I'm not usually personal in this blog, but a combination of things have occurred over the past 24 hours that feel pretty good.
First, my apartment is done. Done, done, done. The last door was hung on the last doorframe, the last stick of furniture found a good home for itself, the last drop of paint splatted on the wall. Done.
Second—and this is, I'm not kidding, front-page news in Chicago—the temperature hit 21°C today for the first time in six months (it was 27°C on October 21st).
And finally, I believe I've broken a logjam (passed a kidney stone? sailed around the Horn?) at my office.
I will celebrate with beer, a book, and fresh air this evening.
The first—the most serious one—comes from David Brooks via my friend RB:
Let’s take a look at what [Clinton is] going to put her party through for the sake of [a] 5 percent chance [of winning]: The Democratic Party is probably going to have to endure another three months of daily sniping. ... For three more months (maybe more!) the campaign will proceed along in its Verdun-like pattern. There will be a steady rifle fire of character assassination from the underlings, interrupted by the occasional firestorm of artillery when the contest touches upon race, gender or patriotism. The policy debates between the two have been long exhausted, so the only way to get the public really engaged is by poking some raw national wound.
The other story, via Bruce Schneier, concerns a weird but scary Craigslist hoax:
Two hoax ads on Craigslist cost a Jacksonville man thousands of dollars in property Saturday and could land the pranksters in jail on theft and burglary charges.
The classified ads popped up Saturday afternoon on the Web site saying the owner of a home ... was forced to leave the area suddenly and that his belongings, including a horse, were free for the taking, said Jackson County sheriff's Detective Sgt. Colin Fagan.
The only problem is that Robert Salisbury has no plans of leaving his home any time soon.
Finally, a new dating website that left my friend TLC "flabbergasted but intrigued:"
You fill out a profile which consists of photos, your height, body type, education, occupation and a personal statement, and get rated by other members of the In My League community on a scale of one to ten based on your attractiveness.
Once you've been rated five times, you'll see your rating and all of your matches. Your matches are people who are within one point of your rating either way on the ten point scale. You can send messages and flirts to your matches, and when you appear as someone else's match, they send messages and flirts to you.
So if you're a 7.0, you'll be able to contact members who are rated as high as 8.0. And nobody rated below a 6.0 will be able to get in touch with you.
We live in interesting times.
Let's review. I moved back to Chicago from Evanston. Between finding my new apartment and moving to it, I got a job in Evanston, across the alley from the old Inner Drive World HQ.
Then yesterday, because my new company is overflowing, my team moved back to IDTWHQ.
Today we looked at new space. The new space would combine space currently occupied by a friend's company (she was surprised to see me troop through) and my attorney's old office. In fact, my office would be my attorney's office.
When I found my new apartment, I figured by now, I'd come to Evanston maybe once a month to see friends or maybe go to my favorite Evanston pub.
I feel like Al Pacino.
Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons, died this morning at his home in Lake Geneva, Wis. Half of the developers on my team are old enough to feel sad; the other half said "Dungeons and what?"
Via Calculated Risk, in Sunday's Chicago Tribune:
The new buyers of a rundown graystone on the South Side showed up Jan. 9 to look at the house they won at a foreclosure auction. They took the plywood off the front door and went inside to make sure the utilities had been shut off. Then they called the police.
Sitting upright in the corner of a bedroom off the kitchen was a human skeleton in a red tracksuit. Next to him lay a dead dog. Neighbors told police the corpse was almost certainly Randy Johnson, a middle-age man who lived alone in the North Kenwood house.
...
Left holding the bag is Countrywide Home Loans, the nation's largest mortgage lender and a company whose practices are being scrutinized by the Illinois attorney general's office. Countrywide made mortgages of $450,000 on the property. Now it is likely to lose it all because it financed the sale of a home whose rightful owner was in no condition to sell.
Lovely.
Forgetting for a moment the enormous expense of moving, I now have approximately 75% of my possessions in boxes in my living room. My new place is not only slightly smaller than my old place, but I've absorbed the entire Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters and International Data Center. (The IDTIDC takes up about one square meter of floor space, but five servers make a certain amount of noise.)
Photos later. For now, I'm back at work, trying not to think about the disaster area that is my new apartment...
Eight and a half hours later, I have single-handedly done the following:
- Moved four 23 kg rack-mount servers (sans rack);
- Moved four 23 kg uninterruptible power sources;
- Moved uncounted connectors, network cables, power cords, etc.;
- Updated all the DNS entries for the 33 domain names that point to said servers;
- Talked to three lovely people at my ISP's tech-support line to figure out why I couldn't connect to my new IP range (it was a PEBCAK issue on my end);
- Confirmed that my mail server can receive mail from everywhere; and
- Dropped my overall stress level by about 30%.
So now all I have to do is move a not-insignificant quantity of my mother's stuff, empty my current office, and empty my current apartment, then move the lot into my new place. Fortunately I have all day Monday to do that.
(Did I mention the three flights of stairs on the receiving end?)
The humble Lego brick turned 50 on the 28th. That explains today's Google logo.
For the first time in 11 days, the temperature in Chicago got above freezing this afternoon. It's odd how warm it feels out there right now.
Speaking of chilling, I saw No Country for Old Men last night. Great film. Very chilling.