A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

I played my first game of Scrabble in many years, last night, with housemate and his GF, after they hit the game store to pick up a new copy. The board is still biege, after all this time! God bless them.

I took an early lead with ZIPPER and then getting a bonus turn through winning housemate's challenging my GENT. (No, it's not an abbreviation. furrfu.)

All enjoyed cheap laughs from this bit of visual poetry:

    P
S N O U T
    U
  G R O I N

Alas, housemate won, as he has with the last 50,000 games of any type that we've played together. It's still good.

The Diesel, I see, has embraced the strange weather by removing the wintertime battens from its roll-up front facade. I still feel the need to have some token acknowledging that these temperatures shouldn't be here: I'm wearing my corduroy sportcoat, something I wouldn't do were we having this very same weather in June.

I wasn't nervous until two people at the Sunday gaming group agreed: "That's it. We're done, we're doomed. Head for high land!" While their attitude was ha-ha-only-serious, seeing any amount of fatalism in my friends still fills me with dread. This, and the constant little reminders of the oddball atmosphere (here comes Charles in the door wearing shorts, listen to the squeak of the air conditioner at the office), has put a dint on my ability to focus on things.

Internet access at home has been squidgy for over a week now, despite Charles' efforts to make the new would-be firewall machine, the scrounged Alpha, work. Last night we went shopping at Micro Center, and I picked me up a new Netgear wireless router. Though it has its own firewall capabilities, Charles wants it sitting behind the Alpha-based one if at all paossible. If we determine that the box is simply toast, we'll fall back to using the Netgear as the house firewall instead. Tonight should hold the moment of truth.

(I played with the router's Web-based configuator a little, enough to change the admin password from the factory-default "1234" (There's a tip for all you 1337 1s) (Also: insert quote from "Spaceballs" here, if you are Carla; I'll have to tell her about this and see if this triggers her automated quote mechanisms as I predict) and make its broadcast identifier string "Chez Chestnut"... @whee)

Today, though, I'm on my way back to O'Reilly to hang out (uninvited, but I'm fairly certain I'm welcome, given my goal; see below), since Internet access is out-and-out dead at Chez Chestnut, the Alpha idling with a screenful of kernel compilation error messages until we decide what to do with this mess. Charles is sincere in his belief that we can hit a working solution tonight. I just hope we can hit one before Saturday.

The pressure to not spend this Netless afternoon reading or watching movies comes from the imperitave to Finish The Book Dammit that Erik and I received yesterday. I must spend the next week and a half in hack-and-describe mode in order for this to work according to schedule. Strange and Wondeful fact: I think I can hold up my part. I don't know how, but over the last mangle of weeks (maybe since autumn) my confidence with the project has risen a lot, and stayed there. I've managed to get a lot done, and the path ahead of me seems reasonably well-defined. I'll say no more on this, though. I know myself a little too well for that. Mmm-hmm.

I'm also making progress on the other thing I told everyone I'd put off until the move was done, and have completed the first draft of my Statement of Objects essay for my MIT application and vetted it by Jon, my principal sponsor in this crazy endeavor. He filled my head with ideas for stuff the essay still needs, so that's gotta happen today, because there's now one month left for me to finish filling this thing out. I still have to choose who to tap for writing a third recommendation letter, but after speaking with Jon yesterday I have some ideas, at last.

Finally, my first-ever contracted programming job reached feature-complete stage this week. Yay. Now comes the part where the customer tells me about all the changes they need. It's just like I read about! But in this case the customers are also my dear friends, so it's all good.

This house officially Wins. I did good by coming here, and have said as much to the preinstalled peeps, with whom I seem to be swimming swimmingly. Charles acknowledges my skill at memetic boxing, and Carla invited me into her GURPS Discworld campaign. We've all played the official house game of Lost Cities many times, and we chat and share food and coffee and do this and that with respective other friends as much as you might expect, and yes indeedy my Social bar is perhaps greener than it's ever been. Even the cat seems to think I'm OK.

So yeah. Props to cthulhia for encouraging my move here, both in advising me and in speaking in my favor to the residents. I am a heppy heppy ket.

Neighborhoodishly, I didn't realize how quiet the surroundings are until my first or second night here, when I heard a very distant emergency vehicle siren and realized that it was all the traffic I could hear at the time. How different from the Medford/Highland intersection of my last apartment! This despite the fact that there's so much good stuff in walking distance; Trader Joe's 5 minutes thisaway, Bread & Circus 7 minutes thataway, and Central Square with its T station and coffee shops is but 10 minutes up yonder. Compare with my east Somerville place, where I had an array of convenience stores to pick from, and that was that.

Driving seems a puzzle. Cambridgeport is more or less griddish, but every day a random selection of roads are blocked off by construction equipment, making the neighborhood streets an ever-changing labyrinth. As for Mass Ave, it's just as confusing during the day as it is at night, but it rewards those with cool heads with as many chances to loop back and try again as they need, until they finally bang into their heads the pattern of which lanes to occupy when, so as not to get prematurely flung off at any of several flinging-off points. I have come to the conclusion that Massachusetts Avenue is not a single road, but a collective organism made of lots of smaller roads, each with their own personalities, who have nonetheless decided to band together under a single name. Learning and accepting this makes navigating it a bit easier, for me.

There is a dishwasher, a concept so alien that even after being introduced to it I refused to accept its existence and washed the dishes once by hand anyway before thinking: hm. Charles has since educated me on dishwasher protocol, which I appreciate.

Apparently I am alone among the three in using the house phone line, so all phone bills will go to me until I finally get around to nabbing a cell phone, at which point, Charles figures, we may as well cancel the thing.

Despite all this talk of assimilation, I still haven't actually moved in yet. The landlords return this weekend, allegedly... I'll go research this now. Wish me luck.

Logged two hours of work today for Arcus, my first two ever as an independent contractor. Picked up plenty of useful advice from veteran contractor (and Arcus bossman) Jim, on when and when not to bill. Figuring out how to navigate the customer's whacked-out labyrinth of existing databases and APIs: bill. Thinking to self about how to solve the problem at hand: bill. Having chosen a particular attack path, figuring out how that is supposed to work, prior to actually applying it to the problem: do not bill.

I've been using a little OS X dock app called AtWork as my clocky tool, though Adam thinks I should learn how to use the time-tracking Emacs mode he heard about. GEEK

---

Charles says that he has successfully phoned my employment references, and presented this information, at long last, to the super-busy landlord and her husband. (Said employers corroborate this, though I do trust Charles, who, I remind myself, hangs directly off the small but succulent trust network I've built in Boston -- and views me in exactly the same way, with the same network.)

This news came in the nick of time, as, after speaking with my parents about the situation, I had resolved to leap at the other opportunity if the first was still stalled by day's end. And so, the waiting game continues, now through a second weekend.

The mail from friends, gaming groups, and social circles in Boston really makes me pine to be there again, despite the fact that I don't get out much, no matter where I am. :)

Gaming... there is RPG madness due to happen, a critical point in our Nephilim campaign, possibly a Big Fight, when I really should be there. Should I say "foo" and drive down and maybe hope for crash space? Dunno. OTOH, there is no lack of stuff to get done here. Like, oh, I dunno, the book? Mumble

---

I had better set about fixing my homesite, which is still littered with debris and broken internal links from the move. Between laziness and general disconnection from the rest of the world (something that definitely fuels the former), I haven't so far been bothered with it. Bad, bad. This is not the time to be ambivalent about my face to the world, friend.

Quoting recent mail to Charles:

> I decided to rent a storage locker and have started to pile stuff into it.
>
> I forgot that I had a small bureau in the large-objects category, along with
> the couch. Bloody thing... its next stop after the locker will either be to
> a susboid who wants it, or to the dump. All thingies that don't lend
> themselves to moving deserve purging from my life. Must find alternate
> clothing storage solutions, he said in a rumbling monotone.
>
> After the bureau-moving debacle I am prepared on calling the couch a lost
> cause. Snf.
>
> Um, anyway: No matter what happens tomorrow night, I have to zip up to Maine
> soon after, so that I can exorcise the jmac.org server in the company of
> licensed profesionals (they tell me that I'll still get to shout "The power
> of Christ compels thee!" at it but this time I should lay off on the holy
> water) and then plug it into its new host setup, conveniently at the same
> place. If I'm an official resident of Chez Charlas by the witching hour
> tomorrow night, I'll sleep there and leave the next morning; else, I'll go
> north after the party and return the evening of the first, unless I should
> stick around for some reason.

So that's what I'm doing.