What is the sound of one geek clapping?

Whew, now that I got that big entry all handled and done with (I’ve been picking at it a little bit over the last couple months and finally just decided to scrap it, start over and write it all in one sitting), here is a little update for my life:

I suppose there isn’t a whole lot to update on, except for this: I’m moving! After almost two years at my current job, I finally found an apartment close to work that isn’t the size of a matchbox and doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg, and I decided to take the plunge. My parents were kind enough to lend me the money to make the deposits, and I’ll be moving at the end of this month. It drops my commute from almost an hour to a whopping eight minutes. I don’t know what I’m going to do with all the extra time I’ll have available to me. Maybe I could actually start working out in the mornings again… but I have the nagging feeling that maybe I’ll just end up sleeping another hour instead. I’m hoping that as I start to get used to the extra time, I won’t need so much of the extra sleep and I can adjust enough to start the workout regimen again. God knows I need it.

Speaking of workouts: My company is instituting this health initiatives thing. They announced it at our latest quarterly dinner, and I thought that it was quite ironic for me that they decided to announce that they were going to pay us as much as a thousand bucks to quit smoking or lose weight. This being ironic, of course, because I was celebrating my sixth-month anniversary of being off cigarettes only a couple weeks prior to this event. And I had just lost ten pounds. Cosmically funny. But hey, my CEO was kind enough that once he found out that I had quit smoking this year, he said that the company would gladly pay me for that.

I gave my father his birthday present on Monday. It was an 11×14 blowup of this photo, and he loved it. It makes me want to photograph more stuff. I really wish I had a digital SLR. The primary thing preventing me from taking photos of everything everywhere is that I know I have to take the film to a processing location and get it developed, which takes time and money, and then if I want a professional job done, I have to take it somewhere where I’m going to pay even more money to get it processed well and blown up. But perhaps I can get enough photos taken of interesting subjects that I can use them to decorate my new apartment. Or sell, for that matter. If you’re interested in buying any of my prints, I’ll gladly sell them. :)

On the subject of photography: I’m thinking of creating a moblog for my site. It wouldn’t be on the main page, but would probably be a subcategory of the regular blog. Do you think that’s too pretentious? I figure that now that I have a camera on my phone, I’d like to try and post some creative content with it.

I had a pretty awesome birthday week. Nothing super spectacular or anything, but it was pretty cool and everything.

Wednesday started the same way it does every year on my birthday—my father and stepmother calling me and singing to me over the phone. Corny, yes, but I’ve always thought it was very sweet despite its corniness.

After work, I played the worst nine holes of golf ever—literally. I almost scored the maximum I could have possibly scored. It was completely frustrating.

Friday, I played again, with a friend of mine who was playing for the first time. He scored better than I did. Twice as frustrating. I just couldn’t get it right.

Then, on Saturday, I played another round of golf (three times in one week is a record for me) with my boss, who had invited me up to the course that our company uses. Played much better this time, well enough to renew my faith in humanity and my own abilities. Now I can go back to my league on Wednesday without fearing that I’ll completely suck. Then, on my way home I stopped in at my parents’ house and they invited me to dinner, so that was really nice. I got home, tried to go see the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie but it was sold out, and then proceeded to fall asleep at around 11:30. It was pretty much the perfect way I could have ended the birthday week, except for the fireworks that I was too tired to drive to on Saturday night. But I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed them as much because I was so tired.

Let me tell you a little story: When I got home from work yesterday, I had some stuff waiting for me under the door to my apartment. This is, unfailingly, how my landlord notifies the tenants in my building (or hell, I guess how landlords notify tenants in any building) of future events. Two little items had been slipped through the crack on this particular day.

The first was a bright orange sheet that stated that starting on August 1, the late fees and month-to-month fees were going to go up by $15 per month. I paid attention to this, because my lease had run out on April 1 and since then I have been paying an extra $35 every month for a month-to-month lease, so that when the time was right I could pick up and move closer to work. Ultimately, not a huge deal, and definitely something I can work with until I find a place.

The second piece was in an envelope with my apartment number on it, and was also related to the fee increases, but this one was directly contradictory to the first piece of information. It informed me that my rent was being increased, to x amount per month. The problem is that instead of the normal $15 increase, this represented a $45 per month increase. Obviously, somebody is presenting me with conflicting information.

I was going to call them today and it slipped my mind, but when I got home after work today I remembered and called them to leave a message. But Andrew, you ask. What is it that you’re really getting at? Is there something more to what you’re telling us?

Well, dear reader, there indeed is more to this. Here’s the crux of what I’m getting at: At the bottom of this second piece of paper, I was informed that I could opt to sign a new one-year lease at a lower cost. Great, right? Well, obviously not, since, as I mentioned earlier, I’m not interested in staying here for an additional year. I like the apartment and all, but I just can’t afford the costs of living fifty-plus miles from work. However, there were no options whatsoever for opting out of this increase in prices.

No, I don’t mean opting out in the sense that I just won’t pay the extra cost. What I mean is that there was nothing anywhere that explained that if I don’t agree to the increase in price, I’m allowed to move out. You see, what I’m getting at is that as my current month-to-month agreement with my landlord stands, I’m required to give 45 days’ notice prior to moving out, or I get fined $100 from my landlord for “breaking the lease”. (Yes, there technically is no lease on a month-to-month, but it’s there in the lease agreement nonetheless.) However, if you look at what they told me, these new prices take effect one month from now. That’s 30 days, for those not able to keep score. So, in other words, if I want to move out and not pay the additional $45, they’ll fine me $100?

How is that even legal? How is it that a landlord can unilaterally change a lease agreement and not supply a fair means of getting out of that? I’m required to give them forty-five days’ notice but they only have to give me thirty?

Tell me something: What brownnosing piece of shit lobbyist for the property management industry got that law enacted?

I guess in the long run it’s better for me, because this is probably going to force me to find a new place. I’ll probably eat the $100 fine because I’ll make it up in saved gas costs in the first couple or three months anyway.

My coworkers just surprised me with a cake for my birthday (a week early, but it was also for another coworker who has a birthday too). It was enough to completely make my month, because my birthday usually only gets noticed by family, so it’s really really nice to have friends recognize it as well.

You remember my last post? You know, that post where I said I got a promotion? Well, it’s still happening, except the part where I get the promotion.

I was supposed to start my new job on Monday—last Monday, that is. But when I got into work to gather my stuff to bring onto the campus with me, I was informed that there was “some problem” with the purchase order for the new job, and thus I wasn’t going to be starting just yet.

This was the point at which I should have known that it wasn’t going to happen at all. But I digress.

So it was decreed that I would stick around where I was for the next few days, until they straightened out what absolutely must have been some kind of clerical error. No big deal, I’ll just start a few days later and the job will extend a few days later.

(Is this starting to sound a little familiar, anybody?)

I heard nothing further on the matter until Friday, when my boss came over to my team lead (I happened to be sitting there talking with him at the time) and asked him if he would be willing to train me as the backup team lead, for when he wasn’t there. (Said team lead had been away at a conference for two days and my boss was covering for him, which he hates to do, which is why he asked that I be trained to do it.) Never mind the fact that I’ve expressed absolutely no desire to be any kind of lead role or management position, or that as of this point in time, we were still expecting that I wasn’t going to be available for the next eighteen weeks or so.

But when this latter point was brought up to my boss, we were informed that “oh yeah… that’s probably not going to happen.” As in, at all. If it does, he said, it probably won’t be for weeks.

So to recap: This is twice, now, that my company has told me I’ll be starting a new and exciting position, only to tell me later on that it just wasn’t meant to be.

“By the way, the words you’re looking for are ‘Oh, good grief!'” — President Bartlet to Leo McGarry

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.

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.