Random summary
Another random-ish “life and times” dump.
The short summary: sort of in a holding pattern, with a couple interesting things but mostly same-el-same-o.
2 weeks ago now, my roommate’s family and one of his friends from Indiana stopped by, and his bro and his friend stayed for a week.
We tried going to the air show at Andrews Air Force Base — took about an hour and a half on the subway to get there, but we went on Sunday. Shortly after we got there, it started absolutely pouring, and we bailed on it. Went to downtown DC instead, walked through the Smithsonian Air and Space museum briefly, then spent a little more time at the Natural History museum.
Just as a side note, the Natural History museum is definitely highly recommended. We were there about an hour, which wasn’t enough time at all — me and my roommate saw less than half of it, while the rest of the entourage finished up with the place in like 45 minutes. I get the feeling that maybe the ability to enjoy a museum isn’t so much a universal thing.
Roommate’s brother spent most of the week playing WoW, while his friend went back and forth between WoW and actually doing things. I played a bit of bass, and played some rock band, and did the usual work pattern. Then the roommate’s guests left, and things went back to normal-ish.
Didn’t do anything significant memorial day weekend, but in the last week I’ve been playing more bass. I’m taking today off of it because my index and middle fingers on my right hand hurt, probably symptomatic of the fact that most of my right-hand typing is done by those two fingers, and that I’ve done a lot of clicking in the last week or so, and adding fingerstyle bass (picture the middle and index fingers of a right hand walking across the strings) probably pushed it over the edge.
Watched the first season of the TV series Reaper. It’s pretty decent, but has some significant plot holes and oversights. I get the feeling that maybe they didn’t plan out the whole first season in any significant detail, or had some major rewrites mid-season. Possibly writers-strike related, dunno. Still pretty good to watch though.
I’ve been at the new job for about 2 months now. Things are still going well, and I still like it there. I’m not really going to talk about that significantly though, since most of what I’d be talking about is extremely esoteric. But I will say that I’m getting a pretty solid grasp on some fundamental distro differences (redhat-isms, in particular), I’m playing with cfengine, and doing some of the old standby normal stuff — centralized syslogging, system monitoring, etc. But the job’s great for autonomy, and I definitely dig that. I’ve got about one month left on the contract, so I should be hearing from the manager types about the transition to real employee soon.
In the financial world, I’m looking like two paychecks away from clearing my credit balance for the first time since long before I graduated… so that’s something to look forward to. To counterbalance that, I just spent about $100 on miscellaneous music cds that I’d been meaning to pick up for a while, and I’m about to drop in the neighborhood of $300 on a 3-year XM radio subscription for my car.
Thinking of my car, the altima’s been doing pretty well. It’s reporting a 26.1 MPG average over the life of the car, and I think as I get more used to it and better at dodging traffic, it seems to be doing better than that now — my last fill-up was just over 16 gallons (down to slightly below a quarter tank) and was at about 430 miles, and I’m at about 270 miles on this tank and still over the half mark. 400ish miles on a tank is still a pretty safe estimate.
The commute’s still good most of the time, with occasional badness. The good days, I get to work in about 20 minutes, and get home from work in about 30. The bad days, I get to work in 40 minutes, and it takes a bit less than an hour to make it home. So far, the trips there seem to be about 2/3 good (<25 min door to door), 1/3 mediocre (a 25-35 min door-to-door), and I’ve seen maybe one trip to work that took more than 40 minutes. The return trips are more unpredictable … if I leave before 4 pm on a Friday, it’s usually great, unless it’s a holiday weekend. If I leave between 4 and 6 on a Friday, it sucks. 6-7 on a Friday’s usually ok. Monday through Thursday, before 6:30 it’s always terrible, 6:30-7:30 is bad if there’s an accident or other issues, after 7:30 but before dark is always great, and dark’s just harder to deal with because it seems like not everyone knows how to use things like headlights around here.