29. It’s a prime. Doin’ fine.
Yep, I’m now a prime age again. It’s been a long couple years since my last prime …. like 6 of them. Next one’s only two years away…
But the primality of my age aside, it seems like this would be a good time to post a life-and-times update, dontcha think? Well, plus or minus a couple days….
So I’ve been working my current job for a bit more than 18 months now, I guess. It’s definitely flown by. I’m pretty comfortable with where I am. I’m financially stable, I’m pretty well-respected at work and the work itself is surprisingly satisfying. In any given day I can go from “long-term strategic planner” to “brute squad”. In fact, in any given 10 minute span, that shift can happen. I do everything from building rackmount kits and hanging servers to cabling to os installs to capacity planning, up to infrastructure R&D work. I’ve got a group of coworkers I’ve got a good rapport with. Probably the most satisfying thing is the refreshing independence: my management basically gives me as much leash as I want, as long as I stay in the neighborhood. Very empowered feeling.
Work’s sort of been the focal point of my life here. I don’t have much going on outside of it… I come home, play games, watch stuff, hang out with a relatively small social circle at pretty regular intervals. Sometimes I play tennis. Sometimes I cycle. Sometimes I walk. Occasionally I’ll pick up the bass and plunk at it for an hour or so. Probably of those four pastimes, I don’t do any of them enough to get any better at them… but given the fact that I consider a 4ish mile walk circuit to be the routine walk now and it doesn’t really phase me, I’m not sure how much better at that one I’d expect to get. Still can’t play bass for crap, and the cycling’s pretty limited even on the flat right now, until I get around to getting a gel seat cover or a pair of padded shorts or something.
Still running gotwoot, still out of the fansubbing game. I’ve definitely lost interest in anime pretty much wholesale, and in that world I’m only tracking DragonBall Kai (out of a sense of nostalgia, I guess) right now. Thinking of picking back up the phpdev hat and the trackerdev hat and migrating the tracker to a new piece of software and the admin interface and wp-torrents to something newly-brewed, and maybe doing a theme update on the front page and a version bump and theme update on the forums. But at the same time, it sounds kinda tedious, and I sort of don’t want to do all of that.
I recently put together a spreadsheet of my current income and expenditures and worked out how much I can manage to pay on my car and student loans. Based on the spreadsheet inputs and a slightly more aggressive payment schedule than I’d been pursuing before (’cause it turns out I can afford it), I should have both paid off by this time in 2012, plus hopefully a decent ball o’ wax saved up for a down payment on a house. Of course, that depends on how much of my discretionary budget I eat up on a week-to-week basis. If I spend the whole thing every paycheck I don’t end up saving much, and if I end up being fairly frugal in any given month I do a lot better. But then, I don’t account for pay raises.
Speaking of pay raises, my workplace is doing a workforce-wide “lump sum payment” this year, to bend the payroll curve down a notch. We haven’t heard how much that LSP is going to be, but basically the theory is they’d give a payout equivalent to what our annual pay raise would be right at the start of next calendar year, but without benefits withheld, and without calling it a pay raise. So we essentially get a pay raise this year but not next year, or so the theory goes.
That may or may not matter much to me, since I may also end up moving up a level this year… which might also come with a commensurate pay raise of its own in the couple-of-percentage-points range. So that might be cool…
On the financial front again, I basically owe money on my car and the student loan. The car’s at about 20k left, and the student loan’s also about 17k. I’m still feeling the car as a good choice, since satellite radio and various luxury features are pretty damned nice when you’re stuck in traffic. Still, my minimum payment is fairly steep, so I’m pretty much paying off the car and the student loans at the same rate… which sucks, ’cause that means I can’t really do the whole payoff-snowball thing and get rid of the student loan much faster. Unless I abandon the idea of saving altogether, that is.
On the “taking care of myself” front, I should really see a doctor for a physical and some associated bloodwork and to get rid of some cysts, a dentist to get my teeth cleaned and patched up, and an eye doctor for new glasses. All of these things have been outstanding for a couple years and are things that I can get for somewhere in the neighborhood of free, and my goal right now is to deal with all of them by the end of the calendar year, and most of them before thanksgiving. I’m still not really eating a great diet, though I’ve downticked the calorie count a bit and dropped about 10-15 pounds from my peak, the pizza lunches and plan-free dinners have caused me to plateau a bit there. So I definitely need to revamp that sometime soon. Planning out dinners might even help me with meeting the discretionary budget.
It’s interesting looking at the arc of my life though. When I was 19, I thought I’d be a mechanical engineer for some company somewhere, designing robotics hardware and doing what amounted to applied physics. When I was 23, I thought I’d be a developer somewhere writing some interesting and complex piece of software (though about then that idea was sort of fraying around the edges). When I was 27, I had just moved to DC (a move which I completely didn’t expect at all), and was working at a crappy DOE site doing what amounted to litigation support, and thinking that maybe sysadminning wasn’t the direction I wanted to go. Now I’m thinking that sysadminning is exactly the direction I wanted to go, and where I am is where I wanted to be.
But at the same time, I have to recognize that if I stay in it another 5 or 10 years I might find myself stagnating, sort of like I did towards the tail-end of my stay at SEAS. It’s really easy to envision myself doing this job another decade… I mean, I’m definitely planning for another 4-5 years at least, and I’m thinking about getting a house in the area and putting down roots. Right now I feel like I’m kind of getting close to that asymptote, where it’s going to take a lot more work to make relatively small gains on my technical skills. So maybe in 5 years (yay multiples of 17!) I’ll be at that point, where my foundation’s solid and the towers are tall enough that it doesn’t make sense to build any taller ones. So will I stay where I am, at a company that it’d be really easy to retire from? Or will I find something else, move along and pursue another field entirely? Or should I keep drilling down, chasing that asymptote, digging that hole, maybe going and doing more experimental/academic stuff in the field that I’m in?
So I guess what I’m saying is, I’m starting to feel like there’s maybe the itch to go back to school growing here… maybe I should see if I can pursue that a little bit more seriously than just kicking the idea around in cy10. It’s been a couple years, it’s probably been long enough…
Right. Anyway, enough of that. Still alive in 2009. In need of better sleep patterns like always. Signing out!