It was a set of unexpected and sudden realizations in May in my personal life that made me want to move. The decision on where to move was surprisingly simple. However, dealing with the underlying reasons for wanting to move, the consequences of actually uprooting and finding a new job has really worn me out over the past 4 months. The constant anxiety and loss of sleep are the real reasons I’ve lost so much weight this summer.

I’ve been editing and re-editing a blog entry for months to try to explain it, but I think for now I’m going to keep that to myself. In retrospect, I wish I had done a better job jotting down my thoughts privately every single day, because it’s been emotional turmoil. On paper, all the reasoning seems to check out. No less than four people have actually told me “you have balls”. Pretty much everyone I know has been supportive of the idea, which helps.

I had pondered “someday” about moving, knowing my lease was up later this year. It was the day I came home to a lease renewal notice on my door that forced my hand and required commitment to either stay or leave. I put in notice to vacate and started figuring out what I wanted to do. I was now committed so I started selling off my furniture and giving other goods to Goodwill. I didn’t expect to keep my job, so the general plan was to take a couple months off to unwind and figure things out before being a productive member of society again.

In the end, I’m still moving and I was asked to stay on at my current job and telecommute. Finding a new job had been the scariest aspect of the whole move idea. I didn’t want to get a new apartment until I was settled down at a new job. But, I also didn’t want to be somebody’s roommate and I can’t sleep on a floor forever. I have the savings to do it, but it was all a big unknown.  Keeping my job solved a lot of problems and removed a extraordinary amount of weight from my mind. I’m finally excited at the idea of moving now!

I honestly have no idea how I’ll like it in the Pacific Northwest. I look forward to doing lots of things with my friends there and having an entire new region to explore. Being acclimated to sunny 100+ F summer days, I really am concerned about the whole drizzly cloudy weather thing. I like to think I’m more capable of adapting than I think I am, and I’ll just deal with it. The PNW also has a different breed of people, and I hear the “Seattle freeze” of making new friends is no jokes. I’m going to miss girls in sun dresses, my Tex-mex and Sonic iced tea horribly. I’m also going to be a plane flight away from my family instead of six hours on the road. Offhand, I’m going to give it two years (or 6 months if the clouds kill me). Past that, I have no idea if I’d stay, move back to Texas, or try out California.

So, this is my last week in Austin. I intend to pack up a trailer this Friday+Saturday, and be on the road next Sunday. I’ll be graciously crashing on the floor of the Coppoleigh household as I look for a new apartment in east bay, probably either Redmond, Bellevue, or Kirkland. Keeping my job means I can (and need) to get a new place as soon as possible. Unfortunately, I won’t get my two months of wanderlust camping.

I’ve been thinking about this whole move for months now to the point the newness has worn off and it’s a dead and buried issue. I know it’s a major thing, but it still doesn’t feel major. My emotions and constant anxiety have finally settled down, especially after sorting out the job issue. It feels like I’m going down a checklist: buy fuel filter, pack books, move to Seattle, water plants, do Christmas shopping.  On some days I think I’ll believe it when I’m sitting at Brown Bag Cafe.

I hope I know what I’m doing!

July 18, Fredericksburg:

Another place I stopped in was the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg.  I’ve been through this town at least a dozen times on the way to Enchanted Rock and had never been to this place.  I thought it only consisted of Nimitz’s birthplace, but there’s actually a large museum on the street behind it. I had arrived late in the afternoon and the girl at the information desk stressed that I’d probably need around five hours to take everything in. So, I did what I could in the couple of hours I had before closing.

I’m a bit of a WWII junkie and there was a lot of good material here.  A significant amount of background material going back to the 1800s about China and Japan was presented to highlight the events that eventually led us to war. Several large exhibits here, a B-52, a Japanese sub, a model of Fat Man, and several other planes that I forget the details about. I recommend visiting if you’re in Fredericksburg!

Hiking on Enchanted Rock was uneventful. It was a real scorcher of an afternoon, so virtually nobody was there. On the summit hike I only ran into about a dozen people.

July 24th, Corpus Christi: Last Saturday was a trip to Corpus Christi and the Gulf coast.  I was happily cooling off in the Corpus Christi bay like everyone else until I saw a jellyfish in the water, then another, then another, and then another. They were all over the damn place, watch the water for a few minutes and you’d see another.  Several were washed up on the beach. Notably, they really do have some mass and are squishy to step on, like firm Jell-O.

The beaches on Padre Island were much nicer. Much finer sand that was easy on the feet, “real” ocean, and few people on the vehicle-restricted part of the beach.  Wading around the surf for an hour is a great leg workout. Taking the long way home, I went up Mustang Island to Port Aransas.  I guess I’d never actually been to Port A before. For one, I didn’t know getting back to shore on highway 361 required a short ferry boat ride.  Compared to Corpus, which I thought was rather sleepy, Port A is a happening little town.  Being Saturday evening, all of the bars and restaurants were packed and people were everywhere. I now see why this is a popular vacation spot!

Sunday, July 25: Yesterday afternoon was a visit to the Zilker Botanical Garden. I had no idea the park was 30 acres, but that now explains what’s between Barton Springs and Zilker Park in all the trees. The Oriental garden is nice, serene, cool and shady and had several running water features.

What I especially liked about this park was the number of stone pathways leading everywhere. In other gardens I’ve seen, you had to stay on the main walkway. Here, you can follow rock paths to really get in amongst the plants and landscaping to explore up close. I didn’t spend as much time as I intended there, the afternoon sun was really heating things up so I retreated for lemonade and ice cream.

I was by myself, so I don’t have many photos to share of this trip. The few I do have are up on the flickrs.

Digging around and asking around, I found a few interesting tech social events in Austin. The first thing I found was the Door64.com website. In just a couple of days, this thing has kept my Twitter feed full of meet-ups and job openings.  The timing of this week’s meet-up is odd, 10-11 AM, which is precisely when I start work.

One meet-up it lead me to is the Austin Tech Happy Hour which happens downtown at Molotov.  I’ve never been to Molotov, and I was highly amused reading the Yelp comments that describe the place as overpriced and overrun by yuppie douchebags. Presumably those were written by hipster douchebags.  I’m probably a yuppie douchebag myself these days (I do like Brooks Brothers and Spanish footwear), so I’ll fit right in.

AustinStartup and Tech Ranch were two start-up centric groups I encountered. While I’m not in start-up mode, they had some nice articles to read and worth to know they exist. Capital Factory’s Startup Speed Dating is certainly an interesting twist on the speed dating game, an approach I’ve never seen. The goal is to match up business entrepreneurs with tech people in order to help build a solid founding team.

…

In other nerd news, I finally got IPv6 connectivity to my cloud VM in Singapore.  I was warned that there wasn’t a lot of local/regional connectivity, which is exactly what I wanted to see.  Between Singapore and my London VPS, my packets really do go around the world.  Outbound looks like Singapore->SJC->ORD->NYC->LON. Return traffic completes the circumnavigation by going via LON->Singapore.

…

Spring is finally here, March is almost already gone.  When I leave in the morning, it’s nice to see the red buds blooming, wildflowers popping up and the SUN!  It always puts me in a good mood and makes me thankful to live in Texas for a short while before I have to go tackle the mountain of tickets and barrage of phone calls at work.

After this, it became a learning experience.  What I wasn’t expecting is that I’d still be billed for CPU usage even if my VM was off. (If I had read the FAQ I would’ve known.) I guess there’s two ways to look at “on-demand” computing, one being that you can provision/destroy a VM on demand, or you can use it whenever you want and put it on the shelf. I’m told that Voxel is going to offer a hibernate option soon, which will ease my concern. Even though it’s not a great deal of money, it’s still a new experience (and slightly disconcerting) to look at the service page and see the bill increasing every time. I can’t irc from my VM, which makes me sad that I can’t pop up and say “oh hai from Singapore”.

Also, completely not familiar with service APIs. I wanted to cancel an unused VM, they were all “oh well why don’t you use our desktop app or API?”  How uncivilized of me to involve humans! This further lead me to discover Adobe AIR, which is apparently the new Java Flash. Because Flash is so awesome, let’s make standalone desktop applications made of Flash+HTML+Ajax!

…

I’m looking for the tech social scene in Austin.  Surely we have one.  The SF kids have their tech parties and token coffee shops where people sit around inventing protocols (see: pseudowire).  We’ve enough California people here that they had to imported it.  I’m aware of Dorkbot and the occasional BarCamp. I’ve certainly heard lots of people talking about silicon, memory management and VMware while sitting at Kerbey Lane and Spiderhouse.

Somewhat related, I finally joined Gowalla.  Eric has been bugging me about it for a while, because it was made by a group of Ruby kids in Austin.  For the longest time I didn’t know exactly what it did, I gave up trying to figure it out from the website after 10 seconds.  After joining it and using it a couple of times, I finally realized what it is: virtual geocaching using a smart phone. Go to places with your phone, “check in” and occasionally there’s things to take or leave behind.  Or, there’s tours, to drag you out to a series of interesting places around town.

It’s midnight, I’m 31.

This of course is only second in comparison to it being 81 F at noon last Tuesday then plunging into the 30s with snow. That’s more impressive than the usual 70s -> snow we had in Oklahoma. I blame the global recession for the weird weather, “global warming” or “global climate change” is so old and busted.

It’s animal kingdom around here. When I first moved in, I had three squirrels munching on the oak tree just off my balcony. Then the deer roaming about. Last month there was a pair of bucks walking down by the mail center. This month while walking out to my truck there were four raccoon crossing the parking lot. Earlier this week as I drove up the hill there was a group of six raccoons on the road. Last night as I walked down the hill from doing laundry, I looked over in the brush and there was a deer walking down with me no less than 30 feet away. Tonight there was a deer walking around the Walgreens parking lot on Mesa.

This is absolutely brilliant: Denny’s Introduces ‘Just a Humongous Bucket Of Eggs And Meat’ ]]> http://binaryfury.wann.net/2008/11/123/feed/ 0 http://binaryfury.wann.net/2008/09/6th-street-people-watching/ http://binaryfury.wann.net/2008/09/6th-street-people-watching/#comments Mon, 01 Sep 2008 19:10:14 +0000 bwann http://binaryfury.wann.net/?p=163

Last night was spent hanging out at a fire station downtown visiting some of Lorie’s friends/acquaintenances. Great night for sitting outside chattering and people watching. Some of the more memorable people:

• All the girls on their way to 6th street wearing high heels and very short “skirts”
• All the girls who shouldn’t be wearing skirts at all
• The guy pissing on 5th street in the open
• The guy and girl who couldn’t go 10 meters without stopping to suck face and grope each other for a few minutes
• All the girls leaving 6th street in pain from wearing high heels hobbling along and/or catching piggy-back rides from their dates and/or going barefoot
• The woman who stood across the street for a few minutes eyeing the firemen until she summons up the nerve to come over and ask to take her picture with them
• The Secret Service people who parked a couple of rigs in the station parking lot for Bush’s anticipated visit to Gustav evacuees at the convention center
• The pair of whiny girls standing on the corner trying unsuccessfully to summon taxis occupied with fares on a thru street, later screaming into their cell phones how they couldn’t get a cab and failing to walk across the street where all taxis were having to stop at the light.