Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.
I’ve updated the original ‘New e-mail addy‘ post to reflect this, but the e-mail addy I thought was going to work…won’t. So, my real new public e-mail address is djwudi@myrealbox.com. Sorry for the confusion….
Oh, and incidentally, if you for any reason need a new e-mail address, give the guys at MyRealBox a try. Looks to be a good deal.
I’m not much of a sports fan, but after having two parents who went to IU, it does catch my eye when the Hoosiers beat Duke by one point, and move into the final eight.
I’ve always kept three active e-mail accounts. One I only give out to my close friends and family, one I give to friends and contacts, and the third is the one I use publicly, on this page and whenever I sign up for anything via the web (this shuffles most of my spam to the public addy).
Due to changes in Yahoo! Mail‘s terms of service, I need to discontinue using my @yahoo.com address. My new public e-mail address is djwudi@myrealbox.com.
(Incidentally, parents, friends, or anyone who has either of my other two addys — you don’t need to worry, those are staying the same).
Yesterday, Yahoo! Mail sent out a notice to all of its POP3 service users (this allowed you to use an external client — such as the Mac OS X Mail program — to check your Yahoo! Mail account, rather than having to use the web-based client) stating that as of April 24th, they would no longer be providing this service for free — rather, you’d have to purchase a $30/year ‘premium’ account. Since I would much rather use my Mail client than have to use the web client, I decided to find a new public addy.
I found a thread on MetaFilter discussing this, and one of the comments suggested that we take a look at Lycos UK‘s free e-mail, as it has the best free e-mail deal available on the web today (“…15 meg of storage, POP3 access, and importantly — SMTP access with unlimited attachment size for outgoing mail.”).
So, I stopped by this morning and signed up. Now I just have to ferret out all those places on the web that I gave my yahoo.com addy and change them over…(sigh).
Update: For one reason or another, the lycos.co.uk server was incredibly slow, to the point where it proved unuseable. I did end up finding MyRealBox, which is run by the folks at Novell, and looks to be a truly good service. So…that’s the addy I’m at now.
Update: In the end, MyRealBox didn’t cut it either. As with many people, I’ve since moved to Gmail. If you really need to find me and don’t have my e-mail addy already, check the ‘about’ page on this site to track me down.
Just got back home from picking up my keys for the new apartment. Pictures were taken, I’ll have them posted as soon as I can. Yay!
Okay, first ‘picture’ is up. I took a few moments to sketch out a rough floorplan of the apartment, so you’ll have some idea what you’re looking at when I get the pics put in. It’s a pretty rough floorplan, but I think I got it pretty accurate for the most part.
Not bad for a studio apartment — one main room, a full bath, full kitchen, and two closets, one of which is a full-size clothes closet, and even a little entryway space. I think the main room ends up being a little smaller than the single room I’m in now, so figuring out how to arrange things might be a bit tricky, but I’m sure I’ll find a way to get it all in there.
Okay — here’s as good of a tour through the apartment as I can do. Right inside the front door is a cool little delivery box, left over from when the building was originally built. Each of these boxes has two doors — one on the inside that you can see here, and another on the outside of the apartment opening into the hallway. The outside door is fixed closed now, but when these were in use, they were the drop-off points for milk, newspapers, whatever. The delivery person would open the outside door and put the goods in the box, then the tenant could take them from the inside of the apartment without ever having to open the front door. They don’t work anymore, but I thought it was pretty nifty. If nothing else, it’ll be a convenient place to store shoes.
Here’s two shots of the main room. The first was taken standing in the door looking towards the windows, and the second was taken standing in the corner by the heater looking towards the entrance. These should give a pretty good idea of the layout of the apartment. The landlord tells me that the overall floorspace is definitely larger than the place I’m in now, but since that takes into account the entire apartment, the main room itself is a bit smaller than what I’ve got now. I think the tradeoff is more than worth it, it’ll just take a bit of work figuring out how I’m going to get all of my goodies set up in here.
This is a shot I put together of the kitchen. It’s the sloppiest of the stitch jobs that I made tonight, but they’re a little tricky to do, and it should work. It seems kind of funny, but I think I’m more excited about this kitchen than anything else! A good sized sink with a drainage area built in to the right, and loads of cupboards and storage space! Plus, it’s a gas kitchen, rather than electric like the place I’m in now, so that should cut down on my electric bills (as will having a steam heater rather than electric heat).
All in all, I think I ended up with a pretty good deal. I’ve got the next two weeks to move in, too, so I don’t have to make a mad rush at anything. Too cool!
First off — according to the software I use to run this blog, this is my 400th post! At least, it’s 400 since November of 2000…I’d actually been doing daily updates in a blog format before that, but as I wasn’t using any sort of backup or management system like I am now, they disappeared. Ah, well. Still not too bad of a track record so far.
Anyway. Yeah. In the midst of replying to an e-mail from my mom, I realized that while I’ve been putting a lot of links up (hey, I think they’re interesting….), any content actually dealing with my life has been pretty sparse recently. Mostly that’s just because there hasn’t been a whole lot to say, but it’s also because I’ve been posting mostly from work recently — things have been slow, which gives me time to bounce around the ‘net. Once I’m home in the evenings, I’m dealing with food, e-mail, the occasional movie, hanging out with Candice, and other such things. End result — a veritable plethora of ways for people to leave my website, but not much to make them stick around. Yeah…I’m a professional, can’t you tell? :)
So…using my e-mail back to parents as a jumping off point…here’s a brief update.
I think I’m glad you aren’t working directly for Arthur Anderson! You may still be employed after the shakedown.
True — but where? Timing is actually somewhat amusing, to tell the truth. When I first signed up for this assignment, Xerox asked (as Andersen was prompting them to) if I could commit to a year. I figured I could do that, so said yes…at this point, that decision seems to have definite pros and cons. On the plus side, I ended up in a position that survived the post-9/11 fallout, and as of yet haven’t had to jump into a job market recently flooded with 20,000 ex-Boeing employees. The downside is that I’m daily more frustrated with the fact that after nearly 10 years I’m still ‘pushing the green button’, and am more and more looking forward to the end of the year timespan so that I can see if I can find something else (it’s that silly semi-overdeveloped sense of responsibility you and I share kicking in again…I said I’d do the year, therefore I’ll do the year :) ). The upshot? I’m starting to wonder if Andersen will last long enough for me to finish that year I promised them….
SPELLING WORD FOR THE WEEK: Column: you have the hard part, the silent N, but get carried away with LLs.
Yea, yea, nag, nag.
:) I wondered about that, but hadn’t looked it up yet. I’ll work on getting that one down. Overall I think that among you, dad, and the school system, I manage to do a fairly credible job with the English language (at least, when I write more than just a simple short blurb) — but even I do have a few areas I consistently mangle. But hey — at least I’m consistent, right?
You must be terribly busy in the mornings at work, since many of your posts are put up between 9 and 10 am.
We’ve been so dead recently. I’m just glad they let me play when things are slow…though this may end, soon (the slow time, not the ability to bounce around the web), I think we’re in the proverbial ‘calm before the storm.’ At least, something about working at a top-5 financial/tax firm with less than a month before April 15th would seem to indicate that things might get a wee bit busier soon. ;)
It’s been COLD, but beautiful recently. Mornings between -10 and +10, afternoons in the 20’s, but clear as can be.
As I’ve mentioned before in the past, I really do like winters in Alaska. As long as they’re on the other side of a window, and I’m next to a fireplace. The prettiest days are the ones that you just don’t want to be outside in.
At least, sane people don’t want to be outside in that weather ;).
Other than that, nothing major going on at the moment (hence the lack of more personal substance on the site for a bit now). I’m still waiting on the call from the landlord to get into the new apartment, and am hoping that that comes through in the next day or so. And, all around, life pretty much progresses, as it is wont to do (snicker…no, I’m not dad’s kiddo…not at all).
I wish I had the guts and thought I could afford to make the vow that Jonathon does here:
I vow never again to work for someone else’s riches. I am independent being, free to grow rich or die poor using my mind and the thousand bucks I’ve got in the bank. I refuse to be a slave to the shirt-and-tie drones of Ford or any other Fortune 500 company, now and forever.
I just need a little more assurance that I’ll be able to pay rent next month. Still, it’s a goal to work towards.
Found here on GreenFairy:
Is the reason I get pulled around by men when my tattoos are visible because they are shocked into defensive aggression by someone obviously not trying to meet their standards of attractiveness? After all, women are supposed to dress for men not for themselves. Nothing is worn, nothing about a woman’s body is adorned the way it is for reasons of personal aesthetics, it’s done to attract men. Everyone knows that. So when someone doesn’t do that, can it be taken as a personal insult, a provocation worthy of violence?
Six months today. Might be good to take a moment for reflection when you have a chance.
Not too long ago, as part of my “Where were you?” post, I talked about how I found out about the events of Sep. 11th. Now it’s six months later, and in many ways, I’m still not sure how I feel about the whole thing. I am quite sure, however, that what we’ve seen happen in the past six months is just the beginning, and that the repurcussions are far from over.
More people died that day than many people can easily concieve of — especially, I think, people of my generation and younger. We’d never really seen attacks on this scale before outside of a movie theater, or the confines of a television set tuned to the History Channel. The three generations prior to mine have all had their conflicts — Vietnam for my parents, World War II for their parents, World War I for their parents — but there hadn’t really been anything to really affect the majority of my generation yet. Desert Shield/Desert Storm was about as close as we got, and for most people (at least, most people I know), it seemed more video-game inspired than anything else. Tune into your television each night and get the latest scores. See the video footage of bombs dropping straight down chimneys. It didn’t feel real — it was a world away, and I don’t think I or any of my friends actually knew anyone directly involved.
Suddenly, terrorists hit America — and at first, it seemed that everything had changed. Suddenly we were the victims, in much worse a fashion than we ever thought we could be. Thousands of people dead in the matter of a few hours. Civillians targeted, rather than a military target. Disbelief, shock, and terror swept across the nation — which quickly turned to outrage and a cry for revenge.
Looking around now, it seems to me that the more things change, the more things stay the same.
The changes I see frighten me. As dad and I were talking a bit about in the comments to an earlier post, there’s a patriotic fervor sweeping the nation that seems to be blinding people to the all-too-possible consequences. Our government is passing legislation that appears to be heading us full-steam into becoming a police state, and because it’s all hidden behind a political smokescreen of “Homeland Security”, people are all too complacent about giving up their freedoms. We’ve declared war on a concept — finally, something that, at its core, strikes me as being both stupider and exponentially more brilliant than the long-running “War on Drugs”. Stupider, because of the infintesimal chances of ever ‘winning’ such a war, and more brilliant, because of its ability to capture the public’s approval for anything connected to it. I truly worry about where this nation will be, and what life will be like in another six months, or a year, or two years down the line.
In many ways, though, it’s the things that haven’t changed that scare me all the more. Primarily among these being a repeat of the “video game war” feeling I had during Desert Storm. I don’t know what it was really like, as I wasn’t there, but any time I’ve seen or read anything about the previous major conflicts that America was involved in, I always got a sense that the nation knew we were at war. The draft was active, and at any point, any eligible person could get snapped up to go to war, whether they wanted to or not. Everyone knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone who was fighting. Rationing of important supplies was in place. Women moved into the workforce to offset the number of men leaving for the military. These, and many other things that I’m sure I’ve missed, both helped the nation realize the situation it was in, and helped band everyone together towards a common goal.
Today, however, for the majority of people (including myself), for the most part, it’s like this war doesn’t exist. It’s the occasional headline in a newspaper, or story on the evening news, but again, it’s back to that “video game war”. There just isn’t that national feeling of being at war — it’s happening somewhere else, to someone else. Over here, life goes on, and it’s just another day. I’m not sure how better to put it like that, but that’s the feeling I get…and I’m not sure I like it, or what it may mean in a much larger sense.
Last week I was walking down the street and saw the headline “U.S. Suffers War’s Most Deadly Day” with a sub-heading detailing that there were 7 deaths when a helicopter was shot down. This may be overly cynical, but I have to admit my first thought was of some grizzled old Vietnam or World War II vet seeing that and laughing in derision. While I certainly don’t mean to belittle or demean the deaths of those soldiers — 7 deaths? There were probably times in previous conflicts where making it through a day — or sometimes even hours — with only seven deaths would have been practically cause for celebration. Today, it’s front-page, banner headline news. Maybe I’m being too cynical about it — I’m certainly not wishing for more deaths — but when the same report mentions that “100 to 200 enemy fighters had been killed,” it’s obvious that the low number of deaths on our side aren’t due to less overall casualties. I’m kind of losing my drift on this particular topic, but hopefully you got my point. If I’ve stumbled too much, let me know.
Anyway…. I guess that’s a lot of what’s on mind mind these days concerning all of this.
Well, I was going to go see Daniel Ash at the Crocodile tonight, but unfortunately, due to a car crash, that’s been postponed for a month and a half. Bummer. I’ll be looking forward to that show when it rolls around, though — Daniel has at various times been parts of Bauhaus, Love and Rockets, Tones on Tail, and has had his own solo career. Hopefully the crash wasn’t too bad — I’m guessing not, since they’ve already got a rescheduled date of April 22nd, should be a cool show.
So, rather than that, it looks like there’s a fair crew of people heading out to The Vogue. I’m going to meet up with Gail, a friend that I’ve met in Yahoo! Chat and meet and get some food (we were going to meet at the concert tonight, but since that’s been cancelled…). Then, off to the Vogue to meet up with Chad, Rick, and our friend Megan who’s another expatriate Alaskan now living and going to school in Portland. Candice should be showing up around midnight or so after she’s done with a babysitting job that she’s at right now. Should be a fun night!
This is all sorts of entertaining, as an ex-Alaskan living down here — a rare early March snowstorm is more or less shutting western Washington down. I can understand, as Seattle has hills that Anchorage doesn’t…but it’s still pretty entertaining to see all this after an inch or two of snow. Right now there’s pictures on the morning news of the West Seattle bridge backed up after two Metro buses jackknifed, and people have been abandoning their cars along the sides of the highways and walking.