Alright, its time for a road trip to KC! Except I don’t get to come back. Its kind of hard to believe, but I have no idea at all where I’ll be living 2 days from now. I’m finally taking my computer offline here after waiting till the last minute. Hopefully I won’t go too long without RoadRunner out there and I’ll be back on before too long.
Monthly Archive for January, 2003
mp3s stole my memories b/w new car
I noticed something when I was packing up all my cds the other day. Every time I grabbed an album that I had owned before I got an mp3 jukebox, I instantly got some kind of memory of a place, person, or event in my life from when I had been listening to that album. Even albums that I had never really listened to as much, I still could remember what had been going on when I bought them. When I would pick up an album that I got after the mp3 jukebox, that rarely happened if at all. I’d never even listened to any of those albums from the cd. Right after I bought them I would just rip them and listen on my computer or on the jukebox. Until now I hadn’t really considered a downside to the convenience of being able to listen to any song from any album at any time. I think I spend less time listening to albums sequentially and in their entirety, and as a result I’m not associating them with events in my life as closely. It’s a little troubling, but I don’t know what to do about it.
The other thing is that I finally got a new(er) car. Its a green 1999 Suzuki Esteem and its… a… well, there’s no other way to say it… its a station wagon. See, I needed a car to replace my ‘83 Toyota, and fast. I leave for KC on the 30th, and I wasn’t really looking forward to trying to find a car out there in addition to all the other stuff I have to do. My parents found the Esteem through a dealer they trust and it was really cheap and in really good condition. I figured it’d be better to go with this than to rush into buying a more expensive car. Its… *sigh* …responsible. So now I’ve got a station wagon, at least until I get settled in KC and can do some real car shopping. Its not that bad really, its kind of rugged and sporty, and… still a station wagon.
One might assume that nothing’s been going on since it’s been almost a month since I’ve done anything here. One would be wrong. In fact, things have been pretty crazy. I would even go so far as to say that situation might be classified as full-on wacky. Its like this: I got a job. Ok, so I got two jobs but I could only accept one of them, which made me feel like a jerk but I’ll get back to that. I got the first job offer two weeks ago from Reflex, an internet design company here in Columbus. They’re a really cool small company and I was looking forward to working for them, but it was only a 2 month contract and it didn’t really involve as much software development as I had hoped. Still, I was really excited about it. Then everything went crazy-go-nuts. Last Saturday I got a package in the mail from Cerner. Yeah, that Cerner. The one that said no and crushed my hopes and dreams, etc. etc. Apparently, they decided to hire a few more people in the position I had interviewed for and they made me an offer. Its kind of been a blur since then, but as near as I can tell I’ve got just about 2 weeks to get myself and all my stuff over to Kansas City, MO. The difficult part was that I had already told Reflex that I’d accept, but that was before I had any idea that I would ever hear anything from Cerner again. I really would have liked not to have had to back out of that, but Cerner was pretty firm on how soon my start date would have to be. Also, the job at Cerner is exactly what I want to do, as opposed to just close enough. The other difficult part is that I’ve been in Columbus for 5 1/2 years and its really started to feel like home. There are so many people here that I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to call friends. And just the thought of leaving Magnolia Thunderpussy’s and Used Kids record stores is enough to make me all misty. I’m going to be leaving so much behind that I’ll miss here, but I know that this is the right choice. I’m going to be a professional geek!
Elsewhere