The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 273): Psi Phi Music

I made #1GF! breakfast and had a breakfast burrito for myself. We watched Heroes while eating, and spent the rest of the day reviewing my FineTune PSI PHI station while looking at granite on the web. I drifted in and out of the GIMP book that #1GF! thought had to do with bracelet weaving instead of image manipulation.

I started making stir fry for dinner until I realized that #1GF! was interested in every move that I was making. Rather than make a fuss, I stepped out of the way and let her cook the way she wanted. She cooked and I cleaned.

Monday (Day 274): Save The Permit and Kill The Ads

This ended up being a day of running around. I went over to the town hall to square away some issues that were holding up our permit, and then ran a set of plans down to the builder’s house. When I got home, I calculated the amount of money that I made in February and got pretty disgusted. I decided to take most of the ads on my site down. I think this might be the end of the road for trying to make a buck on the web. I can make way more money with way less work sitting at a train station with my hand out.

Tuesday (Day 275): Kitchen Choices

I made some calls about our kitchen, and started working on the Netflix Watch Instantly new additions. I realized that I was off in my calculations of the number of movies available by over 700, which threw off my entire post. I quickly found my error and went to an appointment with the kitchen people. We didn’t feel like cooking, so we went out to dinner and then went home where #1GF! watched TV while I worked on getting the rest of the week’s posts together.

Thanks to an e-mail conversation with a friend’s younger brother relating to my harassment of a speech engine, I had to look up what “ridic” meant. When I learned that it was just short for ridiculous, “redonkulous” and “recalculous” re-entered my vocabulary for the first time since I quit my job.

“Redonk” somehow snowballed into becoming my word of the week, and I couldn’t stop saying it. I also couldn’t stop saying “mu’fuckin’”, meaning that “mu’fuckin’ reDONK” came out of my mouth a lot more than it should have for a 35 year old guy with a bushy beard and no sense of style.

Wednesday (Day 276): Code, Code, Code

Spent the morning writing a script to compare all the FineTune Friday playlists to find out what the most popular songs, artists and albums were. I started building a screen scraper that anyone could use, and then dumbed it down because the regexes were hanging me up. Rather than waste time on it, I built a “good enough” script and moved on.

I also took all the ads of my site because they’re slightly above useless for generating income. I was supposed to go out to lunch but didn’t, but that didn’t bother me because humans are just another form of code that I don’t fully understand the syntax to.

One win for the day was that I fixed a template issue that had been screwing up search results on my site for months. It ended up being a missing else statement. Gah.

Thursday (Day 277): Comcast’s Human Spam

While eating my breakfast, I started watching a video about a Jehova’s Witness who needed a liver transplant, but wouldn’t get one because blood transfusions are against his religious beliefs (video). The idea seemed a little crazy to me, but I appreciated the idea of sticking to something he believes in. The guy eventually got his operation with no transfusion, and when they showed the rows of surgical staples holding his skin together, I got a little scared.

Eventually, they’re going to take my kidneys out, and seeing the staples all over this young guy made me more afraid than I’ve ever been over the prospect. The fear went away within a minute when I told myself to stop being a baby and accept it. The older I get, the more I notice how easily the void left by the evaporation of youth can be filled with fear, if you let it.

Once I got myself in gear, I spent the morning working on my FineTune Friday stats script to display the similarities between participants’ playlists in a more useful way. I spent a little too much time on it considering that Finetune Friday typically has no more than five participants every month. When you spend a lot of your free time working on something that you know no one cares about, sometimes that means that you’re doing exactly what you want to. Other times, that just means you’re a IT slave in a large corporation.

Midway through the day, someone started pounding on my door, which is unusual because the handful of friends that I have don’t need to call, never mind stop by. Using a trick I had learned from a previous tenant, I went out on my balcony and asked the guy standing at my door what he wanted. It was a Comcast cable guy who was trying to get me to switch my phone to a new service.

After I listened to his pitch, I told the guy that I wasn’t interested, and he got adamant in trying to get me down to the door. I wasn’t biting. I was looking a little crazy because coding makes me twist my beard into dreadlocks, and I was spending most of the conversation staring at the guy without responding. He told me that I needed to switch to Comcast’s new phone service to keep my phone number. I said that I was moving soon anyway. He asked when, which I thought was a little personal, so I just said, “soon”. He then asked where I was moving to, which made the words “get fucked” pop into my head, but I opted for the less colorful, “around here”. He described some plans. Again, I told him that I wasn’t interested because I’ll probably switch to another company. He then started describing some deals that he could give me. I told him that it wasn’t worth it because, as I said, I was moving, and added that “Comcast is a screw job anyway.”

Then, we stared at each other for a few seconds, and he eventually broke because I have no problem with using large, uncomfortable silences in conversations to make people concede or back down. That’s when the guy decided that he was going to try to hand me his business card. I was on a second story balcony, and I couldn’t reach him if I nailed my cock to the railing and repelled off the side, so I just stared at him like a crow perched on a wire, and told him that he could leave the card in the door if he liked. He folded his card in half and stuck it in my door, telling me that I should call him because he would get a commission on the sale. As he walked away, I’m almost positive that we were both thinking, “What an asshole,” and we’d both be a little right.

If anyone from Comcast headquarters reads this, listen: You’re not my pal or parent. You’re a company that provides a service. If there’s a problem with my service, I’ll call. If I don’t respond to your junk mail, and don’t want to talk to you on the phone, don’t send human spam over to my apartment to give me the pitch. Ok?

After the guy left, I went back to my Perl coding, which took me until late afternoon because I was looping through multidimensional hashes, which tends to make things fuzzy enough to require scrap paper. Yes, I used multidimensional hashes in a crappy FineTune script. I told you, the script was for my own entertainment.

Once I was done, I realized that one of the FineTune Friday participants hadn’t finished their list yet, so I decided to hold off on publishing until I could include her list the next morning. By that point in the day, I was all done with the web and out of ideas, so I started working on getting things in order with the contractor and the appliance guy. Once everything was squared away, it was 4:30PM and I had to go meet the contractor so that he could take some measurements to have some beams engineered.

I forgot my set of plans, and the building department and engineering companies were holding all of the contractor’s plans, so I had to run home to get the master set. I could’ve saved myself ten minutes if I had listened to myself and grabbed the plans on the way out the door, but it was only a loss of ten minutes, and far from a big deal. We did have a dumpster in our yard, which is a big deal though. When I told #1GF! about it, she was so excited that she drove by the house on her way home just to see it.

Friday (Day 278):

For some reason this day flew by. I gave my beard a little trim at #1GF!’s urging, and threw on Amon Amarth to musically guide me through my Viking conquest of the supermarket. When I got home, I made a batch of brownie biscotti. I typically make a double batch, but I needed the cookies made before we went over to #1GF!’s friend’s house, and I wasn’t sure if I’d have enough time to get it all done before we left. I probably would’ve had enough time, but it would’ve been tight.

When we got to the house, I let the man of the house take rocket car to the liquor store, and no one can resist the whistle of that turbo. When we got home, another couple had already arrived. They were really nice and asked if I was retired. It was a reasonable conclusion considering I’m in my prime earning years and not working, but it seemed like a funny thought to me. I consider myself to be more like temporarily retired than fully retired.

During one of the evening’s conversations, the man of the house started talking about ROCKET CAR, and I eventually admitted that my car was not only “rediculous”, but “redonkulous”, “recalculus” and even “redonk”. While 0-60 times that hover under five seconds might make this true, I seriously need to learn how to act like a normal adult in public.

As the evening progressed, we eventually found ourselves in the middle of a little Hobin’s Dice for not quarters, but dollars. A dollar game only costs $6 per person, but it seemed crazy to someone like me who doesn’t really gamble more than heading down to Fascination once a year to play fifty cent games of ski ball bingo.

Before we left, #1GF!’s friend’s teenage daughter got home, and I intentionally stopped myself from saying “redonk” because I remember how retarded it sounds when old people use vocabulary that their generation doesn’t own. Then, I felt old. When I considered that the girl is half my age and can drive a car, I felt even older. I don’t think one of those mu’fuckin redonkulous tweed hats with a feather in the side is too far off for me.

Saturday (Day 279):

#1GF! and I went to a granite warehouse to get a jump on our kitchen counters. The receptionist there was dressed in tight clothes and tall boots, which I didn’t get a good look at because I didn’t want to seem like some perverted weirdo, but women in tight clothes have the same attractive power for eyes as buttons marked “Do not press” have for fingers. Again, I think I’m turning into an old man, because I thought that no matter if the woman was the most fantastic assistant in the world, her clothes made me think that her boss must be a lech who hired her for her looks. That’s sadly predjudiced against smart ladies with good physical assets.

After an hour among the slabs, we were no closer to a decision, so we headed home so that #1GF! could recover from the previous night’s festivities. I ended up finishing TimeSplitters for the PS2 while she slept, which was a little strange, because I breezed through parts that I thought were so hard that they made me stop playing the game a year ago. The rest of the day was even less eventful than what I mentioned here.

What I Learned

• The real fun of Hobin’s Dice comes to fruition at 8+ people. 6 works, but the game really needs 8+ to bring out the rowdiness that it should contain.
• I haven’t had a drink in over 11 years, and I have lost the ability to discern when people are drunk unless they physically fall down or throw up directly on me.
• If someone cares more about the outcome than you do and wants to take over, it can sometimes make more sense to step aside and let them take over.
• Not playing video games made me better at playing video games.
• The work required for a web worker to earn less than a paper route seems like a waste of time.
• FineTune Friday is no more popular than it when it started ten months ago. FineTune doesn’t care about it, and only about five other people on the web care about it.
• Redonk is fun to say. Mu’fuckin’ redonk is twice as fun. The words are three times as fun if some sort of hand gesture are used. At my age, the coolness of each action is inversely proportional to the fun.
• Hobin’s Dice for dollars is pretty fun.
• Always make a double batch of biscotti.
• It is very common for people to suggest writing a book, but I don’t think that they consider the prospect that three pages a day will lead to a rough draft in three months, and after three months of editing, a mildly successful book might only earn only $5-10,000. That’s pretty unappealing for six months work.

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