What is the sound of one geek clapping?

I haven’t updated lately, even though I’ve had stuff to report, mainly because I haven’t had the time and/or the energy to write up a post. Even now, I would really rather be headed to bed, but I want to get this all put down on paper (as it were) just so I can focus on other things.

First, I’ve lost some weight. I’m down just under ten pounds at this point, to just over 260. I was down under what I weighed before I quit smoking (more on that below) for the first time since quitting. Unfortunately, over the last weekend I gained some weight due to extremely unhealthy behavior (more on that below, as well).

It feels really nice to be losing weight—mainly, I think, because it’s the result of increased discipline. I’ve been working very hard lately on my finances and my eating habits (and I think that the discipline for both comes from much the same place), and it’s been rather amazing at how much better I feel, not only in the psychological sense that I’m doing something good for myself, but in a very tangible sense as well. Working on keeping my finances in order means that I’m far less likely to eat out, which means that I have to cook for myself and plan my meals—more discipline, which has a direct impact on my health as well as my wallet.

As for the smoking: I just hit the five-month mark of not having had a cigarette. Not much to say at this point that I haven’t said in one of my prior updates regarding the smoking. I do, however, feel that it’s important to keep celebrating the fact that I’ve been successful with this. But I think that after the six-month mark (which, coincidentally, will be at some point very near my birthday next month), I won’t bother posting any celebrations until I hit the one-year mark.

And as for last weekend: We shut down an entire datacenter last weekend. The power consumption of our New London datacenter was growing so much that we didn’t have any more capacity, and as a result they had to add UPSes (Uninterruptable Power Supplies). However, in order to do that, we had to shut the entire datacenter down. Given that there were over a thousand servers alone (not counting network devices, network storage devices, SAN devices), this was no small feat. Given that there was only a 36-hour window during which they could work while the power was out, too, meant that we had to work fast in order to get it done. We shut down all of the servers in a matter of about 10 hours on Friday night, and powered them all back on from Sunday afternoon through early Monday morning. We had a small contingent of servers that had to be powered back on by 6pm Sunday for the start of the business day in Nagoya, Japan, and another set of servers that had to be powered back on by 3am on Monday for the start of the business day in Sandwich, England. Needless to say, I was pretty exhausted come Monday (although I got lucky as I have awesome coworkers who knew that I had a long drive and were fine with letting me go home a couple hours early, both nights). I was also eating crap the whole weekend as a result.

And now for the really good news: I got a promotion! Well, sort of. It’s an 18-week “project” with my company to fill in on the Level 3 support position, to backfill for our normal guy who is doing another position. It means that I get to do more in-depth, engineering-level stuff, which is exactly the kind of thing that I want to do. You know, solving the big problems type stuff. No pay raise, but obviously it gives me more ammunition for the not-too-distant future (especially should they decide to keep me on in the position or move me into other similar positions instead of putting me back where I am currently).

I think there was some other stuff, too, but I really can’t remember what it was, so I’ll finish for now.

As a geek, I know how to do lazy in a way that very few others know how. Let me explain:

I just spent over an hour writing a script for my laptop so that it will automatically figure out whether I’m logging in at home or at work, and start certain programs based on which one it is. Because I just can’t be bothered to double-click some icons like normal people.

This is the kind of laziness that can only be beaten by the people who will search the living room top to bottom because they can’t find the television remote.

I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention – invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble. — Agatha Christie

Not that people do post comments on the site very often, but for those that do: I’ve added a subscription function. This way, if you post a comment and somebody responds to it, you can be notified that another comment has been posted. All it requires is that when you submit the comment, you click the checkbox below the submit buton.

The bank just refunded me the additional $90 that they didn’t give me yesterday. They’re safe, at least for the time being. :)

…if you can prove that you don’t need it.” — Bob Hope

I spoke to the bank today about my financial woes. I asked if they’d be willing to refund at least some of the fees they charged me, if only because of the fact that what they were fining me was almost five times the amount that I’d actually spent to get me into the red. Besides, one mistake in calculations and it costs me over four hundred bucks? Let’s face it: It would be wonderful customer service to be understanding and forgiving of a situation like this.

They didn’t really see it my way. Big shocker, no?

The customer service agent I spoke with said that the most she could refund me was $110. This is the equivalent of three overdraft fees. I told her that while I appreciated this, it really wasn’t acceptable. I asked to speak with somebody who had the ability to grant me a larger refund than that, and she resisted, because obviously the bank doesn’t want to give up more money than it absolutely needs to.

I tried to explain in as many logical ways as I could how ridiculous the whole situation was. Personally, I think that my best explanation was the one in which I responded to her claims that the bank had effectively loaned me the money to cover the charges, by countering with the fact that if the bank wanted to look at it as a short-term loan, they were charging me an interest rate that was almost one hundred times the prime interest rate.

Eventually, I got her to speak to a supervisor. She came back and told me that the supervisor authorized her to refund me $210, which equates to half of the total fines they charged me. She all but told me that I was lucky, because they very rarely go halfway with a customer. And then she had the audacity to ask me to rate the customer service on the call.

I don’t think she grasped the irony of the question, or understood why I laughed in response.

The real kicker? After agreeing to refund me $210, she fat-fingered the update to my account and only refunded me $120. When I called to get it fixed, the woman I spoke to wouldn’t update it because she apparently only had my word to go on that it was supposed to be $210. So now I have to defend that money all over again, apparently.

So I’ve had a pretty horrible week. What with the events of my previous entry, and the general depression I’ve been feeling, there have been only a few things that I’ve been able to do to keep my moods up. Golf is one of them. The other has been playing the Da Vinci Code Quest on Google. It was a set of 24 puzzles over the course of 24 days, and the idea of it was that it was part of a contest for a pretty amazing grand prize worth over a hundred thousand bucks. The first ten thousand people to finish the puzzles would be entered into the final stage of the contest.

The final stage of the contest is apparently a set of five more puzzles. The person who finishes the puzzles consecutively (they won’t let you take a break after starting) in the quickest amount of time wins the grand prize (which, by the way, I think is a pretty damn interesting way to do a contest winner).

Today, when I got home from work, I had this waiting in front of my door:

(click thumbnails for larger version)

It opens and everything! SOOO cool.

I got screwed out of over $300 by my bank today. I think more fines are about to come through tomorrow.

The sad thing is that I have no recourse. Technically it was my own damn fault, because I was expecting a check to bounce, and instead of doing that, it was processed, which caused all of the transactions that I did over the weekend and at the beginning of this week to overdraw, which generated about eight overdraft fees.

The thing that upsets me is that the bank cleared the check on Tuesday night, but claims that they actually did it on Sunday night. As a result of this regression of 48 hours, the bank was able to retroactively give me the overdraft fees. Had the check been marked as cleared on Tuesday as it should have been, the check would have bounced instead of the eight other transactions.

The bank has done this to me once before, in a similar situation. In that situation, they wouldn’t change anything.

The real problem, though, is that I don’t seem to have any alternative. Wachovia seems to be slightly corrupt, but I have heard some incredible stories about Bank of America, and I used to be a member of Citizen’s and I’m not a fan. I think that what I really need is to find a better bank, but I’m really not sure that one exists or not. I’ve heard great things about Commerce Bank, what with their 24-hour banks and stuff, but alas, they apparently won’t have any Connecticut branches until 2007.

I guess I’m just pissed that it seems like every time I start to get on my feet again, something like this happens.

I’m not really in the mood to write any kind of in-depth, well, anything, so here are some talking points:

• Tuesday evening marked four months of not smoking. For those really counting, that’s seventeen weeks. Yes, I’m very proud of myself.
• I was hoping to spend this holiday (if you can call it that; we are in America, after all, and this is really just an excuse to drink, like St. Patrick’s Day) with friends, but no such luck. Seems to be par for the course, really.
• Speaking of “par for the course:” The first official week of the golf league got cancelled due to unstoppable rains. Naturally, the day after, it stopped raining and has been some of the nicest and warmest weather we’ve had all year. Go figure.
• As this post’s bullet-point style would indicate, I have almost no desire to do anything requiring any kind of actual work at the moment. My job has sapped me, I have no money (despite the fact that I just got a raise; I think it’ll take a little while before that really starts to have an effect due to the amount to which I’m in debt at the moment), and I seem to be some kind of pariah lately, if the fact that my friends seem to be avoiding me is any indication.

Let’s hear it for staying positive. *clinks glass* Cheers.

I was going to write an entry here about how incredibly stupid a golf swing looks when you really examine it. I had it all planned, about how I went to the driving range today and realized that I completely suck.

But alas, I’m not going to write about that. You’re crushed, aren’t you? Here’s why:

So I was sitting in my apartment eating dinner and watching The West Wing (it was “Galileo,” for those who would be interested), and I heard a knock on a door that sounded distinctively like mine. Not knowing whether it was my apartment door or not (and knowing that anybody I opened my apartment door to would be exposed to the horror that is how dirty my apartment is), I carefully peeked out my door and saw through the small porthole window on the door in the hallway a man.

At first, I assumed he was just another guy trying to get in, possibly to see the guy next door to me (who I think is some kind of drug dealer), until I noticed that there was a small shield on the left breast of his shirt. Upon noticing that it was a police officer, I opened the hallway door for him, assuming that he just needed to get in. But then he surprised me and asked me if I was the driver of a black Hyundai out in the parking lot. I said that I was, and he told me that somebody had called and reported that I had bumped into them on the way home today. He said that the guy had pulled my license plate and called it in as some kind of hit-and-run.

Now, having not hit anybody at all, I was quite taken aback and incredibly confused as to why there would be a police officer at my home telling me that I had. I went outside with him to look at my car, because even I will admit that it is entirely possible that I could have missed something so monumental as a car crash. But there was nary a scratch on my car, save for one scrape from misjudging how close the dumpster in my parking lot was, and that was easily proven given that the scrape on my bumper still has the telltale green paint that was plainly visible on the dumpster from even all the way across my parking lot. I told the cop that I had no idea what he could be referring to when all of a sudden it hit me (no pun intended).

I asked him, “Was this a guy in a white truck?” When the cop nodded his head, I explained this situation: There’s a stoplight at the end of the offramp from the highway, and I stopped behind this guy in a white truck. Not a big deal at all, as it’s your average stoplight. The light turned green, or we both stopped at the red and turned after seeing that nobody was coming (to be honest I really couldn’t tell you which it was; I’ve stopped at that light countless times since moving to this town and it’s not exactly something I pay attention to). I’m guessing that the light turned green, given the fact that I was close enough behind him that he claims I hit him, which would indicate that we moved together. All of a sudden, the guy practically stops in mid-traffic and pulls over. I, having no clue why the hell he was stopping and assuming he was going to pull into the auto-parts store parking lot that was right there, pulled around him and went on home.

So apparently the reason the guy pulled over was because he thought I’d hit him. And when I drove by him, he took down my license plate number, because obviously, waving me over and making sure that I stopped when he clearly looked me right in the eye as I drove by him would have been too difficult.

Now, just to be sure I wasn’t delusional, I gave my car a thorough once-over, and having satisfied myself that there were no telltale scrapes (white paint on a black bumper, even a trace amount, would have been incredibly obvious, right?), I handed the cop all of my information—license, registration, insurance information—so he could submit his report, at which point he informed me that he was going to put down my statement just as I had told him: that I didn’t think I hit the guy, that I was confused as to why he was pulling over, and that I couldn’t find any damage whatsoever on my car, and that most likely that’s as far as the whole situation would go.

Truth be told, I think he’s right. I mean, even if I’m absolutely looney and I did somehow hit this guy without leaving a trace of it on my own car, who would be stupid enough to file an insurance claim for a scraped bumper? I think, just to be on the safe side, I’m going to take photos of the front of my car in the morning.

And whew, enough of that. On a much happier note: I’m seeing my first medical professional since a long while. Here’s the not-so-great part: It’s an ophthalmologist, and it’s because in the last week or two, my vision seems to have been very blurry or at least inconsistent. Given that I only have one good eye (thanks to the genius of my Kindergarten screening, my lazy right eye was never detected), that worries me. Since my health insurance is pretty damn good and I only would have to pay fifteen bucks for a checkup, I figured it was time. And maybe this time I’m going to finally need to get corrective lenses for my good eye, which has been slowly slipping as I’ve gotten older. Guess we’ll see.

I seem to be getting a lot of blow-offs lately. It seems like nobody wants to spend time with me or talk to me lately, but mostly it’s the spending time thing that I’m getting a lot of, recently. Every time I try to come up with plans to hang out with my friends, everybody’s “really tired” or has something important to do.

Is it just that I’m boring and nobody wants me around, or maybe it’s just one of those strange coincidences where people really do have all this stuff that they have to be doing. Whatever it is, it doesn’t really feel that great.

On a similar note, I spent some more time doing further thinking about moving in with my brother. Friday, I asked him if I could come and take a look at the bedroom, to see whether I could make it work out. He informed me that he had taken in a coworker who had also been interested in moving in, having made the assumption that I didn’t want it. It would have been nice for him to tell me, so that I didn’t continue to labor over the whole thing.

Maybe that’s what’s really bothering me, lately. Maybe it’s just that I feel that my entire environment just isn’t really noticing me, or doesn’t have the time (or perhaps the interest) to include me in it anymore.

Maybe I’ll just go to bed early and get up to do some exercising in the morning. At least my stationary bike doesn’t blow me off.