Brian's Blog

The term is "Blog", not "Blah"

Silly me for thinking that I could avoid my annual case of Seasonal Affective Disorder (well, at least it's always a mild case)...

What is it with programming houses and small windowless offices? I mean, it's not like we're vampires or various sundry creatures of the night that will evaporate at the merest hint of the Day Star; but every place I've worked in the past four years has been in a small windowless rooms. Come to think of it, I seem to going downhill...at my last job, it was a large windowless room filled with other geeks; this one, a small room with just my lovable self. At least I'm done with this crypt^Woffice at the end of the month.

Turns out I haven't read email since late January. And with me on Debian mailing lists, I had a nice surprise waiting for me when I checked by inbox: 2300 messages. Thank god for Thunderbird and message threading.

What About The Weather?

This being my first fall back on the west side of the state in nine years, I've been struck with two observations about the weather:

1. Leaves. There are leaves everywhere. The yard. The sidewalk storm drain next to my bus stop. They've even found their way into the windshield wiper well on my car. <question type="rhetorical">How do people live with all these leaves?</question>
2. It's late October; where's the snow?

Blogging On The Road

Well, today is the beginning of my third week of my new job (which is fast loosing the veneer of new). But I've now switched over to riding the bus.

On the plus side, it seems that there is sufficient cell service along the entire route that I can do anything I want, whether that be general web browsing or blogging in particular, form the comfort of my Sidekick. The only downside I see is the route(s) I have to take. One of the perks my employers offers is a free (to me) bus pass. However, it's only good on Sound Transit (the regional bus service) and Metro (serving King County), excluding service on Community Transit (which serves the area in which I live, Snohomish County). &gumble; So to get to my job in north Bellevue, I end up taking Sound Transit 530 from Canyon Park all the way down to downtown Bellevue, and the Metro 220 from there up to my building, which fortunately has a 220 stop right by the front door.

Oh well, at least I don't have to worry about the 405 commute any more.

A Hunting We Will Go

Had fun this afternoon trying to track down a used car at some car lots here. What with my financial situation, I've got only three constraints on the process:

1. The car must run.
2. The car must have automatic transmission.
3. Spend no more than $1000.

You'd think that in a pair of college towns, that kind of car should be easy to find. Trust me, it's not. The closest I came today was a little 2-door Pontiac with manual transmission for $2000. Oh, well, time to start digging in the classifieds.

Also had a chance to stop by and have a little chat with some ex-cow-orkers from Cylant (gotta have that human contact...or the next best thing, in this case).