Hell has frozen over and the woman is up from NC visiting me.

I finally bit the bullet and paid a substantial sum of money to join the elite club of A D C (A pple D eveloper C onnection), because if I want to get a machine in the near future, I can either choose to get the hardware discount that official developers get (which is offset by the exhorbitent membership that costs exactly the same amount as the developer hardware discount) or pay full price and get no membership at all. With membership, I get access to interesting stuff that I can't legally talk about but may prove useful in the future. In a sane world, work would pay for this membership and pay to send me to W W D C. Oh well, c'est la vie.

Yeah, it's kinda stupid I don't have anything better or more eventful to write about and resort to talking about geeky stuff. But I'm working towards the "100+" lettering on my userpic.

My latest attempts at self help involve what I call "achieving little victories"--small steps towards the person who I want to be. A lot of times a little victory is my finally doing stuff that I've been pocrastinating from doing, that in some way slightly reduces the quality of my life.

So far, the lttle victories I've one include getting most of the plastic wrap up on my bay (aka ball-turret) window, getting more sleep each night, and getting my hair cut today. I was particularly bad about the last one in the past few weeks, because I had been going to a place in Orchard Park, which is a bit of a drive, especially considering that the only time I can go is during the weekends because although it's close to work, barber's hours are almost identical to the bank-type hours I work at (still much better than retail work hours, though).

Still requiring some perseverence is dieting and housecleaning and doing worthwhile things that benefit society. But that's the thing about little victories, they're easy to accomplish and if you don't win them right away you don't feel too bad about it.

The good news for today is that the CEO of the company I work for congratulated me on the job I did with the database, telling me that I did a fantastic job and did more in one year than the three other guys before me did in two years. I actually never thought I'd hear him say it and that he would take a more "grudging acceptance" approach. That kind of threw me off guard, but I have put so much of myself into this project and have made so many sacrifices to move up here and get the database working, I felt I had it coming (in a not "pop-squish-six-ahuh-cicero-lipschitz" kinda way.

Which brings me to my next point.

Yesterday was my 1-year aniversary of living in Buffalo. One year ago from yesterday, I finished my epic trek from North Carolina and arrived at the hole in the wall that my current employer had put me up in. The next day, I would embark on what was basically a programmer's suicide mission trying to get what everyone else would consider a hopeless cause up and running.

I remember silly little things about my initial arrival. Like that I hadn't gotten stuck in the snow on my way up like I feared, until the last 20 feet of driveway at the hotel that the hotel owner didn't shovel. Or that the hotel cable system didn't let me watch Robot Chicken but had 24 hours of unscrambled porn that actually got boring pretty quickly.

I also remember the "first set of eyes" phenommenon that took place when first saw Richmond ave. I don't know how other people perceive objects, but the appearance of an object or person the first time I see it is totally different from that object or person once I've grown used it it or them. When I first walked down Richmond ave, it looked so enormous, especially considering the brutally cold wind that made the distance back to my warm car seem that much longer. The area of buffalo seemed hip, but at the same time I told myself "living in a city sucks. It'll be just like you imagined NYC, you'll have a small apartment that will feel totally cramped with all your stuff--but will feel less so after half your stuff is stolen out of it in a manner befitting big city crime." I couldn't see why anyone would want to live in a big northern city, but looking back on it, I'm happy that I was saved from the dreary existence in West Seneca that I was originally contemplating. Today, I see Richmond and the surrounding area with a different set of eyes; everything looks much smaller and more more homey. I don't see it as big, freezing and ominous to walk down during the winter but rather as beautiful to walk down during a mild summer day. And I have the whole entire top half of a house! Compared to my previous 500 sq ft in raleigh it's definately an improvement.

I also recall the enormous battle I've had to wage to settle in my house. For two weeks I fought a pitched room-to-room battle in my house to win the war of privacy. Blinds had to be put up everywhere to keep myself non-visible from the neighbors windows four feet away, and only until the entire indoors was cloaked did I feel I could relax. I'm actually still fighting battles to make my house more livable, but it's now settled into a war of attrition; I find more and more things I forgot to bring up from NC and I have to spend considerable time and sums of money hunting them down and replacing them. I've somehow furnished my apartment as well, despite fantasies of having a bare, blank room all to myself. And don't even get me started about all the bullsh*t one has to deal with when living in an old house in Buffalo--lack of three prong power outlets, no insulation, no true central air or A/C, etc. I've dealt with most of that stuff, but damn, doing so was a pain in the butt.

Feeling the absence of long time family and friends goes without saying. I've moved to a city where I didn't know a soul. I've worked a lot on changing that, but I still miss everyone from back home. The most difficult experience by far was the on-and-off again relationship with a girlfriend from NC. We had one fight and breakup after the other, largely due to unresolved stuff from before I moved, plus her discomfort with the distance and my fear of any number of bad situations I'd be put into if I went back home to the unresolved stuff. In addition to all the other difficulties I've faced in finding women up here was the spectre of fidelity that dogged every encounter with the opposite sex. In spite of my feeling that I had been sold out by "the other side" so many times on many issues, I never once cheated. While I probably am Buffalo's most pathetic excuse for a "guy", I tried my best to be a decent man.

Finally, I've managed to stay alive despite the fact that everyone back home I could have called on to save my ass in an emergency is 700 miles away. This is in no small part due to the enormous paranoia I feel about such sticky situations, always having to plan at least 10 steps ahead of everyone born and raised here with family here. It's enormously stressing that I have to watch my back this much, but I'm proud that I've done okay so far.

In summary, I think I've done close to the best I could do up here, and I've done a hell of a lot up here in just a year.

Now for the random footnotes:

Behold, the savage irony that I have to move up here for a job from a place where I can't find a job in the place that Forbes magazine rates as "best place to find a job" (Raleigh-Cary NC). I'd be pissed



My pick for local hero for the Artvoice vote:



C'mon, the guy tries to raft across the border to pay a bill in Buffalo, which he can't reach because of some previous equally stupid crossing attempt some years back. It's just so stupid that it's actually cool.

Blackboard O' Love.



I think that spending Valentine's Day without female company doesn't bother me as much after that 5-year stretch I spent between 1998 and 2003 where the most contact I had with women was shaking their hands and the occasional hugs from friends.

Amazing I'm still sane after all these years.