prog | Entries tagged with my apartment

There's a cleaning lady in my house, at the invitation of my landlady. After a few moments of working around her and even helping a little with my own messes, like taking out the trash, it seemed wisest to just withdraw into my room and her do what she likes. I kind of hope she gives my room a pass; it's been a sty since I stopped using it as a workspace two years ago. It's been a little better lately but I am not proud of it yet.

The rough part is that my landlady is there with her, ordering her around. Neither are native English speakers but they're using it as a lingua franca, which I think is always kinda cool to see, but my landlady adds the extra stumbling block of being batty and cranky, so they're both getting frustrated with each other. Cleanlady is a consummate pro with her own system, and landlady is at her heels telling her that it's all out of order. Gah. I didn't want to be witness to that either.

On the subject of housing: can any of y'all give me an idea of what I should have in the bank in order to obtain, let us say, a two-bedroom condo in the vicinity of my current location? Is doing this sort of thing as simple as paying a mortgage every month - just like I do now with rent - after dropping a single phat down payment? I don't know, I'm asking.

I passed the magic barrier not too long ago of wondering why I'd ever want to own property to wondering how one goes about this.

The landlord called last night to complain about the noise. This happens most times someone besides me plays a jumpy or stompy video game with me at my house. I have practiced enough at DDR to develop a light touch with these games, though I think it was actually a jumpy WarioWare game that did it in this case.

She is very old and still doesn't understand voice mail, so when she leaves a message she often grows increasingly upset in the process of speaking. This is because she can hear someone knocking around downstairs, and figures they must be willfully ignoring her voice coming out of the answering machine. All I can do when I listen to the message later is grit my teeth and make a mental note to clamp down harder on the NO JUMPING law, like ol' Big Brother in the groundbreaking 1983 Atari coin-op I, Robot. Uh-huh.

She and I spoke on the phone the other day about whether or not I was leaving. Full of my usual inertia (and my low-money state), I said I'd like to stay another year. This led to her asking about all the strange men with keys who come in and out of my apartment all day long. I told her that it was just the Andys, who were working with me on a project, but they have both returned their keys and now the only one holding a copy is my girlfriend. She said "Oh girlfriend that is OK she is good!" in what sounded oddly like relief.

classicaljunkie advances the theory that she may have been pleased to discover that I apparently wasn't being all gay on her property. I really don't know and I expect that I never will, because I don't like talking to my landlord.

While I haven't signed any leases yet (it's way too early), I already feel off-kilter about staying here more. It's nigh-inevitable that I have at least another year here, but I find myself distinctly not thrilled about it. For one thing, this will be my fifth year at this address, far and away the longest I've ever lived in one spot, and saying nothing about how I pay $1,200 / month for the privilege. That is actually a reasonable price for an apartment of this size in this area, but the thought of pouring it into the same sinkhole for an entire half-decade seems wrong. If I'm this geographically stable, shouldn't I own?

I'm thinking: probably. Not right now, because my net worth today is close enough to zero, since I spent all my savings on the startup last year, and then borrowed a lot when it took an extra-special long time for my new day job to remember that they hired me. (In fact, I spent this past weekend pulling together my personal finances, and can report that it's rather depressingly negative if you don't count my retirement accounts.) But I should start thinking about it anyway. Let this post mark when I started thinking about it.

Any locals want a nice wooden CD rack? It's quite handsome and almost as tall as you are. But it doesn't serve any function in my house and I'm gonna curb it.

Tuesday night

dictator555 visited to help me haul my furniture around, implementing some redesign ideas she came up with last weekend, on my commission. I haven't plugged anything pluggy back in yet (on laptop now) but I'm already loving the effect of just having everything shifted around and the office turned back into a dining/gaming room. I feel like I've moved. If you've been here before you'll really notice the difference on your next visit.

I didn't mention before that Sunday night I got to play with a Wii, finally. The host had only one controller so there was none of the tennis that everyone's crowing about, but there was bowling, and that was plenty fun.

I ignored

mrmorse's earlier admonition to let someone else make your Mii, so mine was based on my own perception of myself, and ended up looking something like a Planet of the Apes character with glasses. Other folks' Miis were group-build affairs and were all quite accurate. Just as with City of Heroes, it's almost half the fun, even though the goal is less making crazy character concepts and more just potato-heading up a Jpop-cute version of yourself.

Can you rescue Miis from friends' Wiis via broadband or do I actually have to go to this person's house and pick em up when I finally get my own Wii? It's not like we're more than acquaintances, so I'd rather just download them then have to go visit...

Spent hours being a perfectionist with Jmac's Arcade audio and ended up with something even worse than the first draft, hours later. It'll be days until I actually finish it. You'll know when I do.

I'm on my couch and feeling mellow. Part of this is because I have been cleaning lately, and I am greatly calmed by the - well, I suppose it isn't order, really, so much as a moving towards orderliness that fills my apartment. I mean, there's still crap all over the place, but it looks slightly more right than it did yesterday, when it looked a bit more correct than it did the day before that. I have a new system I've been trying, see. If I can keep up the pace I'll describe it, sometime.

The other reason is that for a good while now I've had a real handle on Volity development, consistently setting short-term goals and then meeting them. Pace is enforced by the fact that the three core Volity boys are guaranteed to meet together only once a week, on Monday nights, so when I get to a decision point I can't overcome by myself I just make a note to bring it up Monday, and then move on. Eventually I hit everything I wanted to do that morning, and so I go do something else. I'm in such an in-between mode now, and feel like I have a right to be here. It's nice!

We're shooting to have a soft launch of the revenue system by the end of this month. That's a few weeks slipped past our summertime make-up-a-date deadline, but I'm willing to stand behind this one; we know exactly what needs to be done, and how. The fact that my Volity work-week has been shortened to four days might make this a week later, all told. So be it! It shall get done.

My parents finally picked up a Globe to check real estate prices 'round here. They didn't believe the numbers I have recited to them, until now. But then this led into another long lecture (in the academic sense) about home-buying strategies, so I know it didn't really discourage them from their dream of seeing their youngest become a homeowner; owning property is the one true form of financial security, to them.

I'm still not convinced of why I'd want to own a home versus renting one. However, I suspect that I just haven't collected enough reasons yet. I still feel that it's pretty likely that Linden's the last apartment I'm going to rent, before entering the real estate market on my own. I feel that it's equally likely I'll live here for more than a year. Perhaps I'll break the two-year record I set with my W-ville place! But, yes... we'll see.

Volity news:

Volity isn't behind schedule, but I feel like it should be. I guess I'm just impatient. Some of this also comes from the fact I'm repeating myself in mail to people, including curious strangers who've been joining the mailing list. I've had to write two separate emails about how the graphics're going to work, to two people who independently asked the same question. The question was perfectly reasonable, emerging from the currently published doucmentation describing the graphics system in general but not in detail. This makes it clear to me which book chapter I ought to write next, which is great, but on the other hand I'm hesitant to write anything definitively until we actually have a client, and can prove (to ourselves as much as anyone else) that these ideas will actually work.

That's actually what I'm impatient about. Clients we have so far include a very basic command-line thing that

daerr wrote, and the Java client that K has recently started building. The latter is going to be the big deal, but it's a month or three away from usability. What to do in the meantime? I predict that I'll spontaneously sink some hours into mutating d's client to use the Jabber libraries I wrote, and then extending it from there to handle all the functionality I'm adding into the server code. Either that or talk d into doing it. We'll talk.

Random thought (spurred by the music the diesel is playing right now, dunno why): One of the Karate Kid movies (II? III?) had the title character visiting Japan, and the TV trailer depicted him awkwardly asking a local girl "Are you... arranged, like?" (Referring to arranged marriage.) My dad, when we watched this ad (long, long ago, mind you) thought he said "Are you arranged right?" and exclaimed about what a crude movie this no doubt was.

I'm pretty sure I saw Karate Kid II, but I don't remember anything about it other than the Bad Karate Man (he wore a black gi, boo hiss) and a scene of KK and his coach on the long flight to Okinawa (IIRC). The fact that they were flying wasn't as important as the fact that they were traveling, and the focus of their scene was conversation about their destination. I think I remembered that scene because it seemed inspiring to me, who was (and remains) jittery on cross-country airplane flights, and here were these guys not even thinking about an intercontinental flight.

That Christmas I got an action figure of the BKM, who didn't have kung-fu grip per se, but did have a button on his back or hip or somewhere that made him kick, and came with little plastic oil barrels or something for him to kick over. The other figures based on the movie all did different things, chop and punch and so on, but I didn't have any of those. However, the BKM was like twice the height of my Star Wars guys, and so made for an effective exotic villain in young jmac's chop-socky playhouse of the mind.

Has anyone ever created a piece of media titled The Kung-Fu Grippe? I'd check now but I'm not online. It could be about any number of things, anyway.

Crap. I just asked the girl "C'n I have half a refill of the dark?", but it came out as "have have a refill"... I'm speaking in thinkos... and now I have a second large coffee here, which is too much. If I drink it all I can't let myself have any coffee until I finish peeing all this out, which won't be until 6 p.m. or so, or I will turn into Mr. Coffee Nerves and ineffectively fly around the office with my little jet pack and ruin marriages until it's time to go home.

True fact: I'm less shy about the word "girl" than I have been, perhaps as recently as a year ago. UMaine isn't the most oppressively P.C. place on earth but it does encourage what I imagine is the standard battery of Right Thinking through Word Elimination that one sees in American universities. There, "girl" is never ever the right word, unless one is talking about an actual young child. It took years of soaking in the Real World to get a feeling for the contexts when the word is just fine -- even stylistically appropriate -- to apply to an adult female-type person, and the contexts when it is legitimately too squirmy for the 21st century. (Which are many, granted.)

I'm probably like this with a bunch of words, actually.

Of course, this assumes a rational audience. A friend once told the story that someone crossed out the phrase "The home of Boston's chic shops" from an ad poster in the T, and wrote "WE'RE CALLED WOMEN" over it.

Also, it's old news, but still: did I call it, or what? I was guessing that his downfall would have been a misstatement, not a sound effect. But, whatever. Doom doom doom. I will do what I can.

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No no you do the windows you don't know how to open here I show you no come back
Still renting.
CD rack for giveaway
Couch moved, Wii spotted
Mellow
Monday coffee ramble

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

That's awful high, Jason. That's awful high.

Entries tagged with my apartment

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No no you do the windows you don't know how to open here I show you no come back

Still renting.

CD rack for giveaway

Couch moved, Wii spotted

Mellow

Monday coffee ramble