Category: Personal

Server Move

Personal

I’ve had a new server on my network for a few months now, and have been procrastinating moving atourworst.org over to it. I’m not really sure why, because it was just a matter of logging into SSH to get the process started. Not like I had to physically do anything!

Anyway, I finally decided to get it done with today, so it’s now residing on grunt, while it had previously been on oreos. The main decision to move it was because I don’t like using resources that should be set aside for Holdfire Network. Granted, grunt is still a network server, but there’s about triple the resources available on this server, compared to my other ones. I was initially setting it up as my personal dev server, but decided to add it to the company instead.

That aside, I’ve been putting some finishing touches on a new design that I’ve been working on. The process is a bit slow, since it’s always a pain designing for myself. Sooner or later I’ll get it up, although I’d prefer sooner.

In other news, I haven’t been up to much other than trying to look around for more freelance work. It’s so frustrating being a freelancer sometimes, when your skillset does not include graphic design. It’d be much easier to find work if I was also a graphic designer, but because I’m not, my scope is a bit more narrow. There was a full time opportunity I was a candidate for, but I didn’t get offered the job, and the owner of the company is not able to give me any details as to why I didn’t get it. I’m a bit miffed that I can’t resolve what I lacked, but I’ll just keep trying elsewhere. I’ve been searching like a mad woman the past couple of weeks.

$4.07 for unleaded gas, and climbing

Personal

When I first started driving back in 2002, I used to pay no more than $1.15 for a gallon of gas. It was awesome because my car only had an 11 gallon tank, and it would be under $13 to fill up my car. Typically that would last two weeks, since I usually only drive to school at that point. Or if I did drive around, maybe I’d spend $25 for two weeks of gas!

Today the $4.00+ gas finally made its way from downtown [Chicago] to the outer suburbs. It’s been skirting around $3.90-99 for the past few days, with hopes of it going down. On my way to work, I paid $3.88 at Shell (which in the past, used to be the last place I’d ever go to!) with a $25 gift card that my grandparent’s gave me for my birthday.

While I was on my way home, the gas station two blocks from me is now at $4.07. What. The Fuck?! It’s not even Memorial Day, and it’s so typical for gas to shoot up .25-50 cents more around that time. I’m going to cry when I start paying $4.50+ for a gallon of gas. Namely for the fact that I currently drive on average about 35-40 miles a day for work. That’s 5 days a week. Ughs.

Other than outrageous gas prices in Illinois, I celebrated my birthday in style by going out to dinner with my family (and my best friend Amy) and then out to Durbin’s (a bar) for some good old fashioned drunk fun tiemz. Didn’t party too hard since I had to work the next day.

Speaking of which, work has been going along quite well aside from having to work with ASP/.NET. Really, I’ll take PHP/MySQL over that stuff any day. Especially with the client I’ve been working for right now. Their site is.. well, let’s just say there are inline styles, 59 “template” pages, and a database we can’t even use for development. Oh, did I mention we got the project on Friday morning with a due date of Tuesday, with Wednesday for bug fixing? Yeah. :'(

I can has updatez

Personal

Week one of work is officially over. It went very smooth, as as anticipated, I enjoy the work. The one thing I wasn’t sure about at first was the drive, which is 30 minutes one way, but surprisingly I don’t have to deal with traffic. I had expected the drive in the morning and night to be pretty horrific, but it’s actually a breeze! It also helps that it’s nearly a straight drive North, rather than dealing with random turns all over the place

My days involve me waking up at 7am, taking a shower and getting ready. I leave at 8am, and typically waltz into the office around 8:45am. I have my own cubicle to work in, although the section I’m in only has three of us. At least in our “hallway.” It is interesting getting to eavesdrop on other people though, especially the ones that are on the other side of me. The other day a lady was talking about how a mouse got into her box of Splenda, and proceeded to hope that it got cancer from it. 😛

I’ve got a bunch of projects on my platter right now, so I’ve been trying to get those done as quickly as possible. I like that I sit around all day coding up websites. Honestly, the day seems to go by really fast. Yesterday I started at 8:45am, and by the time I looked at the clock, I realized it was already 11:30am and my tummy was growling.

I think my personal favorite of the job thus far is that everyone uses IRC to talk to each other. Although I have to admit that when I’ve got a few questions I feel weird PM’ing him in the #chan, because he’s literally diagonal to my cube.

In other news, my birthday is in five days and my Kentucky Derby pick (Gayego) was a failure as it normally is.