On Texas and Alaska.
The reason for my absences, in brief, involves Texas and Alaska.
In slightly less brief, I took the fitness test in Seattle on Friday, then found myself back up there on Sunday to hop a plane to Anchorage.
In slightly usefully verbose, I HAVE THE JOB, as I passed the fitness test. Poor Z is going to have to coordinate pretty much every aspect of the move...from a paid house-hunting flight/stay down there to look for a place, to dealing with the movers while I'm in training. That'll be fun, but at least we get movers. I'm in Alaska until the 29th. So far it's honestly pretty idyllic. The people here aren't so great but the scenery is magnificent. More on that later.
For now, The Big Move is go. I'll get Jez into the garage sometime between the 29th and the 5th, and she'll be taken care of while I'm gone. Come December we'll be in Texas, where everything including the anxiety is going to be much larger. It's still hard to countenance that I've actually gotten this far and I doubt it'll sink in until perhaps the 5th and Oklahoma. Or the 11th and training classes.
The ugly: Virgin Mobile doesn't service Alaska. Oh, sure, there's Sprint towers up here but I guess they don't have the provisioning agreements to use them HERE like they do in the lower 48. So I have plenty of signal, I just can't ever do anything with it. I have a sinking feeling that the moment I land in PDX and turn on my phone, I'll get about six thousand missed calls. Oh well, I do enjoy the quiet.
Life with the new laptop is surprisingly easy. It's SO much faster than Briknik, the old T41. The SSD makes Windows load in a scant few seconds and I have a good enough onboard graphics card to play UT2K4 lag-free. The clit mouse is no substitute for a proper hand-sized one though, which needs to be remedied if I'm going to go revisit Unreal (....funny, with the Serpentine weapon mod, how much it feels like a modern fantasy-world shooter....) and be able to maybe crank up the difficulty in UT to "Inhuman" like I used to play at.
I will also recommend seedboxes through Xirvik to anybody who wishes to stay under their ISP's radar. Discretion is the better part of valor here, but they've been quite good to me so far.
60 hour weeks in 4 days are still taxing. I have become quite adept at sleeping on airplanes, I seem to default to a weird-assed 24 awake /10 asleep schedule, and a $9 pair of Walmart shooting hearing protectors is far superior to noise-cancelling headphones for blocking out all cabin noise and reducing screaming infants and over-miked pilots to a quiet murmur. However, on a turboprop, they are absolute bollocks and make the noise take on the characteristics of a yobbo with a subwoofer in their car.
My hotel room is an entire corner of the building and has (measured by my wingspan) almost exactly 40 feet of windows. A shame there's mold everywhere, the window opens but won't hinge open unless I jam it with a cup, the windows are two-way glass, the wi-fi only pulls ~90k/sec, there's mold and peeling paint in places, the breakfast is via tunnel under the street that's painted like a glimpse into a fish-filled hell, the thermometer doesn't work (...this is WHY I keep wedging the windows with a cup), there's no hot tub or pool, and the 40 feet of radiators are falling off the wall. Oh, and somebody's torn down the towel rack, the microwave is on the floor, and there's no fridge so it's been nothing but fast food. I've been here for just a few days and as of Monday afternoon will be back again for another nine. At least I'm getting loyalty points up the sphincter.
Still it hasn't been a complete whittle. Got out along the prettiest road I've ever been on, got some adequate pictures at a wildlife sanctuary, have plans to go telephoto-stalk the seaplanes at the nearby lake--busiest floatplane lake in the world, apparently--and go ATVing and such other relatively cheap thrills. I'm not likely to come back for pleasure (although, maybe...) so I may as well have fun while I'm here.
Oh, and with a 1/8th stereo cable and a DB25 VGA cable, it's quite easy to make exciting things happen on the 50" plasma instead of the laptop. Your definition of exciting may not be quite mine, but in addition to alternate program material it's also proven quite a good way to catch some of the Rifftrax films I've brought with me.
But, mostly, I aten't dead. Just keeping strange hours and trying to coordinate two jobs without a phone.
In slightly less brief, I took the fitness test in Seattle on Friday, then found myself back up there on Sunday to hop a plane to Anchorage.
In slightly usefully verbose, I HAVE THE JOB, as I passed the fitness test. Poor Z is going to have to coordinate pretty much every aspect of the move...from a paid house-hunting flight/stay down there to look for a place, to dealing with the movers while I'm in training. That'll be fun, but at least we get movers. I'm in Alaska until the 29th. So far it's honestly pretty idyllic. The people here aren't so great but the scenery is magnificent. More on that later.
For now, The Big Move is go. I'll get Jez into the garage sometime between the 29th and the 5th, and she'll be taken care of while I'm gone. Come December we'll be in Texas, where everything including the anxiety is going to be much larger. It's still hard to countenance that I've actually gotten this far and I doubt it'll sink in until perhaps the 5th and Oklahoma. Or the 11th and training classes.
The ugly: Virgin Mobile doesn't service Alaska. Oh, sure, there's Sprint towers up here but I guess they don't have the provisioning agreements to use them HERE like they do in the lower 48. So I have plenty of signal, I just can't ever do anything with it. I have a sinking feeling that the moment I land in PDX and turn on my phone, I'll get about six thousand missed calls. Oh well, I do enjoy the quiet.
Life with the new laptop is surprisingly easy. It's SO much faster than Briknik, the old T41. The SSD makes Windows load in a scant few seconds and I have a good enough onboard graphics card to play UT2K4 lag-free. The clit mouse is no substitute for a proper hand-sized one though, which needs to be remedied if I'm going to go revisit Unreal (....funny, with the Serpentine weapon mod, how much it feels like a modern fantasy-world shooter....) and be able to maybe crank up the difficulty in UT to "Inhuman" like I used to play at.
I will also recommend seedboxes through Xirvik to anybody who wishes to stay under their ISP's radar. Discretion is the better part of valor here, but they've been quite good to me so far.
60 hour weeks in 4 days are still taxing. I have become quite adept at sleeping on airplanes, I seem to default to a weird-assed 24 awake /10 asleep schedule, and a $9 pair of Walmart shooting hearing protectors is far superior to noise-cancelling headphones for blocking out all cabin noise and reducing screaming infants and over-miked pilots to a quiet murmur. However, on a turboprop, they are absolute bollocks and make the noise take on the characteristics of a yobbo with a subwoofer in their car.
My hotel room is an entire corner of the building and has (measured by my wingspan) almost exactly 40 feet of windows. A shame there's mold everywhere, the window opens but won't hinge open unless I jam it with a cup, the windows are two-way glass, the wi-fi only pulls ~90k/sec, there's mold and peeling paint in places, the breakfast is via tunnel under the street that's painted like a glimpse into a fish-filled hell, the thermometer doesn't work (...this is WHY I keep wedging the windows with a cup), there's no hot tub or pool, and the 40 feet of radiators are falling off the wall. Oh, and somebody's torn down the towel rack, the microwave is on the floor, and there's no fridge so it's been nothing but fast food. I've been here for just a few days and as of Monday afternoon will be back again for another nine. At least I'm getting loyalty points up the sphincter.
Still it hasn't been a complete whittle. Got out along the prettiest road I've ever been on, got some adequate pictures at a wildlife sanctuary, have plans to go telephoto-stalk the seaplanes at the nearby lake--busiest floatplane lake in the world, apparently--and go ATVing and such other relatively cheap thrills. I'm not likely to come back for pleasure (although, maybe...) so I may as well have fun while I'm here.
Oh, and with a 1/8th stereo cable and a DB25 VGA cable, it's quite easy to make exciting things happen on the 50" plasma instead of the laptop. Your definition of exciting may not be quite mine, but in addition to alternate program material it's also proven quite a good way to catch some of the Rifftrax films I've brought with me.
But, mostly, I aten't dead. Just keeping strange hours and trying to coordinate two jobs without a phone.