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 469): Zartan Rice

#1GF! and I spent the morning watching The Brothers Solomon, which was so bad that it made me leave the house in spite of the rain. We had no destination, but we ended up going to a framing place to see if it was cheaper to have a bathroom mirror made than to buy one fully assembled from a home store. Pre-made is cheaper, but frame store people are almost as odd as people who work in video game stores.

On the way out, I set off all the motion detected Halloween stuff that has made it’s way onto shelves already. I was unimpressed. If, when I was a little kid, you came from the future to tell me that there would be motion sensitive Halloween decorations, I would think Disney on a small scale. If you showed me some of the motion-sensitive crap that they sell now that pales in comparison to what Disney was doing 30 years ago, I would probably want to take one of my short little legs and use it to kick you in the ding ding for pulling me away from my cartoons.

From there, we went looking for furniture at four different stores before going by the house to check on things. While I was showing #1GF! some of the changes (like our new heating system), the contractor called. He asked about my website for the first time, so I gave him the URL.

I don’t care who sees this site because I work hard on it, but when people I deal with professionally see it for the first time, I still get a little uneasy. I think it’s a leftover corporate mindset that makes me feel like people won’t take me seriously after they see it. It’s fine if some people think I’m an idiot because of this site, but I like to minimize that possibility with people that I deal with professionally. It’s not like I’m trying to be something I’m not, but there are masks we all wear in different situations that get removed with a site like this. Eh, what can you do? I still choose this site.

I made #1GF! enchiladas for dinner, and was disappointed to discover that the Zartarain’s Mexican rice package that I bought wasn’t Zartan Mexican rice. I really was. I thought Zartan rice would’ve been cool even though Zartan was the worst G.I. Joe character since Cover Girl. I took solace in the fact that #1GF! wouldn’t know who Zartan was, anyway.

Monday (Day 470): Writing

I wrote all day, and the rest, they say, is history.

Tuesday (Day 471): Grinding Down

I tried to write, but ended up reading my feeds all day because I couldn’t get anything started. I ended up in a foul mood, which #1GF! and the contractor both said something about it. I can’t pinpoint the cause, but I guess I was tired of all the small decisions, the building process, being broke, bleeding money, not having any writing ideas, and not knowing if all the writing is leading anywhere. Sometimes it all piles on and weighs me down.

Writing every day is like going to the gym. You don’t see immediate benefits, but you have to remember it’s good for you in the long term. Some days, to get yourself to walk through the gym door, you need some short term reward to get yourself motivated. I couldn’t find those rewards to replace the motivation that the house process was grinding off.

Wednesday (Day 472): I’d Rather Write Than Choose

I’ve been taking it easy at the gym, but I still managed to pinch something in my neck with the little girly weights that I’ve been pushing. It wasn’t a big deal, but it was bad enough that I knew that it was going to bother me the next morning.

I talked to the door guy who realized that he couldn’t find the door we wanted, which led us to new choices on things that we thought we had already chosen. Some door choices would mean returning the handles, which I wasn’t into at all. It’s not that I love the door handles or anything, but I didn’t want to have to go back to the store to look at door handles again. Once a decision is done and I put a check mark next to it, I don’t want to revisit it. There are too many choices to be made on a house, most of which feel like when the eye doctor flips nearly identical lenses in front of your eye and asks which is better. After a while the decisions stop mattering, and choice becomes the enemy.

Once I hung up, I not only wrote all morning, but got some graphics done for some upcoming posts that I was working on. I was going to keep the momentum going by getting my traditionally musically based Friday post done, but completely ran out of steam before I could.

While I was writing, I also tested out a drive wiping utility on a machine that I built right after my house fire years ago. There was a time when an overclocked PII 333 was worth saving, but that time is long gone. That sucker is now wiped, prepped, and ready to visit the Dianoga.

Thursday (Day 473): Momentum

I continued the writing streak and realized that, for the first time in a while, I had more posts than days. I not only had enough to posts to finish off the week, but had time to arrange the posts for the following week.

I had to take a break to let the plumber in so that he could finish up getting the heat installed. While I waited, I found a few baseboard issues that still needed correcting, but within an hour, I was back home writing more.

After another hour of seemingly effortless writing, I suddenly decided that I was going to run out and get some errands done. Just as I got to the door, I stopped. I realized that I was breaking up a writing streak for errands that were less than pressing. It was like I had taken everything that might need to be done and was making them priorities for no other reason than to try to transfer momentum away from words and into every day life.

I knew that I had to go out later in the afternoon to get a haircut, so I thought it would be better to take advantage of the writing time and motivation while it was available. I went back to my desk and and wrote until late afternoon. I drove to get a haircut, and drove straight home to write some more. #1GF! brought home pizza and we watched The Shield, which had absolutely laughable acting, but we couldn’t help but watch because the story keeps twisting season after season.

Friday (Day 474): Digg Front Page

I was supposed to get up and lift, but that small tweak in my neck woke me up every two hours during the night. I figured I’d probably make it worse if I lifted, so even though I felt guilty about it, I skipped the gym.

The contractor asked me to let in the tile guy and thought it would be funny if he told me the tile guy’s name was Newman. I even asked a couple of times if he was fucking with me, but he swore that he wasn’t. He was. The guy’s name wasn’t Newman. The contractor just calls him Newman because of Seinfeld. Great. Jokes on me. I went home to write for a couple of hours, and when I went back to check on the tile guy later on, I found that the painters had shown up a day early.

Because I had finished all my posts for the week, I decided to go to the kitchen place to ask them about under cabinet lighting. I stayed for a while talking because its a family business and the family is really nice. I knew their website was being held up because their web designer wanted their kitchen pictures in a certain size and format before she’d put them on the site. The site had been missing the pictures for way too long, so I dropped off a thumb drive for them to put their pictures on and told them that I’d resize them as soon as they got it back to me. It was something that shouldn’t take me long, and I wanted to get it done for them.

While I was there, I got a call from a guy who was going to fix some of the baseboard issues that I found earlier in the week. He wasn’t one of the contractor’s guys that I had met, but he was already at the house waiting, so I zipped back to show him the issues that needed to be fixed. He got started on correcting them, and I went home to write more and check my stats.

That’s when I found out that the beard page had hit the front page of Digg. It had gotten over a thousand diggs and threw over 30,000 visitors to my site in a matter of hours. While I was out running around, my host suspended my account for four hours because I was hogging up all the resources on the server. I enabled caching to ease the load, but the time my site was back up, the rush was over. I missed a fair amount of traffic, but I still got a lot of people in. I shook my head and shrugged, once again confused by how and why the internet picks up on things.

I went back to check on the workers and mow the lawn late in the afternoon. While I was mowing, the electrician showed up and seemed really nervous about taking over the job because he thought that I may have been trying to stiff the last electrician. I spent some time convincing him that I had never actually laid eyes on the old electrician because he was employed by the old contractor. It was a really weird conversation that made me wonder if there was something wrong with the guy or if he was afraid of whoever did the electrical work in the house before. He eventually jumped back into his unmarked van and drove off, leaving me to wonder if he really was an electrician or if I had just been pumped for information for some sort of fraud that would be committed against me in the near future. As an unemployed guy, I shrugged and went back to mowing the lawn.

The baseboard guy finished up what he could, leaving a couple of problem areas, but tile guy did a great job on the bathroom tile. When they were done, I went home to write even more, and eventually decided to take a look at 4chan, which I had never heard of until I heard on the news that Sarah Palin’s e-mail showed up there. 4chan is some sort of anonymous bulletin board, so I thought that there would be something funny on there. All that I ended up finding was a bunch of people posting porn and calling each other “fag”. Maybe I’m too old to get it.

#1GF! went to visit her family overnight, so I ended up writing and writing like I do when she’s off at work. Without her coming home, I don’t have a signal to stop working, so I pretty much write until I’m ready to fall asleep at the keyboard. I didn’t go to bed until 1:30, but I got a lot of writing done.

Saturday (Day 475): Getting Lucky

Because I stayed up late, I woke up late, and was late getting to the house to let the workers in. I usually try to be early, so I felt bad about getting there fifteen minutes behind schedule. It was Saturday morning, and I had a tile guy, two painters, and a crew of carpenters at the house. I thought that I was still sleeping, because this sort of thing doesn’t happen in the world that I live in.

We had a problem with a making one of the baseboard heat units on a crooked floor, and I couldn’t figure out how to make it look normal. The contractor came up with a solution that required the plumber to come back to change around the piping a bit, but it was the best solution that I could see. I called the plumber, but he said he couldn’t get to it until next week. I was fine with that because the solution was only ten minutes old, and I understand that people aren’t sitting around waiting for me to call them with work.

The contractor showed me the brown caulking that was oozing out from underneath our new granite counter that I hadn’t noticed before. The only way you’d see the mess is if you were sitting in the living room, which means we probably wouldn’t have noticed it until we moved in and were sitting on the couch. The last contractor left us gifts that keep on giving. Sort of like a puppy with the runs. Or herpes.

He also had me look at the counter from the hallway, so that I could see that the new wall that the counter sits on isn’t even close to straight or square. There wasn’t much they could do about the wall, but they put on some molding to hide the caulking. It was either that or tear the kitchen apart, which we can’t afford to do at this point. Every time I find something new that is wrong, I get more and more pissed at the old contractor.

When I had enough, the plumber called saying that he would push off some another job and would be at the house to make our plumbing changes in a couple of hours. I really thought that I was sleeping then because in addition to painters, carpenters, and a tile guy, I was getting a plumber on a Saturday. I went home to write a number one best seller and play the lottery before I woke up.

A few hours later, I went back to the house because the contractor wanted to make sure that the new baseboard changes I asked for were done in a way that I was happy with. As is usual with the new guy, they were. I headed home to go through my referral stats, which were a bit higher than normal thanks to the Digg traffic. I found some funny references to my site, and that the Financial Times had run their interview with me (translation). The Financial Times is European equivalent of the Wall Street Journal, so I found it strange that my beard got me into the paper before my Finance degree. I’m still not sure if the interview made it to print, because they didn’t let me know that it was running. They took a couple of small liberties with what I said, but I didn’t really care. Financial markets wouldn’t be affected by this article. Then again, in today’s economy, you never know.

Once #1GF! returned home, we walked around the End of Summer street fair in town. Despite my worldwide beard fame, I was not mobbed by adoring fans. Or any fans, really. I started to question whether the internets is a good measure of fame. What the hell, internets? We saw Johnny Cupcakes walking around there unmobbed, too, so I didn’t feel so bad. I was going to walk over and say hello, but I didn’t know what to say to him that wouldn’t make me sound like a pest. The ovens in your LA store are really cool? Nice beard? Congrats on turning a small t-shirt business into an empire? High five? I don’t know the guy, and I figured that I would just end up sounding like an idiot, so I didn’t bother him. I just pointed him out to #1GF! as we walked by.

As we were walking, we saw the smallest hot dog eating contest that we’ve ever seen. There were five contestants who had ten minutes to eat six hot dogs. Yes. Six. I bet on the skinny kid and his baggy pants, and #1GF! bet on a muscly guy and his tight shirt. The lanky kid ended up winning, but as I was watching, I started thinking that I might’ve been able to win. I’m not sure if I really could’ve, but with the speed at which I’ve always eaten things, it seemed reasonable at the time. Then, I wondered if I really would’ve wanted to win. What can you do with the notoriety of eating six hot dogs faster than a girl, two muscly guys, and a little kid?

Yea, I wasn’t sure either, but watching people eat made me hungry. We went to dinner at a time that old people would scoff at, and I occupied a good portion of the conversation by talking about how I’m doing the web thing all wrong. I mentioned how that in business, there are certain people who know how the game works and they play it. They don’t work hard: they wear the right clothes and say the right things, and get other people to do their work for them. Those people aren’t well liked, but they move up because that’s how the game is played. I always played the game on the merits of my work, trying to bend the system to suit me. It’s a hacker’s mentality, and it’s not how the business world works.

I have done the same thing on the web over the last year. Instead of trading links like currency and trying to work my way into a circle of higher power players, I ignore the game and play it my own way. There are rules to web popularity, and they’re not much different from the business world. You have to know power people, and get the right links to move up. I focus on the writing and not the race, and connecting with people instead of collecting links. Realistically, that’s not a way to build a site that rises in popularity, but I’m not sure if that’s the point for me. The point of this site is to do it my way and see where it takes me. Doing it someone else’s way will just land me in a place that I don’t want to be, possibly disfiguring this site into the web’s version of a grey corporate cube. And that won’t do anyone any good.

Once I stopped chattering, #1GF! looked at me and said, “I love when you get really excited and optimistic about your writing and stop worrying about where it’s going. That sort of excitement is really neat to be around. And you have sauce on your chin.”

What I Learned

• That the Gutmann erasing method is overkill on modern hard drives, and a high security erase can be achieved with eight passes of a PRNG stream.
• Some contractors work on Saturdays.
• Pre-made mirrors are cheaper than making one.
• Frame store people are a little odd.
• Anonymity doesn’t necessarily attract creative funny people. Mostly it just attracts people who like to call each other “fag”.
• There is no such thing as Zartan rice.
• Digg throws almost as much traffic as Reddit.

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Posted in Leisure