Category: general

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general reviews

Reign over me

We went to see the movie Reign Over Me on Saturday, mostly as an exercise to see if we could find a theater and get used to the idea of driving and parking, as opposed to taking a train and fighting the crowds. Anyway, the film was one of those “Adam Sandler, but serious” things, and he did an okay job, except that him either yelling or crying reminds you too much of Happy Gilmore, and his mumbly, disconnected role reminds you too much of Bob Dylan. The rest of the cast was good (except Jada Pinkett Smith; for some reason I would like to see her head on a stick) and Don Cheadle was excellent. The film had some inprobability, but it wasn’t bad.

The thing that was weird is this was the first film that intimately featured New York as its setting that I’ve seen since I’ve left, and that was weird. It was by no means the dose of Bloomington I get from Breaking Away or even the Seattle reverie of Singles (great setting, horrible movie, but you can see my old apartment in it.) But the film was really a mini-test of “do I miss New York at all?” and I guess it was a bullshit test, because even though this movie dealt with death and despair, it was a pretty glossy version of the city. His apartment, depicted as this total shithole, was probably twice as big as my old one and would have cost at least $3500 a month to rent. When you want to go eat Chinese, you don’t go to eat in my old neighborhood on Grand Street, as depicted, unless you’re a pathologist looking to sample some new unheard-of strain of a bird flu for a study. It was very much the Friends syndrome, and I guess that didn’t have me pining for my previous digs.

It was still weird, though, watching the film not as much for the story, but to see if any places I used to go or eat or shop would flash by in the background. Aside from the Chinese place, I think the dentist’s office was close to my old shrink’s office. And oddly enough, the Liv Tyler character vaguely reminded me of a psychiatrist I had once. Other than that, it was a bizarro New York, the Law and Order of the city that’s selectively gritty, and otherwise could be shot in Newark or Vancouver.

I switched email clients, which is sort of a big deal. I’ve been using the emacs editor to read my mail since 1991, for a year with rmail, and the rest of the time with VM. It’s a complicated way to do things, and nobody ever understood what the fuck I was talking about, except every once in a while, I would find one person per company I worked at that also used it or at least knew what it was. It was powerful in that I could read my mail with the same interface at home or anywhere remotely, as long as I could connect to my machine with ssh. All of my mail was in flat mbox format, as opposed to some proprietary bullshit formula. If I wanted to search, a simple grep could do it. And all of the keystrokes I used to move around a file were the same in email.

VM had huge problems as time went on. Attachments were a bitch. There was nothing to control, mark, or train for spam. (My ISP does server-side spamassassin, but that doesn’t work great.) I used bbdb for years, but that became yet another address book to mismanage in my life. And I found I could almost never get an ssh connection from a toyified internet kiosk while on vacation, and ended up reading new mail on my ISP’s webmail page (and not reading anything at home).

Last week I finally gave up, and started using OS X’s Mail.app. I thought at first this would be a horrible toy, like Outlook Express, but I’m actually liking it a lot. Like most Mac stuff, it Just Works, and doesn’t involve a lot of screwing around. Attachments work. Links work. Integration with the Mac address book – perfect. Spam control – I’m still training the filter, but the controls are nice and easy to use. It imported all of my old mail, no problems. If and when I need to bug out and export everything to flat mbox format, there’s a Save As that works. So it’s been good sofar. But still, after using a program for 16 years, it’s hard to not feel nostalgic or whatever.

Last week I also took a field trip to Wings Over the Rockies museum. It’s built on the last little bit of Lowry AFB, which is mostly condos and strip malls since the base got cut in the late 90s. (John Sheppard went to art school there 20 years ago, when he was “a PFC in Uncle Sugar’s Campin’ and Shootin’ Club.”) Anyway, many photos are here. They don’t have a ton of planes, but they had three I was really interested in: an old B-52, a B-1A, and an F-111. There were also lots of static Hydrogen bombs and Eisenhower memorabilia for the whole family. My favorite part was seeing that huge B-52 out front; from one direction, you saw these 1930’s hangers with a monster bomber in front, and from the other direction, you saw the 1950s strategic nuclear bomber with a backdrop of brand new loft apartment style condo townhouses next to a strip mall with an Albertson’s and QDoba, everything shotcreted and painted pink and yellow to look like fake southwest adobe.

I enrolled in a cooking school yesterday, but a few hours later, I got an email saying they were full, and the waitlist was full. I am not sure why I want to go to cooking school. Part of it is reading too much Anthony Bourdain; part of it is wanting to go back to school and meet new people, but not wanting to try and get an MFA and have my writing ripped to shreds by housewifes. And part of it is I like to eat.

Nothing else. I’m working on a short story for AITPL #12. I need to get my story done before I can really gear up the zine, otherwise I will be too busy beating people up to send in writing, and won’t be motivated to write. So, there. I have two short stories owed out, then I can start working on the book again. You would think not working would make me have tons of time, but it seems like now I am way more conscious of every minute I spend during the day, and it feels like I never get anything done. I think that’s the cue for me to stop working on this and start writing writing.

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general

Parking prices as a predictor of game demand

My new “office” (i.e. our second bedroom, where my computers, stereo, and PlayStations live) has a wall-to-ceiling window facing north-northeast, and I’ve chosen to put my computer desk in front of it, so now I’m looking off to the horizon as I work. There’s a huge row of townhouse/lofts being built to my left, and as the sun creeps up, they turn different colors of orange and red. There’s a parking lot directly in front of me, and it’s almost always empty, except for the occasional heavy equipment being used as the lofts are being built. It’s also completely held hostage and repriced at insane rates for baseball games, as is all parking in this area. Monday was opening day, and spots were $40; yesterday was game two of the series against Arizona, and it was only $10. It’s fun to watch people tailgate and fight over parking from my safe little enclosure. It’s far more interesting than looking at an off-white wall, anyway.

If you’re interested, here is where I am. See that half block of nothing that’s northwest of the pointer? That’s where my building is now. My window is on Park, between Market and Larimer. Our apartment is on the northeast corner, which means the other window in my corner office looks out to the parking lot at Park and Larimer. It looks like, from the satellite photo, that they completely tore down the old tire factory before they built this, which makes sense. They did keep a sign from it to put in the lobby downstairs, to add that shopping mall historical marker touch.

I drove around yesterday, trying to find a Long John Silver’s, because I keep seeing commercials and it’s been like five years since I’ve been to one. It’s weird how my default location in any city is always where I first saw it. When I moved to Seattle, I stayed with Bill in Mountlake Terrace for a few weeks. After I moved to Pil l Hill, I always found myself driving back north to the mall at Lynwood, or the movie theaters back near where Bill used to live. In New York, I worked in Times Square for a while, and always ended up going back there to go to movies or to eat. And now, we stayed in Stapleton for our first week here, and I keep heading out there to eat lunch or wash the car or whatever. I think part of it is ease of parking and familiar chain restaurants or something, I don’t know. But it’s an odd migratory pattern.

Since I’m always on the same computer, I decided to switch mail clients. I have been using the same mail reader for 15 years now: the emacs editor plus the VM package, which lets you read email in the editor. It’s a pretty geek way to do things, but I always liked it because it stored my mail in a very non-proprietary way, and it let me read my mail from work or home easily, including my old saved mail. But it didn’t do some things, like it didn’t handle attachments well, or let me send attachments, and links were not hot in email messages. Also, spam processing has become a nightmare. So I switched to Apple’s Mail.app, which is pretty cool sofar. It’s very integrated into the other Mac stuff, especially the address book, which I like a lot. The spam control stuff is also good, and you can train it to pick up on what is and is not junk. Importing my old mail was not a huge pain in the ass, although I really need to do some housekeeping. Another nice feature is that it integrates spotlight, so searching is really great. Anyway, ask me again in a week if I still love the thing or not.

I just saw Rumored to Exist listed on eBay in the nonfiction books section, with a buy it now price the same as a new copy on Amazon. I’m guessing it’s either robots or really stupid people in third-world countries that are doing shit like this.

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general

Million dollar ideas

So yes, I'm alive and in Denver. The trip was full of crackerjack goodness, and I often wondered if I would make it here alive with at least 50% of my crap, but here I am, in an apartment half-full of boxes, in a computer room so strewn with wires, it looks like I'm trying to recreate an early prototype of the ENIAC computer. But I'm here.

Highlights of the trip: a week ago Friday, the movers came and packed up everything. They used approximately 500,000 mile-long rolls of tape and enough shrink-wrapping to seal up the Empire State Building to the point where you could throw it in the Hudson river without anything inside getting wet. And when we got down to the bare walls and suitcases we were taking (plus an Aerobed, for our two days of sleeping in the empty place), we realized that the movers had packed a bunch of clothes I'd set aside for the week or so before the truck got to Colorado, and I had nothing but the clothes on my back and about a week of dirty laundry, plus maybe a week of clean clothes I left in our car, which was sitting at the airport in Colorado. A quick trip to K-Mart got me some socks and underwear and one t-shirt. And yes, the Astor Place K-Mart brings back many memories. The snack bar used to be my small oasis in the big city, and the only public restroom in all of lower Manhattan. They tore it out, and now it holds housewares or something.

Anyway, Saturday we had a cleaning crew to come over and scour the place top to bottom, before we flew out Sunday morning. While I was in the shower, Sarah turned on the self-clean mechanism on the oven, thinking that it would somehow clean the oven by itself, as the name would lead you to believe. Instead, this started a fire in the oven, billowing out smoke. When I got out of the shower, the top four feet or so of the apartment was filled with smoke, and Sarah was wondering aloud if we should call the fire department.

I have an unnatural paranoia of firemen. Being on the receiving end of a two-alarm fire before with an old car that exploded into flames, I somehow built up an unnatural phobia. And my worst fear was that these fuckers would charge into the apartment, break down the unlocked front door ($2,000), fill the stove with water ($4,000), smash out the surrounding cabinets ($10,000), flood the apartment and the two below with water ($200,000) and trigger off a series of lawsuits from the nosy neighbors in every direction because they somehow concluded that our tiny smoke fire caused them undue hardship and trauma and caused their kids to have asthma or food allergies in the future. ($6,000,000 x 8-12). So I said "DO NOT CALL 911!!!" but they showed up anyway, because people on the lower floors were complaining.

So here come a dozen guys in full-on fire suits, and by then, the stove had pretty much gone out. The maintenance guys were there bitching and moaning that our stove was defective and they needed to shut off our gas and power. These are the people, by the way, that told us we had to pay a $500 move-out deposit, even though our lease said our $500 move-in deposit carried over, and we never signed a single thing saying we had to pay the move-out deposit, and the stupid bitch at the co-op office said "well, you didn't sign anything, but that's our policy", to which my reply was "well, nobody at the co-op signed anything, but I have a policy that when I move out of an apartment, the co-op board pays me $10,000 cash, and that's as legally binding as your stupid bullshit policy."

We finally got all of the assholes out of the apartment, but then realized that everything we owned was smoked like a cheap pack of 7-Eleven beef jerky. The first immediate thought was to go downstairs to the laundry room, but the movers packed the card-key you use on the machines, so no laundry. At that point I deduced that we needed to get the fuck out of there and go to a hotel, so we packed everything up and got in a car service and headed to LaGuardia and stopped at some business hotel (Raddison? I forget) that was like a block from the airport. This was partially because we had an early flight and it would solve any potential fuckups with getting to the airport, and partially so we would have a TV and a real bed for a night. They didn't have any laundry, so I put on dirty clothes that were in a plastic bag, which were comparatively much cleaner than my smoky ones.

We got to the hotel with four bags each: two large suitcases, a large carry-on, and a small carry-on. Everything else in the apartment went to the garbage or we left for the cleaning ladies to steal. The hotel room was this ultra-micro thing, very nice, but you could lay in the bed and touch both walls with your hands. We ate at the tiny restaurant in the lobby, then went for a walk in the cold and drizzle to find a bodega and pick up a few bottles of water. The irony was not lost on me that my very last night in New York was spent in Queens, about three miles due east of my old hellhole digs.

The trip out was pretty flawless. We upgraded to first class with some miles, so the people didn't give a shit that all of our luggage was over 50 pounds each. (In coach, that would have been like $320 of fees, I think.) Getting everything to the parking shuttle was a bitch, but a few hours, we were in our car, filled to the brim with luggage (it also had stuff we left behind in it). We got to the apartment, signed a million papers and wrote a big check, and had they keys to our brand new loft apartment.

I should mention that the whole loft apartment thing is a somewhat bullshit term. Back in the old days, in France or New York or San Francisco, a loft was a huge, unheatable, unlivable space that was rented or sold at rock-bottom prices to starving artists needing a lot of room. At some point, probably in the 80s, some enterprising individuals realized you could make a lot of money chopping these up and refurbing them into apartments with high ceilings. Now, pretty much everywhere that didn't have lofts in the first place either restructuring existing industrial buildings or building from scratch, and incorporating the "loft look". This place was a giant tire factory at some point, but only the shell still exists, and that was pressure-washed and sandblasted so it looks like it was built from raw brick and mortar in 2004. As for the interiors, there are 9.5' concrete ceilings, exposed ductwork, but otherwise the place resembles a new hotel more than an ancient apartment building. And I'm 100% fine with that – I would rather have six power outlets per room and windows that actually close and insulate during the winter than "old construction charm", whatever the fuck that means. BTW in my neighborhood, they are building loft apartments pretty much everywhere you look. I'm just hoping this influx of people and money will also mean a boom of cool businesses and restaurants to go with it.

Anyway, in our first week (last week), we had no furniture. We went on some mega Target runs, but I didn't have anything to sit on except the Aerobed (which doesn't work well), or the toilet. Sarah had to go to work a week early because of a big project that was on fire, and I got to spend two days sitting around (correction: laying or standing around) because Qwest hooked up our phone to the wrong apartment. I also had no internet, I didn't have my main computer, no phone, and I had three books with me, and managed to finish the third one by about 10 AM on Monday. The rest of the week was a lot of appointments and errands. I also managed to go to the gym three times last week, which is more than I've gone in the last ten years. I learned three things: my cardio is completely shot, even moreso with the altitude; my knee and ankle joints are in bad shape, and I'm not sure if more walking or weights will make that better or worse; and I did a lot better lifting weights than I possibly imagined. I think I can lift as much now as when I was lifting weights every day back in Seattle. I expected those numbers to be about 50%, max.

Our moving truck showed up at 9 AM Sunday, and they shoehorned box after box into the apartment. This place is technically a bit bigger than the old place, but the closets and storage space aren't as well set up. And when everything's in boxes, it takes up four times as much room, so we had crap everywhere. I worked twelve hours straight on Sunday unpacking, slept 11 hours, and woke up feeling like I slept three. I also worked all day yesterday, and we're maybe 5/8ths done. I have my computer, my stereo, and I hooked up the PS3 to make sure it worked. There are maybe a dozen boxes in the offices, and everything's entirely inefficiently set up. The living room and dining room are still pretty filled up; the bedroom's not bad, and the bathrooms are okay, but the kitchen is totaled. It will take a few days to dig out of here.

The reality of not working yet has not hit me, because the days have been filled with too many things to do. When I get to the point where I can start a routine of going to the gym, doing some writing, reading a bit, doing the errands, etc, maybe I will think about it more. But now, I'm mostly thinking "where the hell is that Ethernet cable?" or whatever.

And I feel the same way about Denver. I haven't seen a whole lot of the city except for the parking lot across the street from my office. I have wandered around a bit, and I do like the city a lot. I think it offers the same general vibe as Seattle, which I like. It has its own identity though, and that's good. I find myself sometimes in a store or driving and I think for a split-second that I'm in Redmond or something, and that's really weird, but also sort of reassuring in a way.

Anyway, I hope to keep more writing coming, now that I have my computer back. I have a lot of other changes in general I want to make to 34.216.9.77/, too. But first, I need to open some boxes, and see what's inside.

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general

Apartment, car, marriage

[xposted from livejournal]

I’ve been back from Denver since Monday, but things have been slightly insane. Tomorrow at 8:30 AM, all of our stuff will be packed up and put on a truck heading west. Sunday morning, we take our remaining two suitcases and two carryons x2 and fly to Denver.

I wanted to post some long thing describing the great time we had last week and all the neat things I saw, but I have a matter of hours before I have to put this Mac in a box and disconnect for a week or so. So here are the key points:

1) We found a loft apartment in the LoDo/ballpark district. 2br/2baths and so many extras and amenities that it makes the four seasons look like a shithole. Pics when I get back up and running. If you need/want the new address and phone, drop a line.

2) We bought a new car. It is a 2007 Subaru Outback. That may not seem too exciting, but I have not had a car in 8 years, and after that amount of time in the urine-drenched world of the New York MTA subways, the new car smell is something else.

3) Sarah and I are getting married in Aprin 2008, in Milwaukee. So yeah, hell has frozen over, and this is most likely the last time you will see me in a tie until they lower me into the ground.

On that note, I now get to haul 20 metric tons of shit to the garbage bins downstairs before lunch. See you when I get my DSL connected on the other side.

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general

A house full of boxes

A dude just showed up with 75 cardboard boxes and tape, so it looks like I have a lot of work ahead of me before we go to Denver tomorrow. We’re getting a full-on moving thing with the dudes packing everything, but they’re willing to shave off a few bucks if I pack my books myself. And I guess I feel like doing that anyway, since I don’t want someone denting all of my Bukowski and Kerouac or whatever.

[Oh, if I didn’t mention it elsewhere, tomorrow I’m just going to Denver until Tuesday. I don’t actually leave leave until the 25th.]

So yeah, going to Denver tomorrow, and I haven’t even thought about it. And I have 75 boxes in the hallway, and I need to write this damn book. So why am I still writing here? Off to work.

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general

Last day of work

I’m done. Friday was my last day of work. After being at a place for almost six years, it was pretty anticlimactic to pack the last things on my desk, say my goodbyes, and escape into the wild again. I always expect these things to be some big, grandiose thing, but it’s usually just a bunch of awkward handshakes and vague promises about keeping in touch. This other guy who works there in marketing who has been there for like ten minutes and is the most insufferable loud-talking prick also left the same day, or at least had his party that day, so I ducked out to avoid all of that shit.

Sarah’s mom was here this weekend, so we had a lot of fun stuff to do. There were three very good dinners with three different groups, all very good. We also went to the Met (museum, not opera house) and saw a couple of new exhibits. There was an exhibit of a bunch of Tiffany stuff, mostly stained glass, which was pretty incredible in the detail. There was also a decent exhibit on Barcelona just before the civil war, with a lot of great Picasso and Dali stuff. It was extremely crowded though – Saturday afternoon is not the best time to go to a museum here. There was also a trip to the Brooklyn art museum, but I was at the dentist for that one, getting another $750 of metal put in my head.

So anyway, now I am home, and listening to Pat Metheny, and eating a bagel, and I have a million things in my head, ideas of things I should be doing now that I’m here and done. And I should be working on this book, but I haven’t touched it in weeks, so it’s hard to get on top of it again. It’s a bit hopeless to start working on anything now, since we will be flying out to look at places on Wednesday, and we have a million things going on for the next few weeks. But I’m hoping for a few quiet hours to sneak in a few thousand words.

Okay, back to work…

[2020 note: the irony of this post is that I went back to this company in 2010 and still work there, over ten years later…]

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general

The facts, in summary

The facts, in summary: Last day of work, Friday 3/9. Sarah’s mom is here 3/9-3/12. Sarah’s last day, 3/13. We fly to Denver on 3/14-3/19 to find an apartment, try to buy a car, and get as much done as possible. 3/23, movers come and take everything but the nails in the walls. 3/25, fly to Denver. 4/2, Sarah starts work.

We were talking about driving across the country, and that would be ideal in that the movers are going to take a week or two to get all of our stuff out there. We have two days in NYC with nothing but suitcases of clothes and vitals, and maybe a week on the other end with just that and what we buy new on the other end. (A large Target run is on the books…) The drive would be very appealing if car rentals were cheaper, gas wasn’t like three bucks a gallon, and the weather was slightly nicer. But as it turns out, two one-way tickets is much cheaper, and getting an aerobed for a week and for later use by guests will not be a bad thing.

The tough thing now are the goodbyes. This happened to me in Bloomington and in Seattle. In your last week, you have a hundred dinners or lunches or drink invitations, from all of these people that want to see you or bid you farewell or whatever. And that’s nice, but there’s a certain weirdness to saying goodbye to people that you might or might not ever see again. And what’s weird is that you’re not sailing the seas to the American territories or whatever; there’s email and phones and planes and cars. People can stay in touch as much or as little as they want. Some people will be friends for life, and some people will never be heard from again, and those won’t correspond to the levels of friendship or affection that you see when you’re in regular proximity to them. And people will get hit by busses, or die of a heart attack, or be in a car wreck, or move to China, or whatever else. So each dinner or drink may be the last time you see the person – for all you know, they will get shot in the head ten minutes after you leave by a random Charlie Whitman wannabe in a clocktower with a sniper rifle. You just don’t know, and that’s always weird to me.

It also sucks having to tell the same story to every single person you see for a month straight. Ever since it was announced at work, people I’ve never exchanged more than five words with are interrogating me for the full story while I’m trying to take a piss in the bathroom or eat my damn lunch. It’s exciting the first 50 times, routine the next 50, and then it gets to the point where I’m thinking of just writing it on an index card and showing it to people when they ask, like those deaf dudes in the airport with the “I’m deaf, give me money” cards. (Maybe they have gone away since 9/11. If so, thank the Baby Jesus for the TSA and God Bless America.)

I forget what else, except I am reading The Risk Pool by Richard Russo. John Sheppard gave it to me, and it’s the best damn book I’ve read in a while. Very thick description, excellent characters, and a good story. Only problem is it makes me want to go back and write another Summer Rain, and I can’t go there.

Speaking of, gotta get some work done before work. Four more days!

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Biggest move ever

I’m sick. Not entirely sick, just the start of a cold where I can’t think straight and want to sleep all day. The good news is, this is probably the last cold I will have in New York. Yes, Denver has dry winters and rhinovirus, but I won’t be spending my days in subways packed with mouth-breathers wiping their nose with their hands and then grabbing the handrails. I also hope to avoid the land of the recirculated air office for a bit. I’m sure I will get sick in the future. But I also won’t be doing it on four sick days a year.

I can’t believe we only have about a month left in New York. It’s more like three weeks; I think we are scheduled to have the movers take away everything on the 23rd or so, and then we have a day or two on air matresses with mega-cleaning duty before we hop on a plane to the new place. On the 14th, we head out for a short trip to find a place, look at and maybe buy a car, and do everything else. So on the 25th or whatever, we should hopefully have an empty apartment waiting, and will then get there with nothing but the clothes in our suitcases, and get to wait a week or so for our furniture. There are so many timing issues that I’m nervous about, and I guess when it all comes down to it, we can just throw money at problems on either end. (Get to Denver and the apartment’s not open yet? Live in a hotel until it is.) Lots for me to worry about, and I probably shouldn’t. Or at least I should get some Ativan.

One of the reasons I worry is that this is the biggest move I’ve ever made. It’s where I have the most stuff over the longest miles. Seattle was maybe about as long and on a shorter timetable, but I had no crap to move back then. New York was longer, but over a longer timetable, and I was only moving a carful of stuff. This is also the first joint move I’ve made with someone else. In any other move, if something broke or something didn’t fit or didn’t work, then fuck it – buy a new one, it’s my thing that didn’t work. Now, it’s also someone else’s stuff. I am very excited to get our first place together and to start from scratch and set everything up together, but it’s much easier when you’re a bachelor and you can just throw shit anywhere and worry about it later. It will all be great, but there’s a lot of work ahead in the next few weeks.

I have one more week of work. Well, I have one more week of showing up for work – there isn’t much left for me to do. I’m now spending most of my time scouring my hard drive and looking at sites about Denver. It’s all very odd though – this is the longest I’ve ever worked at the same place, ever. I’m a few months shy of six years at the place, which doesn’t warrant a gold watch or anything, but it’s more than twice as long as my previous record. I guess I worked at UCS for almost four years, but all of that was as an hourly, and it included a summer of being gone, a summer of working only about 20 hours total (see Summer Rain for details) and a lot of part-time, half-time, no-time, bad-time work. I guess it seems like such a difference because back in college and the UCS days, every semester was its own era; things that happened in the fall of 91 were eons apart from the spring of 92. At my current job, 2001 blended into 2002 and melted into 2003 and poured into 2004 and so on. I spent all of the time sitting at the same desk, working on the same product, staring at more or less the same constant faces. The last six years seem like about 18 months to me. And when people ask me why I’m leaving, that’s up there on the list of reasons. I don’t want to wake up tomorrow and find out I’m 50 and working on the same shit. Yes, it was nice to save $100,000 in six years in my 401K, but the list pretty much starts and ends there.

Speaking of changing careers, I have been trying to get back on the development horse by learning Ruby on Rails. Yes, it’s a horribly overhyped meme. But I originally thought I should dust off my PHP and MySQL books and maybe write a few web-based apps that are incredibly cliche but would get things rolling in my head: a blog, a wiki, a shopping cart, whatever. Then I started looking into RoR and it’s fairly trivial to implement any of the above in like an afternoon. I really like the setup – it’s a close-to-true MVC structure, where the model (how you represent data in the db, plus any business logic to slap on top of it, like unit conversions or sales tax or whatever), the view (what makes the web page and the controls used to mess with it, like your shopping cart forms) are completely abstracted from the controllers (the go-between that juggles both of those).

In other implementation types, you start with a web page or something that makes the web page (PHP, JSP, ASP) and glue in all of these bits and pieces of db access code and business logic all over the damn place, so when you need to add a PayPal method of payment or change how AMEX handles charges or whatever, you have to scour the entire app looking for the crap you put in four years ago, and will inevitably break the whole damn thing. Or if your web designer needs to add a flaming skull to the top of every page, unless you used a maze of includes and templates and CSS overrides, chances are they are going to have to edit the same damn file that glues together your whole online business, and their outdated copy of DreamWeaver is going to fuck the whole thing. With Rails, you just go to the app directory and change the stuff in the controllers, models, or views directories, and there you are.

Probably the most striking thing about RoR is that a lot of the bullshit work you’d do in PHP+MySQL is done for you. Yes, you can get optional libraries to do that for you in PHP, like Smarty, but I see it as a large weakness that 10,000 opinionated losers living in their mom’s basement release their own incompatible PHP framework and then update it every week so it breaks everything. In Rails, you use their framework or you don’t use one. That’s sort of conformist, but let’s face it – any app you’re writing for the web is probably going to be writing pages, taking input, and swapping it in and out of a db. So 90% of the time, one basic framework structure will do it. Yes, you can add more models if your online store starts selling more junk (books, dvds, whatever) or if each item needs more data categories or types joined to it (reviews, links, whatever). And you can tweak the views to add extra pages, use javascript-heavy presentation, dick around with CSS, or even AJAX.

But the one big strength is that when you start with a blank page, you just tell ruby “okay, make me an app template”, (which is literally “rails clown-makeup” if you’re making a web site about clown makeup.) This blows out all of the directories and starter files for the app, and you’ve saved about the first 10 hours of writing a PHP app. After you create a quick db schema and hit the db with it, another one-line command per data object creates all of the scaffolding for the controllers. So three or four commandlines in, you have a very skeletal app, where you can fire up a web server, hit a URL, and have a bare-bones view of a page to view, list, or modify items in the db. I think the first PHP app I made (an attempt at db-ifying the glossary) took me about a day to get to that point. This takes three lines. Yes, you have to stick with their method of thought. But it buys you a lot in the long run.

Probably the biggest pain in the ass with Rails is setup. You need to set up at minimum a language, a framework, a web server, a DB, and all of the crap that joins them. There are a couple of good drag-and-drop installers that include everything in one zip file. The windows one is actually better as far as I’m concerned. So I installed from source on my Mac and it literally took a day to get and compile everything using macports. Yes, that’s because I was compiling on a Mac Mini, but still. Running an interpreter on a web server without using fastcgi (which pair.com does not entirely support) is also going to be a bitch. I can run everything fine on my Mac, but getting it out to the world may be a bitch. The next major version of Ruby (I think a year out) will be supporting a bytecode VM, so who knows.

Okay, I should be dicking around with my hello world app instead of this…

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general

The New York gig is up

So. The gig is up. I’ve told some of you and hinted at it, but now I can talk about it. The big news: we are moving to Denver, Colorado. At the end of the month. Seriously.

I quit my job, and my last day is the 9th. Sarah quit too. She found a new position in Denver, and we’re packing up and heading out. I have not found a job, and I’m in no big hurry. I will most likely take the summer off to finish Book 3, and then try to change paths a bit, and either do some web dev work, or usability, or something else, provided I can 1099 and contract like hell during the winter, and then do other stuff in the summer.

Why Denver? Why not? I’m sick of New York. It’s been a good run, but in the long run, I know I’m not a New Yorker that says “New York is the greatest city in the world, dammit! Our pizza is better than your pizza! Everything’s open all the time!” Yeah, blow it out your ass. Try to find something in my neighborhood open past nine when you need some dinner, and you pretty much end up at McDonald’s. They have those elsewhere, I believe. The cost is getting to me, the rats are getting to me, the August total dehabilitation heatwaves are getting to me, and the fact that our two bedroom one bath apartment (that we sublet, btw) would sell for about $750,000 gets to me. And you already know how I feel about the grocery stores.

Almost six years at my current job has done me in, too. I will have to say that I will miss my closest coworkers, and they do pay me to work there. But you can only stay in one _Office Space_-esque situation for so long. I have cared too much about shit beyond my control for too long, to the point where I really don’t give a shit at all about anything at my job. After 17,000 iterations on the “lets versus let’s” lecture, with no end in sight, I have really stopped caring about anything. That’s a good time to think about an exit plan.

And we have been thinking about it for a while. The original thought was to go to LA (Sarah lived there for a while) or SF (lots of good jobs for me) and we pursued that for a while. I know a lot of people absolutely hate Los Angeles, but I’ve found the same general groupthink that tells people that New York is so great also tells people LA is so bad. But I actually like it there. San Francisco is cool too, but it’s the one place we could move in the lower 48 that would be more expensive than NY.

Denver came out of the blue, and I initially didn’t like the idea, mostly because I was certain I would never find a job again. And maybe I won’t, but the cost of living is cheap as hell. Denver is about the same price as Bloomington. On a New York salary, that means the heat is not really on for me to immediately find another gig. And with the real estate prices, it means a damn nice house is easily within reach. We’ll also be a few hours north of my land, so if I do work seasonally (or anti-seasonally, I guess), I can spend my summers driving down for long weekends of tree-planting and soil-tilling and whatever else.

As for the actual plans, we both finish our jobs, then we fly out for a week of getting shit done, with apartment hunting being at the top of the list. We also have to buy a car. The move will be taken care of by a moving company, who will pack it all and ship it out. (I found out during my 2005 move here that I am officially too old for this shit.) We have a notebook of crap to do, before during and after the move. The list is three or four pages. I think there are five or six things done. We have a lot of busy weeks and weekends in the next month ahead.

I’ve had to tell the above story 50,000 times in the last week, at work and to relatives and in emails. It’s getting very old, and I’ve probably forgotten some important details. If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Well, feel free to ask *most* questions, I should say. The most common question I get from mouthbreathing idiots is “why Denver? WHY Denver? Why DENVER?” The same groupthink that says “it rains every day in Seattle, I saw it in that Tom Hanks movie” when in fact, Seattle gets less rain than New York, is also the same process that makes everyone say “Denver is horrible because of the snow and winters!” Yeah, the current three day forecast in NYC is identical to the one in Denver, except in Denver, I won’t be walking across town; we will have a car with a heater.

In other news, John Sheppard was just here for a few days, and we went to his book reading last night. Always good to see him and Helen, and we had a nice dinner last night and much conversation. See http://midamericabymini.blogspot.com/ for more details. And buy the damn book already!

Categories
general

B-2s over the valley of fire

Yes, I’m alive. I have not been writing here for three reasons. The last in the list is that I’ve been sick for a few days, and sleeping in.

The next reason is that when I wasn’t sick and sleeping in, I’ve been working on book #3. The first draft of the first third is done, and I’ve been going over that on paper while I’ve been pushing around the outline of the next third. It’s going well, and that’s all I’ll say at this point. Once I am over this bug, I will get back on my schedule of waking up at 6:30, taking a shower, and then writing until 9:30. It works well, except that it would be a lot easier if I didn’t go to work and kept writing past 9:30.

And I went to Vegas. I actually was in Henderson, at Sunset Station, for Sarah’s family reunion. We did get to the strip once, to shop at Caesars. (Oddly enough, we saw Pete Rose there, signing autographs.) But the base of operations was just out of town, and that worked out fine. We spent a lot of time with a lot of family, watched the superbowl, gambled a bit, ate a lot, and had a good time. Sunset Station is also in this strip mall suburbia, with a big mall and a bunch of big-box stores scattered everywhere. I forgot to bring my full-spectrum light, and found that when I didn’t use it and spent all day in a casino, I crashed horribly. So I spent an hour or two each morning walking through parking lots and in laps around the casino, getting lots of sun and a little exercise.

Another thing we did that was fun was go to the Valley of Fire. It’s a huge park about 50 miles from Vegas, and a lot of it looks like the surface of Mars. There are red sandstone formations everywhere, and a lot of desert scrub land. I got a lot of neat pictures there, and we also saw them shooting a commercial for the new Porsche; when we were entering, six of the new cars came out, in formation. Also, when we left, we stopped at this truck stop that was also a fireworks warehouse and sold cheap cigs and other trucker necessities. It was hilarious to read all of the manly and jingoistic names on the giant explosives, like “RED WHITE AND BLUE GLORY” or “THE DEADLY PUMA” or “SHAKE AND BAKE” or whatever. (Okay, not the last one.)

Oh, and on the drive back, I saw a B-2 stealth bomber for the first time. It was heading toward Nellis and totally looked like a UFO.

(Pictures of everything [but not the bomber] are here. No captions – I have no time.)

BTW, John Sheppard’s book Small Town Punk has been released and is out. I got my copy while I was gone, and I’m re-reading it. The new version has been edited a ton, and is missing the old ending, but still, go check it out.