Just for those keeping track: my brother just got into town after driving himself and his belongings across the country. He pulled an all-nighter for the last stretch, and is thus currently passed out on the Giant Purple Chair of Doom (Of Death! Of Sinus Infection!). It’s good to have Uri out here, and it should be fun getting to show him the area a bit.
Anyway, just wanted to post a quick update letting you all know he made it across safely.
I apologize for not posting recently. It has been a mixture of avoidance, laziness, and being swamped with other things. I have a pile of email I need to respond to about UberCon that I’ve been putting off for too long (I hate people-wrangling with a passion… for some reason, Kevin doesn’t seem to realize just how crazymaking and draining it is for me), plus personal emails, and all of my various projects are currently in a bit of a holding pattern.
That said, I’ve been working doing the game testing gig for most of the week (Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then Monday and Tuesday of next week), which is where most of my time has been going. Why is it taking so much more time and energy from me than it used to? Thanks for asking, Reader. Put simply, our new house is technically a 45 minute drive, if you were to, say, put it into MapQuest. In reality, I am competing with the rest of the region’s populace to get to the Redmond area (yes, there really ARE that many Microsofties). This turns the commute into an hour and a half long crawl. Even then, I’m taking the alternate route (I-5 to I-90, instead of I-5 to I-405), as the “shorter” route is even MORE swamped with traffic. My return drive also works out to be anywhere between an hour and a half and two hours, depending on weather conditions and whether there are any events going on… anywhere. So basically, I get up at 5:30 AM each morning so I can be on the road by 6, so I can be in Redmond by 7:30… and then get out of work at 4:30, and can expect to be home sometime between 6 and 7PM.
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Alright, I’ll admit it. I’ve been a slacker about posting, opting to do schoolwork and pack and move instead. But since Mickey decided to point people in my direction, I guess it is finally time to update.
The quick sum-up: the move sucked more than it should have because no one showed up to help, but other than that didn’t really suck all that much. No serious injuries (just some bruises, a pinched finger, and a splinter when all said and done), no broken furniture, and we managed to get the rental truck back on time. It took us two twelve hour days to load and unload the truck, which was a Budget 24′ Truck (the largest they have) filled front to back, wall to wall, five-six feet high. Considering that, I think we made damn good time.
The house is currently a pile of boxes, though we’ve managed to get most of the furniture where we want it. The house has a separate den and living room, so we’ve got the tv and dvds and games and such in the den, which is off the kitchen. The living room is in the front of the house, and has a beautiful vaulted ceiling with a giant window letting light in… so we’ve decided that rather than making our offices tight with bookshelves, we’re going to turn it into a library of sorts… the bookshelves are going to stay down there, along with one of the futons, and Mickey’s giant soul-sucking chair of doom (for those unfamiliar with it: it’s a big purple beanbag that is roughly the size of a couch). I’m really pretty happy with this prospect, as I didn’t really want to hide all my books in a closet again. (My tech books and some of Mickey’s reference books are still going into our offices… we’re talking about our fiction collections, and my art and photography books, and Mickey’s Neil Gaiman collection.)
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Sorry I haven’t been posting regularly recently. Part of it is hecticness involving school and packing for the move and financials, but the other part is a lack of motivation to post. The weather is back to being in stasis (clear blue, mid-80s, every day), I haven’t been working much (not that I can really talk about what I play, anyway), and I haven’t really done anything interesting in a while. That’s not to mention the roofers banging on my ceiling as they retar the roof of the apartment and the mind-numbing heat actively conspiring to keep me from getting anything productive done.
That said, here are a few updates as to what’s been going on and how things have been going. I’ve managed to keep up with school, and have two packets left to the semester. I’ve been taking a beginner figure drawing class over at University of Washington for the past few weeks each Saturday (my last class was this past Saturday), and I’ve got a sketch-dump up here. (For what it’s worth, that’s an entire sketch dump of my sketchbook, not just classes or even since class started.)
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For the first time in several weeks, it is raining in Seattle. It has been sunny and hot for most of the summer, and the entire area is wrapped in a drought. It was discussed on the radio that with the ground where it is, if we got a torrential downpour, it wouldn’t help… so instead, we’ve gotten exactly what we needed: big droplets of water, falling at a steady pace. I can hear the pitter-patter as it falls through the trees outside my window, through which a gentle cool breeze is blowing.
I’ve got Nick Drake playing on my computer, and I’m listening to the rain, talking to interesting people. It is all relaxing in a way that only quiet rainy days can allow.
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I’m in the process of collecting my stuff to mail my packet for school down at the coffee shop Eli and I found in downtown Bellevue. The fact that everyone is so amazingly friendly and laid back suddenly makes more sense… turns out that easily 75% of the folks who work there are Baha’i. Chris was talking to them while I was working, and mentioned that my name was Nabil… they all kinda arched an eyebrow and asked me about the name… “Oh, yeah, I’m named after an early historian of the Baha’i Faith”, “Yeah, we’re all Baha’i’s here.”
Blink, blink. Cool! They’re all really interesting people, and interested in art and philosophy and other nifty shit, and aren’t nearly as… hmm (how to say nicely), fundamentalist/overzealous as some of the east coast Baha’is I’ve met (this is not saying those people are bad people… it’s just that I disagree with that level of zealousness, even for religion. It’s not for me.) Turns out there is a substantial community in Bellevue, and another large community in Seattle proper… from the sounds of it, the Seattle group would probably be the best fit to go hang out with, as they tend to be a bit more laid back, like this group at the coffee shop.
Just thought I’d share, because I thought at the very least Mom and Dad would be amused. Hi guys!
You have dishonored my dog! (Why? because it’s fun. Apologies to those on dialup.)
I’ve gotten pretty used to the new Movable Type at this point, though there are still a few tweaks I need to do (like adding internal site navigation again). Expect those back up sometime in the not too distant future, but in the interim, I’ve re-uploaded my Online Communities essay[PDF], so if you missed it the first time, feel free to check it out.
I’m actually a little irked about that essay. The PDF as it stands is just the core essay and the bibliography. The cover letter, the cover page, the table of contents, the appendices… are all gone. For some strange reason, I didn’t manage to save them last time I reformatted my hard drive or something, because it’s all GONE. I only have the PDF that used to be on the website left, because I had it in a tarballed archive I’d made of my site prior to the last major housecleaning. This is extremely upsetting, and I’m not quite sure what to do about it. The only idea I have is to borrow the copy the school has next time I’m on campus, and scan it all in as text. (This might involve an intermediary step of photocopying it all, since they’re not willing to release those essays from the building.)
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What a completely enjoyable and yet utterly useless day. Though I had no intention to, I slept in til 10 AM (dehydrated). Then I got up and geeked out with Eli, futzing with website stuff (he’s refining and redesigning his site) til three in the afternoon. We made some good progress with the site stuff as you can see, and then went for sushi up at the mall. After that, we went down to the coffee shop again, and hung out for the rest of the day.
Chris met us down there after he got out of work, and we hung out a while longer, until finally around 8, I picked up Mickey from the house and we went down to the Cheesecake Factory and had dinner… by the time we got done, we were running up around 10 PM… low and behold, it was still 80 degrees out, so we went swimming. Lots of fun, swimming around til 11… Aaaaand now we’ve rounded out the night by watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force on DVD.
Good but useless day indeed. Tee Hee!
The house hunting is apparently over. We looked at some houses on Saturday, and then some others on Tuesday, discussed them, and decided to place a bid on our top choice, down in the Federal Way area. It’s great heaping gobs of money ($236,000), but well worth it: it’s in excellent condition and suits us well. We went down and took a second look last night, then submitted the bid.
Well, the tentative answer is a big YES! I say tentative because the seller’s wife is out of town currently. He’s said yes and told his agent to mark it as in contract, but his wife still has a veto. This is fine by us, as no one is expecting any issues. So, big ol’ woohoo!
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Ahoy! Sorry for not posting recently, I’ve been exceptionally lazy. Here is a quick (happy) update: I’m currently working for VMC, testing xbox games. This is sporadic work at best, so I’ve continued to send out resumes. The Apple Store gig turned out to be a part time (10-15 hours a week) sales position, which isn’t exactly all that enthralling, especially since it’s only fractionally more than I make doing game testing, which actually has the potential to be a gateway into cooler things.
I also applied to OmniGroup, yet again, this time for a support position for their web browser, OmniWeb. I fully expected to not hear back, because I’ve never heard back before, but lo and behold, a few days ago I got an email asking to set up a phone interview.
I just had the interview, and I think it went very well. We’ll see if they share that opinion on whether or not I get the job (or at least to the physical interview). I’m pretty excited about this position, as it’s mostly just support and public relations of the sort that I’ve been doing for AVATAR for 7 years now, only I’d be getting paid for it.
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