• I got an air conditioner. It was expensive, because my windows open sideways, and you pay a premium for the less-common shape, I guess? But, I'm able to keep my rooms around 70°F around the clock now, which is much better.
• I got a Roomba. This was part of a plan to get my rooms better organized and keep them that way. I can't run a robot vacuum without keeping the floor clear enough for it to work, right? Well, success. There are a few areas it's not allowed to go because they've got cords that can't currently be dealt with, or I don't want it getting stuck in weird corners, but my carpets have never been cleaner.
• I moved the air filter from the least-useful corner of my office to right next to sideboard in the bedroom, so hopefully it will help cut down on the dust that settles everywhere the roomba can't reach (boy, a flying roomba would be cool slash horrifying).

All of this [waves upwards] seems - if I may engage in some short-form retroactive autopsychoanalysis - to be a vague kind of attempt to get some kind of control over my life in a world where I very clearly have almost none. The house internet has been flaky, work has been alternating between extremely frustrating and kinda fun, and, oh yeah, there's a massive global emergency ongoing. To say nothing of a viral epidemic, which will absolutely kill me if I catch it. (See what I did there?)

But I do have a little 500sqft space that I can exercise some control over, and am finally managing to get it under control. Mind you, I still have a bunch of bins I need to get better organized, and I've been looking for some things that I can't find in any of them, but any progress is good progress.

And it does, slightly, seem to be improving my overall mental health. It's not good, at all, but it's improving. I'm on vacation this week and have managed to actually watch several tv shows. Y'see, very annoyingly, my depression refuses to manifest as "sit in bed all day and watch tv", and instead manifests as "want to lay in bed all day, but get bored, yet also be entirely unable to focus on almost any media I have not previously consumed".

Nothing much else to report. I miss going out to eat. I miss going to the movie theatre. I miss not assuming every trip out of the house is a death sentence, just because a bunch of selfish assholes have convinced half the country to be even worse selfish assholes.

Don't die. I've got dibs.

Point the first: While waiting for a build so we could debug a problem, a coworker and I ended up talking about Amazon, and how I worked there, and stock options. I worked out that, if I still had every option and RSU that ever vested, I'd probably have about $25M in Amazon stock right now. But I was making a quarter of what I'm making now, stock vests are considered part of your "total compensation" - a phrase that still makes me angry to this day - so of course I sold off every share that ever vested as soon as I could, because I had bills to pay.

Point the second: Maybe I shouldn't've followed Hank Green on TikTok. He, like John Oliver, is younger and wildly more successful than me by almost any measure I care about.

Also: It's just shy of 23:00 and it's still 85.8°F in my rooms. I am going to go take my second cold shower of the evening and then try to sleep.

I even registered a domain for it.

Two big issues stand in the way of actually doing it, however:

1) Money. I don't have the funds to buy the physical equipment. The cheapest I could find even dumb phones for was about $40 each, and that quickly gets outside of my budget.

2) Security. I have to have some way of either ensuring I get the hardware back OR my costs are covered. Even if I offered a "pay nothing if you're arrested" deal, I still need either to be able to definitively identify the person renting the phones, so I can send them to collections if they steal the merch, or I need to charge a large enough deposit up front to cover replacements. I'd like to be able to take anonymous payment, and have absolutely no idea who the people are, so that means requiring people to basically buy the phones up front. When you ship them back, you get the deposit back and just end up paying enough to cover the cost (programmable SIMs make this pretty easy to manage, shipping would likely be the biggest actual cost once the hardware was in-hand). But that just makes it even less likely that the people the service is most useful for are able to use it. I assume there's no way in hell any company would insure the hardware against loss, given the nature of the business, so that option's almost certainly out.

So, yeah. Never happened. I've still got the domain, tho. Maybe some day.

Honestly, tho, what is there to report?

• The world went even more to shit than it was
• I went full time at my job
• I've been trying to get my home office organized
• Docker is a pile of crap

Not much else to say, really. That last point is the reason I'm even posting, because my blogs have been randomly crashing and restarting, so I just tweaked some settings to try to fix them.

Took the day off from work. Went to Leena's for breakfast. Got Antares back up and running. Played some video games. Five Guys for lunch. Din Tai Fung for dinner.

We had a tiny NYE party.

My contract has been extended, rather than me being converted to a real employee. I'm looking for something else, but it's not going well.

It's been snowy. I slipped on some ice tonight and hurt my knee.

Still working on getting the new office/bedroom situation sorted out. Half my closet is occupied by bins that need to be gone thru. But my new office is usable and mostly functional. Lots to do with the microservers tho.

Still so much to unpack and put away, or find a place to store. And art to hang.

The giant copy of Beneath the Surface has been waiting to be picked up from the framers since last weekend. Going to see about going to get it tomorrow. Will need to rent a truck to fit it. With the frame, it's nearly six and a half by four and a half feet.

And waited.

A little after 7pm, I called the shipping company, Pilot. Turns out the shipment was damaged, and nobody bothered to contact me, by email or phone, to let me know they wouldn't be delivering it. The guy I talked to said he'd try to find it and send me pictures, in case I wanted to have it delivered anyway. I never heard back.

Ended up sleeping on the couch.

Called again this morning. No record of my previous call. Guy working today - the only person covering for four offices apparently - told me that the actual delivery is the responsibility of a third party, which is closed on weekends. He did manage to find the package, and I honestly can't tell if there's any actual damage to the platform or not (tho, it is part of a stack of other apparently identical units, so maybe deliver one of them and get a replacement?!?). I also contacted Purple, on the grounds that they're the ones who actually paid the shippers, and they might be able to do some appropriate yelling. They also opened a ticket to get me a replacement. I got an automated email asking for some information (wherein I repeated this saga), and also forwarded the damage photos when I got them. I haven't heard anything further, tho the CS guy said he'd be following up.

I am, needless to say, pretty fucking pissed at Pilot, and pretty unhappy not to have my gods damned bed.

On the plus side, I unpacked several boxes, and repacked the rest, so I could find the power supplies and other part for my monitors and whatnot. Tomorrow, I can finish setting up my desktops.

The new Harley Quinn series on DC universe is fantastic. Totally worth the price of the subscription by itself (which is good, 'cause it's the only thing I'm using it for).

I am so very sore.

Also: we finally sat down and started putting together the invite for the NYE party. Need to try to get that sent out tomorrow.

Haven't felt there was much to post about. Eyes are recovering, but not as fast as I'd like, and household refactoring has been stalled waiting for electricians.

Well, today we have progress!

Went to the eye doc, and while things are getting better, they're not quite settled yet, so we wait another two weeks before seeing if I'm ready for a new prescription. Meanwhile, there's some clouding on the lens capsule in the left eye, which is apparently a thing that happens sometimes after cataract surgery. Basically means I'm developing a brand new cataract, but on the membrane that holds the lens instead of the lens itself. If it starts to cause a problem, they laser it away, no big. For now, it's not an issue.

Meanwhile, the electricians came back to finish the work, and got the new circuits installed in my new office. I now have a pair of dedicated 20A circuits, two dual outlets for each. And so, I was able to move the servers over this afternoon. Once that was done, some more furniture could be shuffled. As of now, both of my desks are in the new office, and Loree's makeup table is in the old. I've reworked my plan for where everything's going to go, and can start assembling things through the week. Still a bunch of things to move between rooms, but there'll be the usual move-a-thing-so-we-can-move-another-thing-so-we-can-move-a-third-thing. I am so very sore right now, tho.

My new bed is supposed to be delivered on Friday, considerably earlier than originally expected. I'm super looking forward to that. Purple has a retail store in University Village now, and we popped in just to try one out (it's enough money I didn't want to buy it completely untried). The day we went in, my back had been bugging me all day. For two minutes that day, it didn't hurt, and those two minutes were when I was laying on that bed.

Meanwhile, I've ordered the high-amp car charger, which is conveniently not going to ship for a month or two. It'll be nice to be able to charge my car in a couple hours instead of 8, for the first time since I bought it 8 years ago.

I'll try to get back into the habit of posting daily, or at least more frequently, again. Being in a semi-transitional setup with the laptops and not having real access to my desktop and whatnot has led to spending less time on the computer than usual, massively exacerbated by the whole eye thing. Once I get main desk set up, and Eltanin (my mac desktop) moved over, it'll be a lot easier.

Eye surgery yesterday. Slept poorly. Spent today feeling like something was in my eye. Misery.