State of My Life Address

I recently lost my job at FSD. They couldn't afford me and knew I was going to leave anyway. I'm super thankful for the freedom, and a bit fearful and a lot optimistic about my future.

The next thing that seems like a good idea to do is to sit down with my budget and figure out a spending plan. I will do that today while I'm still in Austin.
I'm in Austin celebrating my mom's and brother's birthdays after having interviewed with Nova to get a job in Japan teaching English. I believe I will be accepted; I'll get confirmation in about 2 weeks.
In a parallel universe, I got married to Wende yesterday, Friday, Summer Solstice 21 June 2002. We were married as part of her family's Family Reunion in Hunt, Texas beside the river at Casa Bonita.

In this universe, I got scared back around October or so and realized I just couldn't do it, that I had to travel first, to learn a lot more about myself before committing to marriage. I am quite happy overall for my choice. I feel guilty and embarassed when I think about being around Wende's family; I can't face them, and I don't imagine I'll ever make the opportunity to do so.

And interestingly, my shame feelings increase the further away from Wende I get in her family. I mean I could basically sit with Wende's immediate family and explain to them my situation etc or whatever. But Wende's Aunt Nancy I could *maybe* do that. Aunt Margot and Uncle Gary, *maybe*.. Further out to aunts and uncles whose names I don't really remember? No.

Why is that? Seems quite strange that those with whom I have the least relationship, I'm the least able to face about my choice. I imagine it's cause I have no identity with them except as Wende's (ex) fiance. Hmmmm.
I have just recently gotten my new Mac PowerBook G4 Titanium, and I love it. So far I have:
- learned how to use ssh, scp, sftp to connect securely to my website
- Sucessfully scp'd a few journal entries to my site
- Set up my .emacs file and used emacs to write journal entries.
I still need to do a few things with it:
- Set up email, including GPG (Gnu's PGP) so I can send signed and/or encrypted emails. (and maybe get off yahoo email altogether)
- Figure out how to use the C-q command during a macro to name a journal entry and set up its guts.
- Make sure I'm enrolled with the Apple Care Protection Plan.
- Get it insured against theft.
- Get a better photo editor than iPhoto; I can't figure out how to change the output quality of the .jpg, nor how to crop and *not* have it zoom in on the cropped portion of the image.
My life seems simpler now that I've lost my job. Excellent!
I have some website stuff to do for Kim Sawyer, in exchange for him acting as my personal coach. Basically I have gotten many free sessions for the past handful of months and have not done any website work for him. I trust that in the end our barter will be even.
Spot is still the coolest cat in the world, and he still lives with me, but that will change before I leave for Japan. I don't yet know where he will live.
I still haven't heard anything about New Orleans Rally, except that I believe it is scheduled for July 5-7.
I just realized something I will do with my CDs. I don't need to take the CDs I want to have during my travels. I can just compress them all the mp3 and store many CDs worth of music on one disc. I know, I know, I know this technology is not new, but I just now realized that I can use it.

One caveat is that doesn't allow me to pore over the CD covers, which I definitely enjoy doing at times, but that's mostly when I first get the CD and I'm really immersing myself in the art of the album as a whole.

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ktru

8:15pm CDT Saturday 22 June 2002

emacs rules.

I have just written a macro that will set up a new journal entry, including putting todays date for the name of the file, and the date at the top of the file. Awesome!

For some reason the command insert-kbd-macro will write " ?" between each character of the macro. I removed all occurences of " ?" and then removed the "[?" at the beginning and "]" at the end, and can use the resulting string in my .emacs file.

9:00pm

Hmm. My computer clock is 10 minutes slower than the KTRU clock, and 15 minutes slower than the other KTRU clock.

9:21pm

Today's shift at KTRU is the kind of shift that makes me go, "ah, why do I do KTRU anymore?" No one is really calling; the music doesn't do anything for me today; I'm just tossing in some CDs and records, choosing randomly as I usually do.

Tonight after KTRU, I'm going to Dude's to be online and get my budget caught up.

10:36pm

At Dude's now; we are watching Black Hawk Down on his wide screen TV.

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