Month: January 2012

Thursday

Oh, such a day. Nothing too remarkable about it, beyond a two-hour meeting, who’s take-away seemed to be that we need to have more meetings so that we can have less meetings. (Have I told you? It’s the Year of the Meeting!) Then drinks after work to wish well a co-worker who’s leaving us at the end of the week.

Which is luckily tomorrow. Not luckily she’s leaving, but that it’s the end of the week. For a four-day week, this has been quite a long one.

Oh, and don’t even get me started about looking for an apartment. My brain might very well explode. I think I’m going to regroup, reconsider my finances and reality, before actually going to look at any places. I may be faced with the very real possibility that I may not be able to afford to move out, now or in any near future.

I’m hoping I’m wrong about that — I love my parents, but it’s been seven years now — but we’ll see.

Where I am

I decided this was going to be the year I finally move out. I moved back home to New York in the summer of 2004, and that, amazingly, was almost eight years ago now. Of course, now I’m faced with the very real possibility that I don’t earn enough yearly to buy a place of my own, at least not anyplace nice, in New York. I’m looking at down payments I quite possibly can’t afford on mortgages I quite possibly won’t get, which run for decades longer than I quite possibly want to live there, and that’s even before property taxes and interest rates and monthly expenses. But still, I got in touch with a realtor in Queens a few days ago, and I’ve said I’ll try to call her tomorrow, even though that might prove difficult at work.

This was so much easier when I was just renting an apartment, and when I was dealing with central Pennsylvanian prices.

Beyond that, and all the talk on Twitter and elsewhere about SOPA and PIPA, it was a pretty ordinary day.

Wednesday various

  • How Doctors Die [via]
  • A Drug That Wakes the Near Dead
  • Every Beatles song played at once. Can you make it to the end? It isn’t easy, and I’m not sure it rewards you for your efforts — audibly, that is; some of the comments are quite funny — but it’s an interesting experiment nonetheless. [via]
  • “Won’t it make you lose your wits, / Writing groats and saying grits?” Can you pronounce all these words correctly? [via]
  • And finally, Warren Ellis on what sounds like the worst computer repair problem ever:

    One day, a few years ago, my backups all got corrupted, and my backup device died. I didn’t have online backups at the time. I’ll fix that on Sunday, I thought, as I was under deadline pressure. Saturday evening, my main machine died in flames. Sent it off for data recovery. The guy running the data recovery shop took it in and then went off to Europe for an operation. And died on the operating table. Came back to the shop to get my machine, because no-one was answering the phone, to find it boarded up, the (mostly off-the-books, apparently) employees scattered to the four winds, and the shop stripped down to the plaster. Not a computer left in there — not even mine. I lost everything, all notes and scripts for work in progress as well as the entire archive.