I’ve spent an extended weekend in NYC to have a lute lesson. One of the things my teacher mentioned to me is that New York will be like Paris soon, in that normal people won’t be able to afford to live there anymore.

Staying with my friend who has an apartment on Central Park West, you see a lot of people with a lot of wealth. My friend has his apartment provided for him because of his job, which is a unique situation. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to live here either because he can’t afford it. I don’t mean to say that wealthy people are bad, but an entire city where only the ultra-rich are able to live seems like a bad idea.

I’d love to live in New York, in Central Park West, but sadly it’s too expensive. I’d settle for lesser neighborhoods, in Brooklyn or Queens, but even that’s getting too high. There is probably a widening gap between those who can afford to live in the city, and those people who provide services to the people who live in the city. Granted, having such a gap isn’t unusual–we live in a society of classes, like it or not–but when the gap is so pronounced it creates an unbalanced living environment.

The essence of the problem is that New York is such a great place, and with everyone in the world wanting to live there, the real estate goes to the highest bidder. We should have more places like New York, so the rest of us have a nice place to live too.

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Reality TV has finally insnared me into its devious web. For the past three months I’ve been following Bravo’s Top Chef series, thanks to Matt and Dan who got me hooked on the show. Tonight, Elan, the charismatic Spanish-style chef won over Marcel, the arrogant yet talented chef who no one liked anyway, including me. Needless to say, I felt justice had been served.

Would my life be ruined if it had been the other way around? Well, no, but I can’t help but wonder why I am caring about this at all. Is this what it’s like for sports fans? Hundreds of people, thousands even, whose daily lives hang in the very balance pending the outcome of the Colts/Bears Superbowl? Who are these people anyway?

It’s obvious that I am not capable of sustaining the emotional rollercoaster that is the American media. I can barely handle a cooking show and there are people out there who have never missed an episode of American Idol. It’s just too much to take. I’ll stick to the Food Network and the occasional CSI season binge on DVD… at least I don’t have to deal with the commercials. God knows I’ve got enough going on right now…

Rants | No Comments »

I’ve been Facebooking a lot lately… is that an actual word? Should probably be filled under “Internet Speak” ? I’ve got the RSS feeds linking to that so that these posts won’t get read in twice as many places. The way I look at it, I’m just contributing to the noise that is the internet. There’s a place for that, isn’t there?

I’ve been listening to Bjork again lately. I’m still not convinced the most recent album, Medulla, is any good. Certainly not compared to Vespertine, which is just an excellent piece of work. Then again, maybe I need to listen to it more.

Complete Rubbish, Music | No Comments »

I get free internet at my new apartment. The only catch is that it’s a private network and it’s painfully slow. So, no more web hosting from the closet. Now I have to actually monitor bandwidth and things like that, and pay for it!

I also want to give a note of thanks to Mark Jaquith who posted a nice little php script that fixed my WordPress 2.0.4 upgrade. I’m glad I tried that before trying to talk to the Dreamhost people about their php.ini files. Now I’ll have to talk to them about using UTF-8 encoding which is I think why all the quotes are appearing as question marks…

The Website | 1 Comment »

Summer is supposed to be for relaxing, downtime, vacations, leisurely walks and other things that generally don’t cause stress. Summer 2006 was not one of those summers.

In June, our support tech who was also moonlighting as our sys. admin. and webmaster got another job and left town. Good for him, I thought, except until replacements were hired, his duties fell to me. Yay. Now, I had the responsibility of 4 people. Next, there was summer school: 2 classes, one of which was an independent study, which meant extra homework for me every night. Working fulltime and going to school fulltime is hard enough, but when your workload quadruples, it’s basically impossible.

New people are on the way in few weeks and by this fall we should have a full staff of IT people for the first time all year. I have made it through thanks in part to a great working environment and a great bunch of people that understand my situation. With all the staff changes we’ve been having, people try to tell me things are actually getting better. Somehow, I can’t believe them. Yet, I still wouldn’t have felt so bad this season if the following other things had not have happened…

I’ve gotten sick twice this summer, and one of them was a cold. Why the hell am I getting a cold in August? The last time I got sick during the summer was 1998, and that was only once and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t working 4 jobs.

2 weeks ago I found out I have to move. The state-subsidized housing I’m currently living in doesn’t allow fulltime students. I understand the reasons, I’ve been on the gravy train long enough, and it’s not so bad, oh but wait, let me refer you to the above events… With all that’s going on, the one thing I really don’t have time to do is move.

Since I’m moving into a smaller place, I thought I should consolidate all the computers in my closet into one. Not a bad idea: save space, and I’d be more mobile when I move again next year. However, due to some bad luck and bad decisions, I now have an apartment full of computer crap that I’m going to have to sell off. It’ll all get sorted out eventually, but probably not in time for the move.

And if that weren’t enough, the extra work, sickness, forced migration, hundreds wasted on bad computer parts, I get no vacation this summer. I was going to spend a week in Florida with my grandma. Nothing but beach all day, booze all night, and getting treated to posh restaurants. I was even hoping for a hurricane like last year. Hey, it was exciting! Nope, the weather gods have spoken: That week has to be spent moving. It’s the crap frosting on the crap cake.

I never thought I’d say this, but I’m actually looking forward to the fall semester. At this point the only thing that could be worse is physical incapacitation due to blunt force trauma, and even that’s not saying much because I wouldn’t have to go to work for at least a couple of days, I’d have some morphine to dull the pain, get to watch TV and possibly even have a few attractive nurses waiting on me.

However, the summer wasn’t a complete loss…I did manage to have a birthday party and to make it to the pool a few times, thanks to my family and friends. But with the Internet as my witness, if Summer 2007 even starts to look remotely the same as this year, I’m blowing town and not looking back.

Complete Rubbish, Rants | No Comments »