system.reflecti0n.net

I only spent about one year doing freelance/"IT Guy" work from home. Two years ago this week I gave up on that to go back to full-time office work. The challenges are bigger and the regular paycheck is a real comfort.

But I miss working from home. I really, really do.

I'm only thinking of this because I've been doing a little extra work just this afternoon. I got a hot cup of coffee, comfy track pants and some decent tech podcasts for a mild distraction and this is pretty damn nice. It's cold outside, I don't have to worry about freezing my butt waiting for a train and when I need a break I can walk 20 feet to my left and flake on the couch. It's really not bad.

The only trouble with being-your-own-boss is it doesn't pay as regularly as having some other guy be the boss instead. That is a little bit of a worry, and the extra work to make sure you get paid is a hassle. On the other hand, it's pretty dame cool to open the mailbox and find a nice big paycheck inside. I didn't earn nearly the same kind of money I do now but I wasn't hurting either. I drove so little I wondered why I was paying car insurance!

Yeah, that was pretty good. For now, it's good enough to know I could go back to it sometime.

Tags:

I’m doing my best to distract myself from being sick and it’s not working. Baseball playoffs, sitcoms, surfing… I’m not enjoying any of them being ill. So I might as well try blogging for a bit since nothing else worked.

Nothing like ending a crummy week with Broken Social Scene—They can dislodge whatever mood you’re in… good or bad so wait until you’re in a bad mood first.

Another attempt at distraction this evening was downloading and installing Zune Media Player. It’s sure pretty to look at. A nice bonus is the “Find Album Info” works much better than the same function in Windows Media Player. WMP would often wreck the titles on the songs—It actually fouled up the tracks for Abbey Road… Abbey Road! I don’t think there’s a track variation for that album anywhere on the planet, except for Microsoft’s CD database. Sheesh. ZMP is a little more cautious and asks you to confirm your choices if it didn’t find a perfect match to the original filename. I’m not surprised they put more work on this feature—Find Album Info actually disappeared from WMP for a while, probably from complaints.

I wish they’d hurry up and do a 32-gig flash Zune. The Zune’s features look great but I need more than 16Gb and there is no way I’m going back to hard-disk players because I keep breaking them… actually I don’t break them it’s the impact on cement sidewalks that tend to wreck the poor little devils.

I wonder if ZMP will sync with my Creative Zen player. Doubt it but I think I’ll try it anyway. Maybe tomorrow.

Well the music seems to be doing the trick, the crap mood is wearing off a little. No, that’s the Nyquil. But the music’s still good… It’s all good.

Tags: flu, broken social scene, zune, nyquil

I dusted off my long-neglected copy of Les Misèrables. The difference between now and fifteen years ago is this time I’m certain I’ll actually finish the thing.

I’ve been reading on the train ride home all week. Normally that would put me well on the way to finishing an average novel but thing—thing is 900 pages of small print (about 12-15 words per line, the usual novel text runs 8-11 words per line). This got me to wondering—how on Earth did this book get read enough to become popular? Were people such voracious readers back in the day that a tome like Les Miz didn’t put them off of starting, much less actually finishing it?

Certainly in this day an age brevity contributes to popularity—In spite of the high page count you could finish a Dan Brown in hours, not weeks. If Victor Hugo were alive today his works could easily go unnoticed because honestly, not enough people would actually read books of this size and weight to popularize it.

Although, there is the “Ulysses” effect… That’s my pet theory that only a dozen people have actually read James Joyce’s Ulysses all the way through—But J.J. has such a good rep for “artistry” that no one wants to admit they don’t get it… For an example of this theory in a modern context, see the reviews of the TV mystery/drama/WTF/show called Twin Peaks. Nobody knew what the hell was going on there, but anybody who raved about the show was certain they knew what was going on.

Did the same fate reach Les Misèrables? Did people start off insisting it was great because they didn’t have 3 or 4 weeks of spare time to finish the book yet they had too much pride to admit the book beat them?

I know of at least one person who read the book all the way to the end, that guy who made the musical… Presuming the book also ends with the lost alien rejoining his parents on a spaceship to outer space.

Tags: novels, reading, classics, great books

There’s a difference. Really there is.

The “Early Riser” starts their day at about the same time as the Morning Person, but they don’t have an agenda that necessarily involves people. Saying “good morning” to the bus driver is about as interactive as it gets.

The yea-called “Morning Person” is your anxious feeling-type person who knows they’re not going to have any influence on people as long as they’re sleeping, so they get up as soon as possible and await their prey. Probably with a steaming mug of coffee in hand to distract the victim with pheromones as Morning Person executes their agenda with military-style precision and confidence.

So it’s nothing special to be an Early Riser, we do the same stuff you do but we just get started a lot sooner. But those Morning Persons… better watch out for them.

Tags:

…I want to go back to Vancouver.

Just being there, only 2 months ago, but I still want to go back.

You see there’s this cappuccino place, just north of the museum, it’s the best cappuccino—ever. Damn it’s good. Caffe Artigiano is the name. I suggest if you’re within 100km of Vancouver you pay them a visit the first chance you get… It’s a really good cup of coffee.

Aside from that, I literally had “itchy feet” waiting for the train one morning this week… Considering I had clean socks I I’d have to take that as a real sign that travel is in my future sometime soon… and not that bullshit “business travel” stuff that gets foisted on me from time to time… Well that’s not so bad, but it’s not the same as real adventure travel.

Before you start laughing at images of me with an Indiana Jones hat, by adventure travel, I mean any sort of travel where you go to an unfamiliar place on your own and do your best to find the most interesting thing to do in that place—that doesn’t necessarily mean tomb-robbing or foiling sinister plots, it just means your vacation can’t be described as “sitting in the pool” or “getting shitfaced every day”. seriously guys, if it's not worth engraving on your tombstone, why do you want to do it in the first place?

That's enough, I don't mean to rag on ya'.

Pizza smells pretty good, time to bail!

Tags: