers crossed….

And the damn disk finally boots straight into the flash utility - and it overwrites the BIOS with a good image. Whew.

I guess how I feel about my computers are about the same as how other men feel about their cars.

Everyone needs a hobby. Sure, at some points my hobbies have crossed over the line into obsession, but hey, I can’t help it. I do almost everything I do to extremes.

And I may have to skimp on groceries this week to be able to make the rent, I may have to keep my bank account a little thinner than I wanted, but judging from the two days I’ve had this baby, it’s worth it.

These are the few remaining chances for happiness I have left. And moments of joy like this are few and far between.

This weekend I will be retreating back into the safety and comfort of my geekhood. Because for months I’d had to make do with public library computers and borrowed laptops and for once I am going to have something I want.

This weekend is for quality time with myself. Call it sad and pathetic. I don’t care, ’cause for a change, I’m not worrying about getting a job or making the rent or drinking too much. For a change, I’m HAPPY.

… and my feet are killing me.

Literally.

So I get my first paycheck. Had to drag my boss to the bank to actually get him to cough up any money, but yeah, got paid.

So. First thing I needed was a haircut. Didn’t know any good places around here, so I decided to drop by the nearest strip mall after I got back from work. The nearest mall is in Daly City, though, so I decide to get off the BART there, instead of the Embarcadero from where I usually take the Muni home.

Looking at the available transit routes in the area, I see the mall is just down the road a bit. Oh, hey I need to work out anyway - the only exercise I get these days is when I lug three loads of clothes down five floors to the laundry room. So, I tell myself, how about a nice stroll down John Daly Boulevard?

Sounded nice. Of course, by the time I actually get to the mall, I’d crossed the freeway, and hoofed the better part of a mile. Good thing it was mostly downhill.

Ookay. Get the haircut. Step outside (slightly chilly, as my neck is now unprotected) and decide not to pay three dollars for the bus home. Three dollars, because you have to transfer from a SamTrans bus to a Muni bus, and inter-city bus transfers aren’t free. Plus it’ll take over an hour, as I have to ride halfway up to Stonestown, then back down.

Hey, and it’s just a couple of streets over, and I can enjoy walking by the lake, right?

Riight.

A mile and a half of lakeside later, and I’m realizing that:

a) I should be in sweats and jogging pants, not a collared long-sleeved shirt and dress pants,
b) If I’m out getting some exercise, I should not be lugging around a heavy notebook case,
c) I skipped lunch, and I am sorta getting hungry,
d) I am wearing the wrong shoes, and they are starting to hurt…

But exercise is exercise. An hour later I stumble into the apartment, tired and hungry. But hey, as I lay back to rest my shoulders, I realized I’d just gotten paid, and for the first time in a long, long while, I am solvent. I have enough money to actually get a haircut.

And as I lay back, basking in the glow of my newly-rejuvenated bank account, tired but happy, I suddenly realized something that made my calves clench in painful terror.

It was time to do the laundry.

A little reminder that this is not a nice, safe world we live in. God promised Noah that "never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth". For a lot of people down in New Orleans, that doesn’t seem to be true.

You can only shake your head when you see news anchors asking why they didn’t evacuate despite having 36 hours of warning. Why they didn’t pile onto their SUVs and drive off before it was too late.

These are probably the same people I was talking to three years ago, when they started bombarding Kabul. They were telling me "no, the civilians have all left, they’re all military targets". These people could not wrap their heads around the idea that some people don’t have cars, that moving out of a city is not an option when you have barely enough for bus fare downtown, let alone out of the state.

Bus people. People who hold down two or three jobs to feed their families, people whose credit ratings are so bad even used car dealers won’t give them loans. People with no medical insurance. People who rent. People who have to take public transportation to work.

And I am one of those people. Oh, slightly better off - I’m not working a McJob, I’m not supporting any dependents, and I’ve got a job that lets me telecommute most of the time. But I still have a two to three-hour commute by bus and BART every morning. I don’t have medical insurance. Don’t know if I can afford it, even. No car, no driver’s license.

And people like us, when something big comes, when public utilities fail, we’re the ones who’ll get squeezed through the rips in your inadequate safety nets. If the Big One hits the West Coast, and California slides into the sea, I’m not gonna be able to get very far on foot.

It’s telling that they send troops to take care of the looters first. I can totally sympathize with these people - when you’ve lived all your life on the wrong side of the department store display window, when you’ve got precious little to lose, and you suddenly find yourself in the middle of a deserted city with no cops and no white people, you’re gonna damn well pick up that brick and go through that window.

People say the Boxing Day Tsunami relief efforts were handled better than Katrina. No looting, no arson. Of course it was better. People in Indonesia and India, they’re used to calamities. Typhoons hit every year, earthquakes every few. People know how to work together to get through them, and the tsunami was just a little more water than usual. People are used to not getting government help. Oh, people die, villages wiped out, but over there, people die all the time. You pick up your life and move on.

Here they need to go all hysterical and stuff. Finger pointing, even while the rescue operations were underway. It’s all politics. The rebels and government troops in Aceh were smart enough to lay down arms and pitch in after the tsunami. Because it was their relatives dying, people they knew.

Oh, well. It’s a little reminder that we live in a dangerous, unpredictable world.  And we need to learn to cherish the moments we have left, because it can all be taken away.

Smack in the middle of an exhausting week. Two weeks, actually.

Just over two weeks at our new apartment. And I’ve finally fought through the fearsome forces of Human Resources, and managed to land a job.

Signed the contract this morning. I’m supposed to start tomorrow, but they expect me to dive right in and hit the desk running.

And it feels damn good to be working again. Well, unless I screw up really badly and they fire my ass for incompetence.

I’ve been a workaholic for over twelve years. Pulling twelve-to-eighteen hour shifts regularly. Weekends, holidays at the office. I spent New Year’s Eve, 1999 logged on just to see if my Y2K patches were up to spec.

And this year was the longest I’d ever spent unemployed. Three months of not working was taking its toll on my brain.

And now I’m back. A little rusty, but looking forward to getting my hands elbows-deep in server guts again.

To some people, a job is more than a way to make a living. It’s a way of defining yourself.

System administrator. Network engineer. Being able to call yourself some swanky title allows you to feel better about yourself. To feel useful, needed.

Sounds kinda sad, I know. But I got nothing else now.

Without a job, I’m just another useless loser. Overeducated, underskilled.

With a job, well I guess things will get better from here on in.

Of course, there are still a couple or so weeks before the first paycheck, and these next two weeks look to be really bad. Belt-tightening bad.

Once I pay the rent tomorrow, I’ll have about fifty dollars left in my checking account. Fifty dollars to get through two weeks. In the second most expensive city in the world.

Oh, hell. I’d like to say I’ve been through worse, but we all know I haven’t.

I have no clue of what’s in store for me now.