California, 2007

I was writing a long-ish blog entry detailing all the books I’ve been reading lately (and mini-reviews of each) but I hit the back button on Firefox by mistake, and lost an hour’s worth of text. Oh, well. Too lazy to retype everything from memory.

Tank Lords by David Drake
Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
The Cornelius Quartet by Michael Moorcock

Listening to Missy Higgins, Anna Nalick and Paula Kelley. Occasionally going into short bouts of Nick Cave. Of course, singing along to Murder Ballads may not be good for my mental health.

Watched two seasons of Battlestar Galactica. Cliffhanger until the season continues in January. The new Doctor Who - just gotten midway through the first season. There’s four seasons of Coupling, sitting, unwatched, on my hard drive. Hoping to get the Serenity DVD after Christmas - although it looks like it’s heavily discounted already, even before it’s released on December 20.

Also, trying to revive my dying Photoshop skills:

I am so putting this on a t-shirt.

Soon after I posted the last entry, a couple of my friends buzzed me on YM, asking if I was all right, that I sounded depressed, etc. I’m touched, you guys, but honestly, I’m fine. A little homesick, but fine.

This coming Thanksgiving weekend, I will have been on American soil for exactly six months. It’s a turning point of sorts… by this time I should have settled in to my new life.

I should have enough information in the credit reporting system to actually have a credit rating. If the incoming stream of credit card offers (19% APR? like I’m gonna fall for that) in the mail is any indication.

So around this time I should be sitting down and deciding what that new life should be.

I’m still half in this frame of mind that my little jaunt here in the US is temporary. That I’ll just stay long enough to make a little money, then go back to the Philippines. Doing the OCW lifestyle - contract work, save as much as you can, then pop back home to spend the money in a place with a vastly lower cost of living. When the money runs out, go off and do it over again.

Comfortable. I guess the only way to get out of that state of mind is to make my life here more comfortable than going back.

I guess to have a new life, you have to give up the old. You have to give up all attempts to go back. I guess I didn’t burn enough bridges behind me.

Part of me still wants to be back in the university. Enough free time for my little programming projects, for all-night LAN gaming sessions, out for a couple of beers or coffee every other night.

Maybe it’s time I told myself I should grow up, that that grad-student lifestyle is behind me, and I’ll never get it back. Ever. On the surface, it looks like that my old life wasn’t much to be proud of…

But despite all the goofing around, I got things done. Division head by the time I was 23. Finished my Masters at 25. Assistant professor at 28. Designed and built a large campus network,  kept it running.

I think I just got sidetracked. Without a PhD, you’re never going to go far in the academic world, as my father kept telling me, and he was right. I think on some level he still wants me to get back to that, go get my PhD somewhere, and go back to teaching. Every father wants a son to follow in his footsteps.

And if I wanted to, I could go get a PhD. I’ve never had much trouble getting scholarships in the past.

Its a matter of motivation. Sure, getting tenure and having a secure job for the rest of your life is nice. I could see myself doing that. And for a long time, eight or so years, that was the future I was moving towards. Until things started getting uncomfortable at work… new policies, an administration that had no respect for its faculty… and I started realizing that an academic career, as with any other career, is still subject to politics. That the safe, comfortable future I was planning for wasn’t really safe or comfortable.

And before I could fully make the decision one way or the other, the decision was made for me. I failed to get tenure.

Got another job, of course, a staff job at another university in another town, and this one paid three times as much, without the headaches of teaching. But this wasn’t as comfortable as my old job.

And I decided that if I was going to give up my safe and comfortable life in Los Banos, I’d better go whole hog and go blow my entire life savings to move somewhere where I’d be neither safe or comfortable, but at least have a change from twelve years of living in the same town and working at the same job.

Which brings me here. Six months in this country, starting from scratch. Borrowed a little money from the parents to survive three months of unemployment in LA and SF. Starting to pay them back a little bit, but that won’t be fully paid for a couple of months yet.

I’ve been pretty lucky, all told. They say God looks after fools and small children, and if that’s true then I should be doubly blessed.

Despite being a total idiot, I’ve managed to find a job that pays well enough to maintain an apartment in the city, a job that allows me to work from home four days a week. And it’s a job that actually fits my skills, that still makes me feel good about myself after I troubleshoot, debug and fix a particularly convoluted Active Directory-DNS-LDAP problem. I am realizing, now that I’m away from the university, that I am actually pretty good at what I do, and there far less competent people out there who are getting paid far more than me. ($2000 a day for a Red Hat GFS consultant? Seriously?)

Not that money has ever been a major concern for me… as long as I can pay the bills and I have an Internet connection, I don’t really need much. I don’t spend that much, even for my computer - I’ve never been a fan of high-priced toys, and I always buy stuff slightly behind the bleeding edge, the stuff that goes on clearance whenever the latest model comes out and the shops need to clear inventory.

Oh, of course my social life is suffering, but I guess I still have friends. Friends who are still concerned enough about me to chat immediately after I post a depressed blog entry. Even if they’re not here physically, they still touch base every day, and for that I am grateful.

So. I’m alone, but I’m not lonely. I’m underpaid, but I’m not falling behind on my bills.

I’m only concerned for my brother, but I guess once his wife and daughter’s petition comes in and they can be together again, it’ll be all right. Or maybe he decides to go back home in December, which means I can be alone but not lonely on my own next year.

God looks after fools and small children. And I hope he keeps looking out for me a little bit longer.

And yes, a month ago I finally got a little extra money, and plunked down the fifteen bucks to reactivate my World of Warcraft account.

And as expected, I’m back to spending a lot of my free time online, whacking away at computer-generated creatures in a virtual fantasy world.

Of course it’s escapism. Due to my job, I’m required to spend eight to twelve hours a day at the computer, required to be reacheable by my boss, my co-workers, or clients. Every time I pop out to get the mail or take out the trash, my cell phone rings. By the time I’m done with work, it’s too dark to go out (and it’s too cold to do anything good anyway).

And yeah, some people have asked me, if I spend all that work time on the computer, why would I choose to spend my leisure time back on the machine?

Some people spend the same amount of time in front of the TV. The average Japanese household watches 8 hours of TV a day.

It’s the lifestyle I’ve had for the past fifteen years now, since high
school and college. It’s worked for me in the past - after a marathon
session of Orion or Archmage after work, me and my friends would all go
out for a few beers or a couple of rounds of billiards. Or breakfast,
sometimes, after an all-night LAN party. Difference here, of course, is that my friends are across the Pacific, and it’s gonna take a little work before we can go out for beers again.

Thing is, it’s not escaping into a fantasy world of wizards and dragons like a lot of people think. Sure, I’m single, working from a tiny one-room apartment, overeducated and underpaid, living with a brother who hates my guts… anyone would want to escape from this.

It’s not that I’m escaping into a made-up virtual world. I’m escaping into a world where I can talk and do things with my buddies, chat about the latest news back in UP or stuff happening in my home town… raise a virtual mug of ale with in a virtual bar in a virtual city in a fantasy world.

I’m escaping into a world where I have good friends, escaping from my life in this cold, lonely city thousands of miles away from the people I love. And for a few hours each day, I can roam that world, with my friends by my side, and remember what my life was like a few years ago.

I’m escaping into my past, and that’s something I need in the face of my uncertain future. Because otherwise, I’ll end up bitter and depressed and lonely, if I force myself to live in the "real world".

Because a few years or decades from now, when I can finally retire, I’m going back to that life.

Someday, I’m going to be happy again. I just have to hold on to my sanity long enough to get there.

A lot of people tell me I’m lucky - I work from home, I don’t have to go to the office (no more than once a week, anyway) I don’t have to endure the commute.

And yeah, people say telecommuting improves your quality of life.

That’s only true, however, if you have a life to improve.

Otherwise, you’re just working longer hours than most people. Show up at the office, and there’s a dividing line between work hours and me-hours… at least during my infrequent commutes I’ve enough time to read a book or listen to some music.

When you’re working from home, you have to have strict rules on your schedule. Unfortunately that doesn’t work too well with my standard work pattern.

So most days I end up configuring a database while I’m doing the dishes, or talking with a client while I’m cooking. My mouse is starting to smell of garlic.

I know I’m going over my billable 40 hours a week, but I can’t help it - once I get my teeth into a problem, I can’t sleep until I’ve done everything humanly possible to solve it. So now, I’m getting about five or six hours sleep - hitting the sack at around two or three AM.

Still, that’s an improvement over the 2-3 hour sleep on weekdays and then collapsing for 16 hours straight on the weekends routine that I used to have back in UP. I’m kinda relishing having ONE job, and only one job. Oh, and getting paid for working, for a change.

I am starting to settle into a routine, although this shut-in life isn’t that good. I don’t leave the apartment for days, save for quick trips downstairs to take out the trash or do the laundry. I am seriously tempted to have groceries delivered.

That’s not gonna be healthy. Unfortunately the way my job works, I need to be there in the late afternoons and evenings, when our clients in Texas quit for the day and we can take the servers down for testing or installation or whatever. So the only free time I have is late at night (when you can’t go out) or early in the morning (which I’d rather use for sleep).

Ah, well. My friends back home are asking when I’ll be playing WoW again. I don’t think I have enough time now to dedicate to developing an MMORPG addiction, but then due to my short attention span, I’m not much of a gaming addict. And I may not be up to paying $15 a month for a game I’ll only be playing on the weekends.

Oh, well. Maybe someday the workload will cut back a bit, or maybe someday I’ll get offered a better job with less hours and more money.

Riiight. That ain’t happening anytime soon.   

Maybe someday. But not now.

Holy Mother of God.

Watched Serenity Saturday afternoon. On my own. Haven’t watched a movie solo since high school (and back then, I was stood up).

Totally worth the forty-five minutes of waiting at the bus stop in the fog.

There are precious few things in my life I that bring me happiness. And it’s wonderful to find one more.

Fanboy mode is right. Although there seems to be very few fans in Daly City - the theater was pretty empty. A little scattering of applause at the River-with-the-battleaxe scene.

Oh well. Maybe it’s a fanboy movie after all. None of my other friends will probably get it.

But Summer Glau was right - she did carry the movie.

Only thing that worries me is that they’ve tied up all the loose ends tightly - so tight that there doesn’t seem to be any room for sequels.

Or further TV episodes for that matter, unless they do spin-offs.

In the meantime, nothing to do but watch all the Firefly episodes again. Here’s hoping they get out the DVD soon.

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.