At what age do “the holidays” quit being something you look forward to and become something that you dread?

Maybe “dread” isn’t the right word, but you know what I mean.

Particularly when the people that you’ve spent the holidays with for years and years (and years) are no longer in your life. Regardless of why they’re not in your life, when the holidays roll around you spend a lot of time reminiscing about history, family, life, etc. Good or bad, you always have this idea about the holidays that they’re supposed to be this magical time of snow and happiness and hot chocolate and family and new socks.

And part of me is afraid that this year won’t measure up. That this year will be a disappointment ’cause of the horribleness that’s preceded it. That it will be a long, gross, cold, freezing rain of re-telling the story of how things fell apart, and saying that you’re “good” when no one believes you possibly could be, even if you did.

I started this post hoping that it’d be a good, positive one that reassured all of us that things are going well.

The thing is, things are going well. They are. I have a great apartment, great dog, great friends, and I’m doing a pretty damn good job of holding shit together and rebuilding my life. But there’s still this…I don’t know…

You know that swirly black swirling mess that appears over your head when you lose at Wii tennis? It feels like that. More on that later…maybe.

Despite everything that’s happened this year, I do have things that I am thankful for:

• I’m thankful for the friends and family that I have who’ve helped me through this.
• I’m thankful for the opportunity to start my life over again. Not everyone gets that chance.
• I’m thankful for what I’ve learned about myself, and the way that I think and feel.
• I’m thankful for the things that didn’t kill me, but made me stronger.
• I’m thankful for what I learned about trust and loyalty, and the people that I thought were trustworthy and loyal, and the people that I know are.
• I’m thankful that every day is easier than the one before it.

In truth, things could be WAY different than they are now, and I am truly thankful for the people in my life who’ve helped me through it all.

I know that a lot of people are eager to know what’s going on with me, how I’m doing, etc. and this would be an excellent place to tell everyone the same thing all at once.
I’m not doing that, though.
Mostly, I am still trying to deal with this in my own head, and, though writing can be a good way to deal with things, I don’t think that I would be writing anything that I would want anyone but my closest of close friends to know, and this is the Internet. Not appropriate.
I promise that I will get back to this once I feel like I have something good to say.

Tomorrow I will return to Chicago from an extended vacation in Utah, mountain biking with my family.
Normally, I would be looking forward to returning to see my girlfriend, see my friends, and find out what had happened in my absence.
Not this time.
This time is different.
This time I kinda want to vomit.

In case you hadn’t yet heard, right before this trip my five and a half year relationship with Talia ended.

I am returning to Chicago to start trying to find an apartment, sell furniture, and divide up our posessions.

It feels like I am flying back to make arrangements for the care and burial of my relationship. Of five years of my life.

If you feel like coming up to the podium and saying something about the deceased, please send an email instead. While I am trying to be more open (hence this post) that doesn’t mean she would want this to become an open discussion on the topic.

PS – Sorry if this is how you’re finding out about this. I do love you all, but I am over regaling survivors with the tale.

Today was the end of week one of my new job, and I gotta say: Damn.

This place is awesome.

The people are super cool. The work we (they) do is amazing. The perks are plentiful (free drinks, free snacks, breakfast, etc.). The work is interesting and fun and I get to learn new things.

And, to top it all off, here’s an excerpt from an email I just got:

…it’s time to think about a Halloween themed power hour.
It’s important that we find 60, Sixty second clips of the best, most nasty, most scary, most tense, most funny, most awesome horror films ever.
Also, we must find 60 separate one second vampire bites or vampires drinking blood scenes that will go between the horror film clips.

Everyone submit and load your clips.  If you don’t know how to load into and avid find a friend who can help. Everyone is invited to submit clips and come to the screening that is TBD, but somewhere around halloween.

This will be best ever.

That is correct. We have holiday-themed company power hours.

Yes, that is, in fact, a ping-pong table, coffee maker, snacks table (they’d just cleared breakfast), and fridge full of drinks. And the bottom shelf? That’s beer and wine.

“Generally you should wait ’til after 5:00, and don’t get hammered.”
“OK.”
“You’ll get hammered.”

Now, where is that Xbox that’s showing up on the network?

The process of resigning can be a lot like breaking up with someone: an awkward mess, especiall if it comes as a surprise to the other person, or there’s a real dependency on one side.

This, fortunately, was not like that at all.

I scheduled a meeting with my boss and before I even said anything he guessed what was going on. Well, close, anyway. He thought I was moving back to Portland, but the effect was the same – I wouldn’t be working for him. And he seemed genuinely happy for me. He knew my job wasn’t doing it for me, and that I wasn’t getting any opportunities to move up.

He was a great boss, one of the few in the organization, and will be a great mentor to the people I left behind. I would definitely work for or with him again, but the circumstances would have to be different. His boss was a micromanager with no real vision that will probably be the boss for the forseeable future. And that is not the kind of place I want to be.

I got a new job.

That’s not something that you hear a lot of these days, but I did it, and it surprised even me.

I haven’t really been looking hard for a job – I’d check craigslist every once in a while, make sure my resume is updated, etc., but I wasn’t sending out resume after resume hoping for some feedback. In fact, I only sent out one. I saw a job called “Mac & Linux Admin” on craigslist, read the description, and thought I should just do it, even if nothing else comes of it. So, after procrastinating for a week, I hammered out a cover letter, attached my resume, and expected nothing to come of it. Especially since I know how many resumes prospective employers get these days. Surely, I thought, someone who’s applying will be more qualified than me.

A few hours later I had a phone interview scheduled for the next day.

That, obviously, went well, and a few days later I had an in-person interview and found out that the employer is The Whitehouse Post.

Now, I’m not bragging here, just making an observation: I have never interviewed for a job I didn’t get.

Dressing well is not one of my talents, so I worried a little about what to wear; after all, this is a high-end, professionally creative place. I wanted to be professional, but not nerdy, competent, but cool, too. I settled on gray slacks, a dress shirt, slightly dressy shoes, and no tie. I almost went with nice jeans, a dress shirt, and dressy shoes, but I think this was the right decision.

I took the train in and it was much shorter than my commute. Awesome. Also, parking downtown? Not a chance. So train and bike when it’s nice. The office is in a block of almost all bars – swanky, $200 jeans kinds of bars (I’ll cope). And it’s on the fifth floor, which is kinda cool. Also, it’s really nice – high ceilings, quiet, nice decor, friendly people, and Macs everywhere.

I interviewed with this really nice woman who asked lots of good questions for a while, then she called in another woman who was also very nice and asked good questions. I felt like I could be perceived as dodging the question sometimes, but some of the questions were hard to give definitive answers on. After that, I was introduced to the guy who is their on-site workstation engineer. He’ll be handling workstation and editing software configuration while I am handling the back end server, network, etc., infrastructure. He was nice, too, and showed me around. Including their server room and media room.

Aside: You should NEVER show your server room to anyone you don’t intend to have working for you.

Maybe they knew then that they’d be offering me the job. Maybe it was fine for them to show me the server room, ’cause they knew that I’d be in there a lot. But that is the nerve center of your business and should be protected from everyone all the time. I hesitate to even let contractors see the server room until they’ve signed the same non-disclosure agreement employees sign – should you really trust non-employees more than employees?

Anyway, by the time I’d met the third person, seen the server room and spent more than an hour at this place, I was feeling pretty good about my prospects.

Sure enough, the next week I got a call offering me the position. I accepted the next day and resigned my current job the day after that. I’ll post more about the process of resigning and all that, but wanted to share with everyone…well, a few of you anyway…the good news.

I’ve decided that some of the junk mail I get is too good not to pass on. Some of it is almost poetic.

This one is called

som of his king, but it is

Interest

there can be no rational debate.

a

There are some things

so simple

that one can almost prove them

with plans

and diagrams,

as in Euclid.

a

One could make a kind of comic calendar

of what would have happened to the English diplomatist,

if he had been silenced

every time by Prussian diplomacy.

a

Suppose we arrange it in the form of a kind of diary:

July 24: Germany invades Belgium.

July 25: England declares war.

July 26: Germany promises not to annex Belgium.

July 27: England withdraws from the war.

July 28: Germany annexes Belgium,

England declares war.

July 29: Germany promises not to annex France,

England withdraws from the war.

July 30: Germany annexes France,

England declares war.

July 31: Germany promises not to annex England.

Aug. 1: England withdraws from the war.

a

Germany invades England.

a

How long is anybody expected to go on

with that sort of game;

or keep peace at that illimitable price?

a

How long must we pursue

a road in which promises are all fetishes in front of us;

and all fragments behind us?

No;

upon the cold facts of the final negotiations,

as told by any of the diplomatists in any of the documents,

there is no doubt about the story.

And no doubt about the villain

I have had the Single Best Idea in the History of the Internet™.

I am going to buy this car, slam it into this office, and twitter™ the tinyURL™ of the flickr™ album and YouTube™ videos to my FaceBook™ friends.

Thereby causing the Internet™ to go so meta™ that it collapses the universe™.

I will accept the Nobel Prize for Brilliance whenever you find time to hand that out.

Last week we did this thing at work called “Tech Check” (or TekChek, or TechCzech, or something hip-but-actually-not) and I got to help a lot of new students try to get their systems to a minimum standard of functionality for their school year.

This was eye-opening. Viciously eye-opening.

The quantity of people who should be computer literate who were running wildly out of date systems with no anti-virus and no admin password was astounding. It was a combination of not knowing that they should and not knowing how to do so. I am not going to go into details about why these things are important, just quick, easy instructions on how to do it.

So, for anyone who’s reading this, I’m asking you to now, please, for the love of all that’s holy (or not), install A/V and updates and make sure that your user account has at least something for a password. Even if you’re using a Mac, you need to keep your system up to date and have a password.

Windows Instructions

1. Open Internet Explorer and go here: http://update.microsoft.com/windowsupdate. Follow the prompts to install all available updates. Go there over, and over, and over until it says there are no updates left to install. Reboot as many times as necessary. Then go there again, just to make sure.
2. Get anti-virus. If you want great protection, you have to buy it and this is the one I recommend: Eset NOD32. Purchasing a good A/V solution is extremely important if you are using your computer for business at all, and Eset NOD32 provides discounts for multiple computers or multiple years. Please do this right now. If you were unwilling to pay the “extra” money for a Mac, this is one of the costs you chose to bear. If you are unable to shell out $40 / year for a great solution, here’s an adequate, free solution: Avast! Home Edition. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing. Note: lots of businesses and schools will provide anti-virus to their employees, students, etc. Often this will be pre-configured to download updates, run in the background, etc., and may never require you to purchase a license. Check with your employer or school.
   
3. Give yourself a password: Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete and click the button that says “Change password”. It is important that you remember what this password is, so make it memorable. Make it your drivers license number, or your license plate number, or your insurance policy number, or something else that you can have written down that doesn’t look like your password. Here’s an idea: pick something in your wallet that expires regularly, and use something from that (your insurance policy expiration date, for example). Then, every time that expires and you have to get a new one, change your password to reflect the new information.

Mac Instructions

1. Click the Apple logo in the upper left corner and choose “Software Update…” Install all available updates, reboot if necessary, and keep checking until there are no updates left to install.
2. Give yourself a password. Click the Apple logo and choose “System Preferences”, then click “Accounts”, your account should be highlighted with a button that says “Change Password”. It is important that you remember what this password is, so make it memorable. Make it your drivers license number, or your license plate number, or your insurance policy number, or something else that you can have written down that doesn’t look like your password. Here’s an idea: pick something in your wallet that expires regularly, and use something from that (your insurance policy expiration date, for example). Then, every time that expires and you have to get a new one, change your password to reflect the new information.

Please remember that this is just a base level of security meant only to deter the casual intrusion – kinda like wiring your bike to the bike rack. It’s not going to protect you from someone who is dedicated, but it should help you from being one of millions of people who get pwned just because it was so easy.

Also, feedback is always welcome. If you want more instructions for making your computer safe, let me know and I’ll write more documentation.

UPDATE: Eset has a free online virus scanner.