The Vast Conundrum

Still in limbo, for so long now limbo became the norm years ago. It’s really surprising how little has changed in my life since 2011. The only change has been that caused by time alone. Not that that’s not substantial. But the basics are pretty much unchanged. Change is coming though. Most likely my next post comes from a new location. On Long Island, unfortunately, but moving is unstoppably afoot again. Such is the life of the renter.

Long time no post. Again. This is one of the slowest-moving sites on the web.

I ended up the victim of some treachery brought about by my hosting provider, so I moved again to Linode. I can’t begin to explain how uncomfortable it is knowing your hosting provider is a sleazeball trying to ruin your reputation so that he can steal a community organization for his own purposes, and that nothing is beneath him. And he’s hosting your server.

Life moved on. Now it’s 2013, and I’ve been happily at Linode for over a year. Interestingly that old Dovecot upgrade I mentioned in the previous post is still biting Debian users on the ass.

These days, I’ve been writing a lot of code. And doing a lot of things that start to make change happen.

An upgrade from the recently installed Dovecot 1.3 to 2.0 in Debian was started at about midnight. It finished at about 5 AM. This is the sort of thing that might tempt me to let Google handle my mail, if I weren’t so spectacularly unimpressed by Gmail and Gmail for Domains. I seem to value not-using-crap more than privacy I guess, but I think it’s because you can’t be an island of privacy in a sea of people who are broadcasting everything they know about you.

My last mail server appears to have been nearly 9 years old. With a little luck, I won’t be doing this again anytime soon. The whole upgrade was sloppy, from the upstream down to the distro packages which dropped dependencies like MySQL (dovecot-mysql not being installed when MySQL had been in use previously) during the changeover. The one thing nobody will tolerate anymore is mail downtime, and although all the issues were minor, it took hours to sort it all out.

One of my pet peeves is when people mark their messages as “urgent”. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve never gotten an “urgent” message from anyone except perhaps from the same people who mark every message they send as urgent. Since I only have one person who regularly calls me on the phone anymore, when I hear “urgent message” at the top of a voicemail, I know who sent it, and I delete it un-heard and un-lamented. It is one of the most annoying things to me, and I only wish there were some way for me to remove the option from my voicemail.

I really hate telephones. I like my smartphone, but I’d like it a lot better if it couldn’t be used for phone calls. Someone recently told me it was a form of PTSD from my Wall St. days. I think it’s true.

And this is how years somehow get past me. I feel like the last post was maybe a few days ago at most.

Been a long time since I wrote anything here. WordPress has tags now. Lots of shit has happened. Billy went into the beyond, the economy imploded and took my consulting business with it, I left Brooklyn, stayed with my father for 9 months, left when my undesired self become an unwelcome one, returned to Port Jefferson for a few months, then moved to Miller Place. Odds are, I’m moving again within this year. Piss. Broke. All the fun that goes with that. Got my driver’s license again (don’t ever let yours expire!), but no car.

I feel like I need to write again, and this compartment feels like the place to do it. We’ll see. There is another compartment. This is where I’ve gone in the past, when I wanted to write, and wanted either no audience or an audience of strangers. Most of what got written here was private or public and shortly lived. If I can keep my nerve up, I’m going to reveal the URL to a very few people. I’m not sure who they’re going to be yet because I’m not sure what I’m going to write yet. But if you know me and you find your way here on your own, don’t read too much into my not telling you about it. My thinking on the subject wouldn’t make sense to anyone but me, and is not a reflection of you.

I decided to swap out Red Train for a copy of GreenTrack that I’ve widgetized myself. For some reason, I seem partial to old skewl WP themes that aren’t even widgetized. I don’t think I’ve got the desire or willpower to bring another WP 1.5 template up to WP 3 specs though. I keep telling myself it doesn’t matter what theme I use, and I keep going back to the repository looking for minimalist themes, but I never end up choosing one. There’s a certain “feel” I need here, I don’t know why.

One of the minor condudra (is that a word?) in my life has to do with the dozens of domains and half-dozen blogs that sit unattended on a half-dozen of them. I rarely write in any of them, I spend more time upgrading the software than using it. A friend of mine who explained the term to me would probably recognize these blogs as compartments. I cannot find the time to write in one of them, yet there are six of them, and the reasons for splitting them out make sense only to me. Sometimes.

I just posted out that draft called bump from last December. I think it’s a testament to both my procrastination that I found the most time to post in here when I arguably had the least amount of time to spare, and how overwhelmed I’ve become since. By the time I left Port Jefferson, I’d left behind 2 desks, 2 dressers, 2 filing cabinets, a professional drafting table, an office refrigerator, and a couch. Oh, yeah, and those approximately 96 black garbage bags, stuffed with all manner of my life, and my lack of order.

It’s been over a year on now, and it seems like I’ve mostly blocked the whole thing from my mind. I’ve noticed my mind is already starting to wall off the whole Port Jefferson era. I hope things work out better here. I threw out the bulk of a ream of gray paper that got water damaged somewhere in transit over the last year. I slip of paper fell out of it as I was throwing it away. When I unfolded the slip, it was a shopping list for my old apartment. Wood filler, plaster, panes of glass, washers for shower door, new sink trap, … There’s a lot I still don’t understand, not the least of it is how I managed to get through all that, and to have everyone happy with the way it worked out.
Speaking of here… I’m in Brooklyn, New York now. It only took slightly more than 8 years to get inside the city limits. It’s turned out to be nicer here than I expected, although I still think if I could afford it, I’d live in Manhattan.

I think I want to re-template this site.  Which I will probably do, and then be gone again for another year. *sigh*

July 3 is the last time I posted in here. July 4 was the day I came to terms with my situation and began dealing with it. It’s also the day everything started going to Hell.

I got little sleep between July 4 and September 20 when the house in Port Jefferson changed hands and I temporarily moved into the apartment at my father’s house. I did succeed, finally, in getting rid of all the baggage I’d been carrying around the last 14 years.

One week left.  No real progress to report. *sigh*