Nothing really makes you feel at home more than pulling into your alleyway after a long night, looking forward to crawling into bed, and braking hard right before you run over the drunk guy passed out sleeping in your parking spot.

What does one do in this situation? Is it worth pissing off your neighbors to start flashing your lights and honking your horn at 1 in the morning? Should you get out of the car, try to wake the person, and hope he says “gee, thanks mister” as you send him away?

Of course not. You head right back out and park on the street.

A precious few hours later, you slither out the door in your pajamas and put your car back where it belongs before it gets towed.

All this on a Sunday night too. I wish I could find that guy and bill him for my lost sleep.

Posted on August 21st, 2006 by Lee
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The transition is complete! Gridley finally came back online this morning, and after a few hours of finangling with SQL, you’d hardly know the difference. This site is as good as old.

That, however, may be a problem.

My hip urban existence is growing a little concerned here. I need something a little more edgy. This layout I put together last year is, well, so last year.

I have to admit, I like the brightness of this color scheme much more than my first color scheme. I’m not about to go black background on y’all.

It’s time to change primary colors here. Those greens and yellows may really speak to motorcycling around India, but they don’t speak much to the colors I see on my morning commute. The greenest thing about my workday is the color cast of the omnipresent flourescent lighting.

But I aspire to conjure up more than the nine-to-six-on-a-good-day. My color scheme can’t merely talk the talk. I need a color scream that shouts, “walking down the sidewalk weighted down with groceries and avoiding the drunks.” I need a color scheme that screams, “I just overpaid for this martini, and it’s still happy hour.” I need a color scheme that pokes sternly and retorts, “you live in an English bunker because you were too cheap to pay for an above-ground apartment with real windows.”

So yeah, it’s time for a new color scheme. Green and yellow just won’t cut it anymore.

Posted on August 10th, 2006 by Lee
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I’ve gone corporate.

For the past two years, this blog has been hosted by what one might call the kumbaya circle of servers. Gridley is Carleton’’s student-run Unix server, a sandbox for Carleton folks to build and destroy their own little Internet castles.

Like the harmonious existence it represents, Gridley is a beautiful idea with just a few quirks. Every once in a while it goes endearingly awry. The major failure that that brought my blog down for two weeks was one such bump in the road. Endearing. Really.

A younger, more idealistic me would laugh this all off. I’d let the blog go back up when it was ready, and I’d shrug it off as a gentle reminder of the quirkly world in which we live. Hell, I’m surpised I didn’t make my blog tie-dye.

Call me a sellout. But a precocious, well-paid young professional such as myself needs a precocious young professional web presence. So from now on, I will happily pay my $3 a month to get the good things in life. Good things like redundancy and 24-hour support. For less than the price of my precocious young professional half-caf skim milk caramel machiavelliato with extra whipped cream and a shot of cholesterol.

My old posts will be restored as soon as I have access to them. Like the idealist I am, I never bothered to back up my database tables. But I see a bright future for my posts. All that money I’m blowing on this site ought to be an incentive to write some new ones.

Oh yeah, and hold the cholesterol.

Posted on August 3rd, 2006 by Lee
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As I kick back and enjoy a nice cold beer after my first day of the real world, I think: what will become of this blog?

Surely it can’t just go away. After all, I’m not going away anytime soon. I may not be in college, but I am young. I am alive. I lead a charmed life in my English bunker. I bike in the park, dance in converted mansions, and wade through lengthy depositions like it was my job. Oh yeah, I guess that last one is my job.

Neither is my newfound non-poverty (non-povertedness?) going to keep me from blogging. I will be forever in search of free food. Let me tell you how excited I was this morning when learning the rules of the company expense account. Suddenly, working 10 hour days seems so much more attractive. No, money has not changed me. After all, the best spice is not pepper or paprika, it’s that inexplicable tingling sensation that comes from tasting something without a price tag. Or at least without a price tag to you.

No, that’s not MSG either. Trust me.

After a month of running around driving home, finding an apartment, packing, unpacking, and more than anything dumping craploads of money into my sad state of a car, I am ready to begin my online life again. There’s a whole world out there that needs to be explored, and it’s high time I start exploring it. And then telling you about what I explored. And then letting you read, comment, and generally live vicariously through what I said. Isn’t that why we read each other’s blogs in the first place?

So first thing’s first. I need a new tagline. Anyone have any ideas?

Posted on July 10th, 2006 by Lee
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Perhaps the hardest thing I did in my four years at Carleton was pack up my car to leave.

I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean it physically. It took me about an hour to pack my trunk up alone. My trunk is packed so tight that I can barely close the door. My backseats are piled up to the headrests, and my passenger seat is full too. Every so often, I have to unravel the cord to my lava lamp from my shifter. I don’t know how I’m going to make it home like this.

Ok, fine, maybe I do mean it a little bit metaphorically. Carleton has been good to me. And if the head of the alumni association has any say in the matter, I will (apparently) be good to it in return. Tough as it would be to stay, it’s tough to leave.
I will resist the tempation to go on at length about how great college was, or about entering the real world, or about leaving friends behind, or about how Carleton is not a bubble but a series of vectors. I will spare you the abstraction, because nothing I can say–especially in this venue–can possibly make sense of it. If you’re not there in the present, you’re just not there.

So, I will brave my way into the future, as I always have. College is over, and I’ve got a lot more living to do. That’s that.

Just know that my car is packed.

Posted on June 12th, 2006 by Lee
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