My Happy Life

It's good to have a plan. It's good when the plan works. Sometimes, it's better when it doesn't.

I had a plan for December. I had just wrapped up a contract and I expected business to be slow during the holiday season. So rather than jump right into looking for a new gig, I thought I'd take a month to work on personal and community projects. I would do a lot and learn a lot, and it would give me a lot of grist for writing.

Thanksgiving is a day for traditions, some traditional and some not so. This was to be my first Thanksgiving at home with my fiancee. It would be interesting to see which traditions from my previous bachelor life would endure, and what new ones would emerge.

This would not be our first Thanksgiving together as a couple. Last year was our first, but we were not alone. We went to Massachusetts for a traditional Thanksgiving meal with my family. Or, at least, traditional for my family. Your family may not consider matzoh ball soup traditional fare. My girlfriend wants me to believe that traditional Thanksgiving dinner, at least in her family, means strange things like rice and gravy, and turkey stuffed with oysters and corn bread.

Those are our families' traditions. This year we got to begin setting our own.

I was at the local H-E-B yesterday to pick up some coffee for the office. While reading the side panel of the store brand Columbian coffee beans, I was surprised to find it had an ingredient list—one that listed more ingredients than just coffee beans. The ever ominous "artificial and natural flavors" was listed too.

This had me puzzled. What are they adding to the coffee beans? Monosodium glutamate? Beef tallow? Crack cocaine?

Until the puzzle is solved, a switch of brands is called for. I ended up with a bag of Newman's Own coffee (Newman's Dark Blend), and have been pleasantly surprised. It's a great coffee for the price. It isn't that much more expensive than the store brand, tastes a lot better, and doesn't contain inexplicable ingredients.

My contract at a large enterprise software company concluded at the end of May. I was going to take the month of June to catch up on projects, and then dust off the resume in early July.

June worked out pretty much as planned. I ended up needing more decompression time than I expected. Nonetheless, I completed a lot of the projects that had been simmering on the back burner for months. My only regret was that I was hoping to blog more about them than I have. I've already written about my experience converting from Fedora Core to Ubuntu Linux. I've yet to write about my adventures getting a Samsung I-500 PDA/phone to sync with Linux, or running Linux on a Linksys WRT54G wireless router. Fun stuff.

The plan for a leisurely return to the job market in July was off the mark. Turns out a great opportunity arose before June was out. The work will involve development for a new streaming media product. It will be technically challenging, and could be a great product in an emerging market. I'm looking forward to it.

Hopefully I'll still find the time to tinker and blog about it.

This weekend, Austin voters went to the polls. A referendum was held to extend the current smoking ban in restaurants to nearly all establishments, including bars and bowling alleys. The measure was passed by a very narrow 52%-48% margin.

I suspect there will be a long period of contention over the ban, eventual grudging acceptance, and, in a few years, we'll have wondered what all the bother was about.

I've heard the claims that the ban will kill the bar and music scene. The data I've seen say in the long run, that won't happen. I do believe in the short term, however, the disruption will pose a challenge to Austin's bars and pubs. I think those of us who supported the ban should work to support these businesses, to help ensure they make it through the transition.

So to help do my part, I've started planning a non-smoking appreciation pub crawl for early September, once the ban goes into effect. The crawl will cover some of funnest-but-smokiest bars I've encountered in the city. Here is my tentative itinerary:

• Carousel Lounge
• Crazy Lady
• Lovejoy's Tap Room
• G&S Lounge

Anybody want to be my designated driver?

There has been a new addition to the household. His name is Rufus T. Firefly. Maybe someday kittys will be available on order from Amazon, but we got this rascal the old fashioned way: from the local humane society.

Only now, I realize I have a thing for pathetic cats. My last cat cc, who remains pictured in this blog's masthead, was the runt of the litter. He was the last kitty awaiting adoption, living in the dirt of a palm-sized flower pot outside a friend's apartment.

Rufus was one of a litter of three, the last to be adopted. When we first saw him, he was sleeping in the gravel of his litter box. It looked very sad but adorable.

The loss of cc was very hard, and it was a long time before I was ready to have another cat. Once that time came my girlfriend was uncertain she wanted a kitty in the house. She was fearful of the havoc the critter might wreak on her furniture and her sinuses.

Fortunately, he has not been harmful to either. Now, when it comes to socks laying on the floor that's another matter.

Even though I was more of the cat person going into this, it turns out the cat has taken a stronger liking to her. Cats are that way. They'll often pick their one household member to latch on to, and tolerate (barely) everybody else.

Some mornings we wake up and see that the cat has dragged socks over to the bedroom door, and left them as a little offering to my girlfriend. It would be cute, if not for the fact that it's my damn socks he's dragging.

It's nice having a little fuzzy guy around the house again.

This year, I was one of the nominees for the Dewey Winburne Community Service Award. The award is given out annually at the SXSW festival. The award was given to Roger Steele, for his work at Menchaca Elementary School.

My nomination was for the Save Muni Wireless web site, with mention of the work I do for Austin Bloggers.

The anti-muni network thing was mentioned several times during the ceremony. Host Councilmember Jackie Goodman mentioned HB 789 in her opening comments. My friend Adina Levin was nominated too, and it was mentioned then. And, of course, it was mentioned for my nomination.

I'm very proud to have been considered. It's great we live in a town that values community service. It's great we have so many people using technology in innovative ways to improve our lives and culture. I'm flattered to have been considered among them.

All of the nominees got a nice engraved glass award. When Jackie and Dorothy Gilbertson-Winburne handed out the awards, however, they didn't realize they were engraved with names. So, we all got an award with somebody else's name. That turned out to be fun. I met several of the other nominees, as we swapped our awards around, to get things right.

Now I know what they mean when they say, "The wheels of justice turn slowly." I told you last March about the lawsuit I filed in small claims court. Today, nine months later, my case was heard.

I sued my old apartment complex for failure to return my $500 security deposit. Texas law gives them thirty days to do so. They didn't.

After 30 days, I sent a demand letter. They sent me $175 and a statement that really didn't explain the rest. They shouldn't have done that. Texas law says that when they failed to act within 30 days, they lost the right to withhold anything.

I thought my rights were clear and I thought they were flagrantly breaching their responsibilities. Moreover, while they were trying to negotiate a small portion of the money owed as settlement, Texas law provides pretty significant penalties: treble the amount wrongly withheld plus $100 statutory penalty. My choice was between the $100 bird in hand and one in the bush worth over a thousand bucks.

So, I sued the bastards.

Yes, it's been a while since I've last updated. I do, however, have an excellent excuse. Since I last wrote, I have become a money-grubbing whore who doesn't care about much besides making a buck. This lifestyle choice does not leave a lot of opportunity for blogging.

As people who know me personally already know, I've spent the recession in severely underemployed circumstances. In George Bush's America, such difficulties don't count for much. The term unemployment has been redefined to exclude all but a few unfortunate stiffs that fit very specific circumstances. It certainly doesn't count anybody I know, even though I know many people who are suffering considerably during these times. The qualifying circumstances to claim unemployed status have become so narrow and rigid, it a matter of astonishment the number could ever go up. It is a sign of our president's poor stewardship of the economy that it has done so by so much.

People who know me personally also know that while I may have suffered financial distress during the downturn, I've not been idle or unproductive. I've been busy, and I've had some significant accomplishments. I learned how to be a lobbyist, and, during the last regular session of the Texas legislature, helped affect the course of several technology bills. I helped found the Austin Bloggers group. I appeared on panels at a bunch of conferences. I was appointed a commissioner by the Austin City Council. I fell in love. I got very drunk and played guitar at an open mike.

All of these endeavors, while noteworthy, resulted in no financial benefit. I get a little whiny about that sometimes, but then I realize that I suffer a severe handicap. I lack the gene that provides the ability for effective business networking. Some people, in such circumstances, can work a room. I hide under the tablecloth.

Recently, my situation took a marked turn for the better. I was offerered a nine month contract on an interesting, challenging project, at a rate that pleases me greatly. I started this past week. Between winding down old commitments and starting up new ones, it's been like working two jobs. It's been running me ragged. Fortunately, things will start easing up next week.

So, now it's time for me to refocus priorities. During the bust I did a lot of cool stuff without making a lot of money. Now that my recession is ending, I will flip that around. For rest of this year, my client is job one. And job two, and three, and four through twenty.

I do not plan to give up blogging, but I'm not sure where I'll go with it. I'll be involved in fewer interesting projects, which means less grist for blogging. I'll be focusing intently on my work, and I have a policy not to write about my clients. So, I anticipate some difficulty finding interesting things to write about, not to mention the time to do so.

In the meantime, for those of you still waiting for your ship to arrive, hang in there. These continue to be discouraging times, but I've seen there still is hope.

Only twice have I begged my girlfriend for something. I begged her to get a cat. She refused, saying maybe someday. I'm still begging her—been at it for months. She won't give in. She's a tough cookie.

The only other time I begged was last year, when we were driving I-10 out of Louisiana. We passed a Waffle House. I had to stop. I pleaded with her, refusing to take "no" for an answer. Eventually her hard shell cracked and she had to relent. Thus began my love affair with the Waffle House.