I’ve decided I’m not a huge fan of tires. While they do tend to go round and round, like my thought process, sometimes they explode. I hadn’t replaced the tires on my truck since I bought it about 15,000 miles ago, and they were getting to be pretty worn. On thursday night at about 11pm, on the giant interstate the circles Atlanta, my rear-right tire popped, sending me skidding onto the shoulder. It was very exciting. Then I spent the next half an hour trying to pry off the overtightened lug nuts and get the spare out, and the jack wasn’t really tall enough to get the new tire on which caused additional difficulties. Then I had to drop over $250 on a new set of tires. I figured replacing them all was a good idea given their state. I am also teaching my computer how to play checkers and I just passed the half-way point on the novel I’m writing. More to come soon!

This year, I’m participating in National Novel-Writing Month. My goal is to write a 50,000 word novel between the beginning of November 1st and the end of November 30th. You can keep up with my progress over at You Will Die a Slow, Painful Death.com, which coincidentally is the title of the novel. I chose it on the spur of the moment; hopefully the plot will tie in with it somehow. Speaking of plots, I should probably have one of those. Only 2 days to plan before writing begins! More to come soon.

If you are reading this, that means that my DNS changes have propogated and you’re looking at the new server. Please let me know if you see anything amiss.

The new job is going well. In case you didn’t hear, I have one. I also have a house, which is still standing (somehow), and though less pink and purple than it was originally, it still has some pink in the office closet. I appear to be a little too lazy to fix that part. My first house payment shuffled out of my checking account today. It was roughly the size of a paycheck, which is somewhat depressing. But anyway, this cake is great, it’s so delicious and moist. I still have some stuff to move, but I’m mostly done. More to come soon.

For various reasons, it seems I’m have not one, but TWO cookouts in my new backyard. One is this Saturday, on the 6th, and one is next Saturday, on the 13th. Both start around 4pm. Come one come all! Bring mustard or salad or something, all I have are meat and buns. Call for directions, more to come soon (though probably not on this topic).

After 20 gruling minutes of signing my name over and over (fastest closing ever), I am now the owner of a house and 189,640 dollars in debt. Yay! I’ll be moving over the next couple of days, getting everything set up, and then the new job starts wednesday. So much to do! More to come soon.

Hey, check it out, I’m actually posting again! The house I was most interested in over the weekend of looking is now under contract by me. The inspection was this morning, and unlike last time, there were no surprises, and the stuff found was certainly not enough to deter me from proceeding. The family currently living in the house is moving "out west" to start a horse-related ministry of some kind, and their timetable fits perfectly with mine, such that I get to move in on the break between my two jobs. I’m actually starting to think this will work this time. More to come soon.

Things are changing. I’ve landed a new job with a computer security company, making rougly twice what I was making before, plus benefits and other wonderful things. The office is about 20 minutes away from my parents' house, instead of the 45 for my current job, but that won’t matter for long. I’m also drafting a contract on a little yellow house that’s about 15 minutes from my new job. This past week has been a real blessing. It feels like the timing up until now hasn’t been perfect, but now God has aligned things to work perfectly in my favor. I’m sure there’s plenty of twists ahead, but the road is looking pretty fun at the moment. New job starts on the 26th, hopefully I’ll know about the house by then, and possibly even moved in. More to come soon.

I’ve been playing with the idea of starting my own company for a while now, and I finally decided to do it last week. I am now the proud owner of Yume Software. It was a lot easier than I thought it would be to get everything set up. The side projects I do for friends will now have an official entity I can route the money through as far as taxes go. Fun times!

As far as houses go. I’m putting that project on hold until stuff either comes together or falls apart with my job. One of our employees resigned recently, and while we’re transitioning, I’ve had to pick up some of the slack that was left over. Most of the slack involves stuff I’m neither good at nor interested in, and if it degenerates the way I suspect it will, I may be looking for new employment. But hopefully everything will get straightened out and all will be well with the world. More to come soon!

I better stop this before it becomes a habit. There was about $20,000 worth of damage to the house in a lot of different places, and there were some other issues, so the house contract is off for good. The $300 for the inspection was the best money I’ve ever spent. Hopefully the next houses I look at will be more what I’m looking for. Anyway, no moving on the 18th, so you’re all off the hook. More to come soon.

Ok, the contract on the house was off, but is now back on. I’m heading out in a few hours to attend the inspection. If all goes according to plan, it’ll be mine on the 16th. I spent a good chunk of yesterday shopping for stuff I’ll need at the new house. So very exciting! More to come soon.

Yeah, I don’t post often enough. I know. Here’s what’s going on. At my job, we’re releasing a new version of our software, which is a nice face lift and partial rewrite of our existing software. The internal release was today, a major deadline, and while we technically met it, we still have a lot to do before we release it to the public. It’s pretty exciting to see what three guys can do when they lock themselves in a conference room for 2 weeks. I feel pretty good about what we were able to accomplish.

The side project is picking up some steam; we’re starting to get some traffic, and we’re testing out the basic business model strategy. So far all is looking good. We’re about to launch a few more sites in our portfolio in the next few weeks. My contracting work, which is a whole separate thing, is also going pretty well. I have some work to do for a Friday deadline that I’m confident I can make without everything spinning out of control.

As for the house, things are moving pretty rapidly. Last weekend, I went all over my target area with my two realtors and my mom, looking at various properties. The one I liked the most was half of a duplex in Sandy Springs. I enjoy how spacious it feels inside, and when I’m done living there, the property is positioned to rent well enough to cover the mortgage payments. The financing is a little tight on my current pay, but it’ll work out.

Anyway, that’s where things stand. I have some other news coming along shortly. I could be a home owner in about 2 weeks! More to come soon.

Well, as seems to happen every year, I’m a year older now than the same day last year. Funny how that works out. Some things seem to be making some progress. The management at work has announced some pretty interesting changes to our business model that make it look like we could actually make some money. Hopefully it will lead to bonuses/raises by the end of the year. I’ve built a few servers for various people over the past few months, which is a nice way to help friends and earn the occasional bit of additional income. I’m also working on a side project, and online mass-product commerce website where you can get gift baskets and just about anything else. Hopefully that will help me generate a bit of additional revenue. Still living at home, so most of my money is going straight into the bank, but hopefully in the next few months things will be in place for me to get my own house.

And, for those of you who both care and are technically inclined, I finally added an RSS feed to my website you can subscribe to, so you don’t have to actually come to my website anymore. Very exciting stuff! More to come soon.

Tonight is, according to some definitions, a blue moon. You can read more about the various definitions in this WikiPedia article. The definition I’m using today is the calendar blue moon, where tonight will hold the second full moon in May. I figured I may as well write a second news post in May to recognize the event.

Useless stuff no one cares about, I’ve added a gallery option in the navigation over on the left. It has some anime pictures, and some image editing work I’ve done (with the GIMP). Also put a link to my resumé, in case you’re reading this and thinking about offering me a job, and to get it in the Google index again.

I’m turning 25 in a few days here, which is kind of scary, but I haven’t been dwelling on it. Instead, I’ve been looking forward to the LAN party coming up tomorrow, the shooting class I’m taking next week, and a possible trip to visit some friends of mine out of state.

As for my job/house/etc situation, there’s been some movement inside the company towards a plan that may actually generate profit (!!), but no visible results yet. Hopefully more to come soon.

Pepperoni is tasty. My friend’s modem got zapped by lightning over the weekend. Which brings up an interesting point. When it’s lightninginging outside, computer-ish part actually tend to attract lightning, if you can believe that. So, when it’s lightninginging outside, you may want to just go ahead and unplug those expensive devices. Not just the power cords either, no, you gotta get the network cords and the speaker cords and the telephone cords. Lightning can travel through very small wires.

The opening theme song for the anime Nodame Cantabile will most likely get my vote for the best opening anime song of the year. Nice use of harmony, and a dash of piano in an otherwise normal upbeat pop song is always pleasant. For various reasons I can’t watch that particular anime yet, but I’ve listened to the song a few dozen times today and I’m not sick of it yet.

I’m rambling, but I think that’s ok. There’s a LAN party coming up on June the 2nd, for those of you who read this and may be interested. Things are still up in the air with my job, and therefore I also can’t get a house yet. I’m thinking about upgrading to a vehicle with air conditioning though. More to come soon.

First of, congratulations to my sister Kate and her new husband Kory! Kory, you know what happens if you screw up, so... don’t. All good things come from God, not from your spouse, though God may use your spouse to deliver them. Don’t get confused!

I spent the weekend up in Tennessee for the wedding, meeting extended family and so on. There was a lot of non-sleeping involved, but it worked out OK in the end. One of the downsides of having the wedding on Saturday was that we had to leave early Friday to make it to the rehearsal and rehearsal dinner. This meant I needed to take a day off from work, but work being how it is lately, that wasn’t much of an option. I ended up working until the wee hours of Friday morning trying to finish up the day’s work before the sun rose. It almost worked.

Speaking of work, and house buying, I’m going to stick with my current company for a few more weeks and hope that the funding issues clear up. Things are looking hopeful on that front, and if it comes together we’ll be in a very good position corporately. If they don’t come together soon, however, I’ll have to find some other employment. A few companies have unofficially offered me jobs, and people I’ve talked to about them have asked me why I’d stay on with my current company in light of the other offers. It really boils down to the perks involved with a small company. I can work at 2am, come in to the office 2 days a week, and I never have to talk to clients on the phone. In fact, I’ve unplugged the phone on my desk. There are very few working environments that allow for that kind of weird behavior. Plus I hate wearing ties.

So, until my paychecks improve, I’m not really in a position to apply for a loan for a house. I’ve had several people suggest a short-term apartment rental while I’m waiting for things to come together (or fall apart), but I don’t want to go through all that if I can help it. My parents are very understanding about things and are letting me continue to live at home. Here’s hoping it gets figured out soon!

Girl Scout Cookies are very tasty. I need some nieces so I can buy in bulk easily. I only got a case this year. It’s already halfway gone.

Things are progressing with my house purchasing plans. I’m working on my document and getting the wheels in motion with the powers that be so that when the middle/end of April comes around I’ll be in a position to start the process.

I find that, since I’m not in school anymore, my brain has started craving the feeling of learning again. Not that I’m considering grad school or anything, just a feeling that my mind needs expanding. I’ve taken to listening to Japanese lessons and software development lectures on my ride to work a few days a week, and that seems to be helping. I find I’m more creative and productive at work, too, though I’m not sure there’s a causal relationship there. Anyway, fun times! More to come soon.

I am 24 years old. I live in my parents house. This needs to change.

In the next few months, I intend to purchase a house of my very own. This is a massive undertaking, and like any true geek/engineer, I’m writing up a full specification document detailing step-by-step how to do it. The first step is to get a raise so that I can afford it, and I’ve got the wheels in motion to make that happen. My goal is to be running computer network wiring by June 15th, which isn’t a whole lot of time, but I believe I can pull it off. What a great 25th birthday present, eh? More to come soon.

I’m both happy and frustrated with how things are going at work. On the one hand, last week I got to tour an incredible facility that provides electricity and internet access (very very reliably) and cooling and so on for computer servers. My company is looking at moving our servers into such an environment, and I’m taking on a lot of the responsibility for the planning of how to do that, including being in charge of architecting the server layouts and so on. As nice as it is to have my technical opinion sought and accepted, it’s still really frustrating to realize that, even if I were to provide the exact specifications for how we should go forward with it, I know nothing is going to happen with it for weeks because the people upstairs are not committed to the course of action. Even though it’s clearly, to me, the right move for the company, and it’s something that they’ve said to people outside the company it’s their intention to move forward with, they’re sitting on their hands and doing nothing to move it forward despite my promptings.

On the other hand, sometimes when I take the initiative things work out pretty well. Over the weekend, I took it upon myself to take one of our servers that was having trouble keeping up with the requests on it and gave it a tuneup. I upgraded software and tweaked some performance options and got it running a lot smoother. When I came in this morning, the boss complimented me on the job and asked me to do similar tuning on some other servers that were starting to give us some trouble. I put forth the effort and moved things forward and they accepted it and it all worked out. So why isn’t it that way with everything?

Not quite what you expected when you came to my website, eh? I’m moving some things around. For now, my personal news posts are going to be hosted at johnplaxco.com, while I restructure ignisobscurae.com to be more of my experimental playground. I intend to post articles there on computer-related topics, have sample code and some other nifty things. I’ll use johnplaxco.com for stuff related to me and what’s going on with me personally.

And while we’re on the topic of me personally, I’m postponing joining the Marines indefinitely. My legs simply can’t handle all of the running. My bones aren’t strong enough, and I keep getting shin splints which make me take two weeks off from running while they heal, and I’m not making any progress towards my running goals. I’m not giving up on getting in shape and being able to run, but I think I need to shift my focus away from the Marines so that I can build up my running slowly instead of trying to get in shape for something as strenuous as the running involved in applying for a commission. By the time my legs get there, it will probably be past the normal window of entry into the Corps, and I’ll probably move on with my life.

I’m completely at peace about all of this. I’m sure God has something in mind for me when he gave me the goal of the Marines, and I’m definitely in better shape and healthier than I’ve been in years. Whatever He’s planning, I’m sure I’ll find out about it in His time, and it will be perfect for me. Thanks for all your words of encouragement and your prayers for me while I’ve worked towards and through this. More to come soon.