Vail Life

So I was still thinking about spending all my money even last night. Having 1200+ dollars sitting in my checking account was driving me nuts. I even picked a laptop for 1800 dollars to spend it on. I then made the decision that I could get twice the power for 1/2 the cost by doing a bare bones motherboard/processor/ram combo and use all my old parts to make my 450 MHz a 3Ghz monster. I found I could do so for about 900 dollars relatively easy.

Then I stopped, walked away from the screen and thought about what future bills I may run into soon. Moving expenses for a new job. Down payment on a new car. First and last months rent on a new place to live. These are things that are a higher priority just not as immediate in the future. But still all that money in my checking was driving me nuts.

So at 5 am yesterday morning I jumped online and opened my first savings account in about 13 years. I took 1000 dollars and threw that in there. Now my checking is down to an amount where it will not egg me on to spend it every time I look at it.

So I have tried finding a way to get around the Nazi firewall at my workplace. We didn't have this many closed ports at the ISP company CP Internet I worked for. I am using a program called RealVNC to try and set up a terminal server to connect to from the work machine. My first attempt to connect to it has failed but there are some things I can try yet.

I have a feeling that my home firewall is mis-configured and is locking it out because I have never been able to get my FTP server running through it either. At least not since moving to Vail. Although I doubt it, I hope it is nothing that Comcast may be doing to cause it to lock out because back in Minnesota I had it working fine on Charter.

Let’s see, what else has happened since then? Hmm just the weekly same old news I guess. Applied for 3 jobs; Smallville was cool; Gentoo server still broken and will stay that way for a while; Work on the Wog site is thought about but hasn't progressed.

My boss asked me last night if I had any big plans for the weekend. Made me realize that I never have big plans for the weekend. I think I have gone out maybe 6 weekends out of the last 52 weekends. And a few of those are camping trips, Christmas trip back home, and 2 company parties. I am really a boring person and have not done much outside of my little world. Will that change? Do I want that to change?

It really is a comfort zone that I have gotten into. Yeah, I send out tendrils to the outside world in the form of job applications and the changing of jobs will be an upheaval to my little world, but again it is letting outside forces change my environment and not me directing them. I am not a very courageous person and do not have the willpower to make my world change around me. I am intellectual about it. I send out job applications, I make websites, I talk about revolutionary views and ideas. But each of these are weak pushes against a mountain of outside influences. Will my pushes make a difference or is it just me striving against the inevitable?

Posted by Coign at 3:04 AM | Permalink | Comments

So I had a 4 day weekend last week and I was determined to get my Gentoo server running over those four days. I completely restarted the whole install and everything went flawlessly until the very end when I need to reboot the machine to launch the operating system on its own. GRUB came up fine; I select the Gentoo install, and then the machine reboots. No error message, it just starts up the start up all over again. I spent 3 more days and countless hours trying to resolve that issue. Needless to say, it is still doing that.

I have also been coming up with some ideas to start a brain dump of what things people can do to make a difference in shaping the laws that govern our lives. That is the idea behind my new button on the front page that leads to nothing. It will be a web page dedicated to those who want to make a difference and not let their lives be ruled by laws dictated by government, religion, or popular media. Common sense once ruled our day-to-day lives and now common sense has been replaced by "Caution: Coffee is hot" warnings. It will be a page dedicated to pointing out absurdities, and giving ideas and information on how to change things.

So I had been working on both of the above projects along with helping Justin with his tattoo shops and working at the Marriott. Over the past 3 weeks I realized I had stopped having fun and all my "hobby" projects had turned into jobs. I would get up in the morning and work on stuff, not because I wanted to, but because I felt a responsibility to do so. So yesterday I decided, I need to get back some time for myself to just play with. So I reinstalled Dark Age of Camelot and signed up for 3 months.

DAoC is a MMORPG and is the biggest time sink in the world. It is also a lot of fun and I have made some relationships in our guild that have lasted a very long time. I laughed when one of the guild members in the game was introducing me to a new guild member. "This is Keli (my name in game). He is one of the founding members of the guild along with Ogmavaug."

I don't know if I would classify myself as a "founding member" as the guild was fairly well established when I joined. But I would agree that only Og and I put in the time and dedication to remain loyal to the guild over individual members of that guild. At one time the guild had a split where a number of the prominent founding members got into a social disagreement. This caused half the guild to leave. Og and I stayed with the Reavers even though we sided with those who left and had some disagreement with the remaining members of the Northern Reavers. Eventually those we disagreed with left the guild and those we had lost rejoined the guild. After all was said and done the one constant with Northern Reavers has been that Og and I have been a part of the guild for as long as anyone can remember.

So now I have to learn some time management. As before when I played this game, DAoC has the potential to eat large chunks of time and can push other projects off the map. For right now, that is exactly what I want it to do because I was starting to get burned out trying to think about computers and social ideas.

The biggest issue that game poses for me now is that it is a constant reminder that my PC is only a 1.6Ghz and I should really think about upgrading it. But I am unsure if I want to spend 1100 dollars on a new PC, which is what will end up happening if I replace it. I have the money, in fact it is in the bank right now and I would not even need to use my credit card. But I want to get a job in Denver and I will need all the money I can to make sure I cover all the costs, plus I also want to get a new car. So I need 3000 for a car, I need at least 1500 to move to Denver, and I want 1100 for a new PC.

Well with the work I have done the last few weeks I paid off my 1300 dollar credit card and my 500 dollar bank loan. So I have 1300 in one account, 400 in another account, and 1800 dollars of potential credit. Having money is sometimes as bad as not having money. Hmm let me think about that a bit. ... Nope I would rather have this problem than the problem I had when I first started this blog. And that was not having money and running into overdraft issues. Being poor is 1000 times worse than having money.

What I need to happen is I need to get a job in Denver for 40,000+. Then I can move down there, calculate new living expenses, see what I have available for car payments to determine what price range of vehicle I can afford, and buy that vehicle, and then when all my necessities are done, then I can buy my new PC/toy.

Well until then I will just have to bite my lip every time I play on my PC and think, "I really need a new machine."

Posted by Coign at 1:40 AM | Permalink | Comments

Sorry late update today.

So I started the Gentoo install. Got all the way through it to the part where you have it boot on its own. Then I got some stupid "unsupported frame size" error. I am on a 21" monitor that does up to 2300 resolution, how can I have some unsupported frame size. Both my video card and Monitor can handle higher res's than the Gentoo can.

So I am wiping everything and restarting all over. The Gentoo install has been very frustrating. I have had 4 errors that forced me to work around the problem because there was no fix. I started this install on Wednesday and it is now Friday as I am restarting all over. 3 days of nothing is a lot of nothing.

So I have become a very active #rantradio poster. If you ever want to stop in I am Coign on #rantradio on the irc.rantradio.com server. It is a lot of fun and I have gained some very interesting ideas about how much our life is dictated to us and what we can do to help take back control of outside forces and how they affect us. I also have some ideas to motivate and help others determine their own fate and to fight those that would persecute those who would facilitate in the propagation of free information. We will see if any thing comes of it.

Other than that, I am done working at the store so I have more time to work on various projects, like Rant Radio and my Gentoo server. In the end those two projects are the same path of different destinations. Rant Radio is a hobby and the Gentoo server is teaching me Linux skills that have deteriorated since leaving CP Internet a year ago. But both will help me with the other.

I have applied for more jobs in Denver using their newspaper but even though I dropped off 12 more apps I have yet to hear anything from them. Ok, back to the old complaint. It is sad to send out 30 applications for every one you get a response from. And for those responses I have had like 10 with no new job. I really feel like I am sifting through a mountain looking for a single gold nugget.

Posted by Coign at 2:18 PM | Permalink | Comments

Ugh, still working at the gift shop so not a whole lot of time for anything else.

In my spare time (sic) at work I have been researching booting my old 450 MHz into a Linux machine. After doing a week of research I have decided on the Gentoo distro. It's biggest selling point is the portage system that allows you to instantly update any module and the fact that because of this feature it is almost always on the cutting edge of latest technology.

To help me in accomplishing this fact I have bought an adapter for my Sun monitor to utilize its second input feature and I spent 100 dollars on books for Linux. I picked up Dummies Guide to Linux, Dummies Guide to Programming in Linux, Running Linux by O'Rielly Press, and Learn C++ in 21 days. I also have printed off the install documentation to Gentoo and am starting to read through that and become a semi active poster on the Gentoo forums.

For all you technophiles out there into the Linux scene you can find out more about Gentoo at http://www.gentoo.org.

Well back to reading, maybe I might get enough time to actually piece together my old machine (I have to replace the video card and reconnect the harddrive) in preparation for the install which will happen as soon as I get my monitor adapter and get some free time.

Posted by Coign at 6:28 AM | Permalink | Comments

Well Grandma is still ill and so I am still working at the gift shop. Justin's wife came back so I cut my works days down to every day 4 hours or so and 8 hours on Friday. That way I still get some sleep. Unfortunatly this really dips into my internet surfing time but I have learned to cope.

I applied for two jobs here in the Valley for computer admin but did not get a reply on either of them. I have a few jobs I have yet to apply for on Monster but have not had the time 'cause I am working so much. It takes about 15 min to apply for a job on Monster and I only get about 5-6 hours of sleep the way it is. This weekend I will do the Monster apps.

With me just working and sleeping my last week was pretty boring.

Posted by Coign at 2:59 AM | Permalink | Comments