It’s been a long two years, but now that I’m no longer as depressed, there isn’t really a pressing need for me to vent. Not on a Friendster blog anyway.

There may be other blogs, someday. Probably not here - it’s kinda hard to post any sensitive information on Friendster, especially since it’s linked to my real name. So I’m forced to limit myself to inane, safe stuff like work.

Anyway. No job yet, living off my savings, no clear prospects for the next few months, and yet I am unreasonably happy. I suppose the shine will wear off as my budget gets tighter, but for now I am busy showing my appreciation for all the friends who have stood by and kept my spirits up these past couple of years.

So. Trying to enjoy the lack of responsibility, at least for the next few weeks before it’s time to go back to the grind.

Keeping my options open, and I’m finding that I’m unusually optimistic for the first time in years. Decades, even.

Maybe there’s time enough to finally go back and do all the things I’d always wanted to do. Maybe there’s time enough to get my life in order.

Maybe there’s time enough for love.

Haven’t been around the city much like I planned, except for a couple of trips to the Palace of the Legion of Honor and the mall, and lakeside walks in the afternoons.

And here I am, in much the same situation I was two years ago. No job, no income, in an expensive apartment in an expensive city. Oh, which is why I’m giving this up - the lease expires this month, and I can’t afford another year-long lease. Between the rent, the food and the taxes, I haven’t managed to save as much as I’d liked over the past two years. People look at how much I make and say I must be rich by now, but it’s interesting that I haven’t been able to buy any computer stuff in over a year. Back in UPLB I had enough money to upgrade my rig every six months or so, with enough left over for eating out or going to the bar two, three times a week.

Here? My checking account keeps sending me "low balance" email every week or so. Ramen for lunch. I’ve only eaten out maybe three times over the past year.

Living in the Bay Area, tech center of the Western world, and there’s all these technological wonders in the shop windows, but I never have any money to buy anything. And no, with the way things were going, the situation wasn’t going to improve.

I’ve decided that life in the big city isn’t for me. Never liked cities, not even Manila.
So now I’m going back home for a few months while I reconsider my options.

So. Flying out of SFO early Tuesday morning, landing in Manila at around ten AM Wednesday next week.

Packing. Packing two years of my life and all my worldly possessions in two bags and a 24×24 box. I find it interesting that by volume, I have more books than clothes.

Backing up my files onto three hard disks and two computers. Still deciding on whether to ship my computer home as ocean cargo, or bring it as checked-in luggage.

I had a brief flash of irrational anger when my brother suggested leaving the computer behind. This is the only thing I have of value here. I’m paying for the ticket, I’m paying for the shipping and I’m damn well paying to bring it along.

I guess I’m closing one chapter of my life - can’t say I enjoyed my stint in the IT startup industry, but it was… instructive. I learned a lot.

I’ve lost a lot of my faith in humanity.  I guess this is part of growing up, learning the hard way that the world is a cruel, hard place and people are going to take advantage of you if you let them. There was a time when I thought sacrifice and hard work would pay off eventually, but now I know better.

I’ve learned that money can’t make me happy. I guess I’m fortunate - a lot of people never get the chance to figure that out for themselves.  Money doesn’t buy happiness - but then I’d known that since I was a child.

My sister tells me I shouldn’t worry - I can find a job anywhere I choose. I don’t share her optimism, but she’s been right so far.

Anyway. Life goes on. Time to get on with mine.

Two weeks from now is the two year mark. Two years living in this country. Twenty months as an overseas contractor.

And this morning I just sent in my letter of resignation.

I’ve been agonizing over the decision all weekend. Decided to sleep on it in case that would change my mind.

It did. This morning I woke up, said to myself "I hate this job", and wrote and sent the e-mail.

Then I went off, took a shower and made myself a ham-and-cheese sandwich for breakfast. For a change.

It feels good to have time to actually make breakfast. Usually by this time I’ve had a couple of calls, and I’m already back in the code. Today is different.

Today I kick back and work a little slower. Today I take a long frantic phone call from my boss, begging me for a little more time (instead of the other way around). With a smile on my face.

Today I take my lunch break and decide that instead of working through lunch, I’m going to log onto Warcraft and see what my friends are up to.

Today is the day I take charge of where my life is heading. Today is the day I stop working myself sick. Today I will put in less than sixteen hours of work.

Today is a nice sunny day. I think I’ll go for a walk.

From Perry Bible Fellowship.

Wish it lasted longer. Being able to sleep in until noon. Going out with friends for coffee or dinner. Just being able to sit and spend an evening with a good friend, without having my cellphone go off every two hours. For the first time in my life in a long, long time, I stayed away from the computer for more than eight hours at a time, and it felt good to ignore the incessant emails screaming "URGENT!!" and "ASAP!!"  and "WHERE ARE YOU WE HAVE AN EMERGENCY THE BUTTONS ON THE WEB PAGE ARE THE WRONG SHADE OF BLUE".

Back to reality and I am back in my room, churning out code and bug fixes ten to sixteen hours per day. My actionables list is getting longer each day, when they expect you to produce three new features in one week (despite your telling them that each new software feature will take two weeks to code and another week to test).

Back in the box. My family doesn’t really understand what I do in my room all day and night, all they know is that I stay in my room, do strange computer stuff and am on the phone all the time, and every two weeks a check comes in the mail.

So. I have not been happy with my job for a long time now, but I haven’t been getting any responses from any of my other job applications. I do get calls from headhunters from time to time, but there’s never any response after I send them an updated resume, which leads me to believe they’re just calling me to pad out their list of applicants.

I wish I could say my life was going in circles, at least I’d be moving. Right now it’s at a dead stop. No change, no improvement. I used to have a pretty good work ethic (I kept getting compliments on that all the time from my boss) but I can feel even that draining away. It’s hard to stay motivated when you know that three months down the line they’re gonna throw out this version of the software and ask for a near-complete rewrite.

It’s hard to stay motivated when you’re staring an unreasonable deadline in the face and it’s five AM, you haven’t slept in two days, and you know you’re not gonna finish it in time for the scheduled test in four hours.

I did finally make a decision, as the plane’s wheels touched down on the SFO runway. I will look for something else to do.

Whatever it is, it won’t be with this company. I am looking for another job. I am sending out applications to graduate schools. I am steeling myself for the inevitable few months of unemployment.

And it doesn’t scare me as much now. Not as much as two years ago.

Early Monday morning, and I’d normally hate Mondays, except that when every day is like the next, you tend to hate all the days of the week equally.

This is the sixth sunrise in a row I am watching, and I am comforting myself by telling myself I just need to hang on for a month or two. Just a little longer.

Just a little bit more.

So. Hoped for more of a vacation, but the best I can get is two weeks. Working vacation at that - my boss still expects me to be available on my cellphone, and expects me to keep working over the break. Typical.

Anyway. I am flying home to the Philippines for two weeks, February 16 to 28. I’ll be spending Valentine’s evening somewhere over the Pacific. First vacation after one and a half years of work. I’ve been away for almost two years.

I’m still pretty lucky I guess - most of my friends have not had the chance to go home in years, due to visa or other concerns. I can go home as often as I want, theoretically, as long as I have enough money for airfare.

And after nearly two years, this city, this country still isn’t home to me. Home is still that small college town in the foothills of Mt. Makiling. I realize this is not going to change, anytime soon.

And I miss it. Miss it terribly.

I am afraid that the next two weeks will be so good, so fun, that I’m going to have trouble flying back and going back to work.

Back to the real world, as they say. Back to the grind. Back to forcing myself awake every morning, bleary eyed as I realize I’ve fallen asleep at the computer again. Back to a life where weekdays and weekends blur together and all you can look forward to is getting this project out of the way before more work comes down the pipe.

Ah, well. I’ve started hating this job months ago, but my resume isn’t good enough to get anything better.

I’m too old for this. Maybe if I was just fresh out of college I’d still be excited about working on the cutting edge of Internet technology, but as it is, new and exciting doesn’t make up for crappy hours and no benefits.

Which is why I try not to think too long-term. Just try to get to the next day, the next week, the next month, and try not to think of where you’re going.

Oh, well. Hopefully the next two weeks away from the Real World will change my perspective. Maybe I just need some time to remember why I’m working this hard, why I’m saving up this money, why I’ve gone and moved seven thousand miles away from all the people I love.

Just need a little time.

So. Like I said. Nothing happening. Still working at this Silicon Valley startup, still not getting any raises or bonuses or overtime pay.

Overworked and underpaid. Not getting nowhere, not getting laid…

Losing what little free time I used to have, now that I’m on the phones 24/7, and people seem to prefer to call the 1-800 number at nine AM on a Sunday morning. Or eleven PM Saturday night.

Ah, well. Travel the world, experience interesting cultures, and attempt to decipher various exotic accents as customers scream at you for technical support.

Or having to wait to make a call until twelve midnight, waiting until offices open in Moscow, because you need a license key from the developers, and you need it now, because the new domain must be online by 8 AM tomorrow, no excuses, no allowances for DNS propagation time.

Ah well. I did know the hours I was prepared to put in. I did read the contract twice before signing it. I knew how much I was going to get paid. I knew that the first job I was going to take would suck.

I did think that I wouldn’t last six months before I’d be forced to quit and find another job, though.

Now I’m here, a year and a half in. Didn’t think I’d last this long, but hey. Wonders never cease.

Still, I haven’t fully adjusted to this life yet.

I think the term they use is "insufficiently socialized". Saying "I don’t get out much" is an understatement - I have been outside the apartment exactly three times in the past month.

Oh, I guess I can keep it up. As long as the checks keep coming in the mail, as long as I can pay rent and utilities, as long as I can put food on the table. As long as I draw breath, as long as I can keep sane.

All my life I’ve been looking for something I can keep doing for the rest of my life. A safe little rut I could get stuck in, and never leave.

For over a decade I thought that rut was in the university, teaching. Staying within my comfort zone (and that was extremely comfortable) just puttering around, pretending I was making a difference.

But hey. I was never a very good teacher (there were times when my lectures bored ME to death) and over the years I came to realize that maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a researcher. I wasn’t an expert in the cutting edge of computer science theory. I was in systems.

Systems adminstrators are the janitors and plumbers of the Internet. We keep the pipes clean and the data flowing, and if we do our job right, nobody notices. And management believes that the stuff we do can be done by any high school graduate. Janitors and plumbers.

And that used to be all right with me. I’d spent months working on this insanely complicated multi-level web cache system, trying to optimize web traffic, making sure the scant bandwidth the university had wasn’t saturated by any single user. Building filters, routers, traffic shapers. Network monitors and automatic fallback routes. Multiple mail servers, active spam traps. 2 AM Sunday morning in the network room, fighting off a rootkit penetration attempt from somewhere in Eastern Europe. Hacking together an ARP-proxied firewall, so that the Windows viruses from the Devcom PCs wouldn’t infect the ones in Engineering. Setting up Samba to tunnel CIFS traffic between three separate physical subnets, across two buildings.

And after each little accomplishment, each little victory, there was nobody to talk to. Nobody I could brag to about how I finally got the hit ratio up to forty percent, or that the web failover successfully kicked in when we lost the UP Diliman link yet again. Or that I’d successfully installed Slackware (Splack) on an old Sparc 10, with my MP3 collection running on a SCSI RAID cluster cobbled together from discarded six-year-old drives.

Which was fine, again. I didn’t really crave recognition. I did stuff for my own amusement, and sometimes it was a happy coincidence that the stuff I did was useful for someone else.

And I guess it was time I gave that up. Oh, I guess the things I do now isn’t that much different, except that now, I don’t really choose which projects I do, and most of the time major engineering decisions are driven by marketing considerations. Sure, I can do this, but will it sell?

So. The hours I spend on my job haven’t changed that much, but the amount of time I spend working on the machines as opposed to sitting in meetings has decreased.

And I’ve always liked working with machines more than I liked talking to people. Machines are nice and deterministic - there’s always a specific cause and effect, nice and logical. Human relationships, on the other hand, have always given me more than a bit of trouble.

I’ve always had trouble picking up hints when talking with people. It’s that "insufficiently socialized" problem again. All these questions with no clear answers. "Why is she still talking to me?"  "Does she want something?" "Why is she pissed?" "What did I do wrong again?"

"Why is she pointing that knife at me?"

Ah well. Some questions I choose to leave unanswered. Especially when I know I’m not going to like what the answer will probably be.

It’s just a long article on the state-of-the-art in x86 processors. State of the art circa 1994. I posted this on my personal web site, one of a series of handouts I was using for CS 132, Computer Organization and Architecture.

To quote the last line of the page:
"The information in this
file was researched in mid-1994 to early 1995, and some or all of the data
presented may be out of date."

Creepy, because I’d taken that page down ten years ago, and to my knowledge only one other person asked for permission to mirror it (and this guy wasn’t him). I’d written that web page way back when we were using Lynx and Mosaic. Don’t know where else it went before this guy put it on his page.

A quick look around Google (ego-surfing: punching your name into Google to find out how many pages register hits) shows me one of my Java programs (actually, the very first Java program I’d written) being used to teach EVSC 430L at virginia.edu.

The timestamp on TreeTest.java reads 96/02/12. I’m cringing at the sight of my decade-old code (which I actually translated directly from Pascal to Java, with all the attendant non-OO structures) embarrassingly posted on someone else’s website.

I guess it’s true that anything you do online is forever saved in the dark corners of the Internet.

They did bring back nice memories of that time - I’d just enrolled in Graduate School, and everything was so new. Nobody knew what this Internet was (except for us geeks in the Computer Science Division) and for us, the Internet consisted of email, USENET and FTP sites.

Back then, to get on the Internet you had to share time on a couple of VT100 terminals (amber text) hooked up via serial ribbon cable to mudspring.uplb.edu.ph - our Sparc IPX. There were only two machines visible on uplb.edu.ph - makiling, a 386 running BSD/386 which was our main DNS and mail server, and mudspring, where the grad student accounts were kept.

I remember spending too much time on USENET. I remember the glory days of SimTel.

I remember writing a dining philosophers simulator using LWP on SunOS 4.x. That was stupid. But fun.

I remember stringing several meters of ribbon cable outside the window from the server room to our office, and wrestling with Trumpet Winsock on Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. I remember the first time I was able to get Mosaic running over a SLIP connection (and how we were happy if we were able to run it for more than two hours without crashing).

I have been on the Internet for over twelve years now. Damn but that makes me feel old.

Trying to diet. Trying to stay away from dairy. Cut down on my intake. And then some days you just have to give in and fix yourself a nice baked potato with real sweet cream butter (not margarine or butter spread) and real bacon (and not that soy bacon-flavored stuff from a plastic bottle) and revel in the wrongness of thirty to fifty grams of saturated fat.

Which is why despite eating less than I have ever been in my life, I am still not losing weight. Or rather, I did lose a couple of inches last month, but I’ve gotten them back.

I should be buying low-fat, diet stuff, but the unhealthy food is just so much cheaper. Plus diet soda has aspartame or splenda, which always gives me a headache. Unfortunately, most sodas here have switched over to high fructose corn syrup (and not the nice cane sugar we have back home) so I have found it prudent to cut down on my soda intake to one can a day.

Of course, without my normal sugar high, I keep falling asleep at the computer. I’m not much of a caffeine addict. Maybe I should learn to drink coffee. Or maybe I should switch from Sprite to Mountain Dew.

Ah, well. Tax time reminds me once again that I am spending far, far too much on far, far too little.
But then, some people tell me, it’s no use working hard if you don’t enjoy your money. They tell me life is too short, that I should loosen up.

Of course, I know better than to take financial advice from people who say things like that.

My fiscal policy used to be simple. Spend less than you make. Invest the difference.

That worked way back when I wasn’t making much. Now it’s a bit more complicated.

Oh, well. Bills and groceries and insurance and rent and service charges and taxes, and at the end of the day it all leaves you with a pathetic little number that sums up how much of a life you’re going to have this month.

So you scrimp and save and put everything aside, hoping one day to get enough time off from work to fly off to distant beaches, trying to squeeze two years’ worth of enjoyment into two weeks before flying back to the work pits to slave away yet again.

And this, this is what depresses me. The thought of doing this for the next five, ten, twenty years. The matter-of-fact way people here accept this as normal, accept this as how responsible, mature adults live their lives.

And I am not mature. I am very irresponsible, and I may not live long enough to reach adulthood.

It’s the way of the world, I guess. Oh, well. Nothing to do but hang on for the ride. Wherever it takes me.

Maybe someday it’ll finally take me home.

http://www.dragonlance-movie.com/

The title from IMDB is Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight, which may mean this is the first of a trilogy (Autumn Twilight is the first book of the Chronicles).

Apparently, Kiefer Sutherland is voicing Raistlin. Hmm. I’m having some trouble wrapping my mind around the idea of Jack Bauer=Raistlin Majere. Don’t they need someone darker, more emo?

Other stars:

Lucy Lawless - Goldmoon (a bit of a peripheral character in the novels, so I don’t know how big a role she plays in the movie).

Michael Rosenbaum (Lex from Smallville) - Tanis Half-Elven (I’d have thought Sutherland would be a better fit for Tanis, but what do I know…)

Michelle Trachtenberg (Dawn from Buffy) - Tika (again, another peripheral character, although this one looks like a better fit)

Dragonlance isn’t anywhere near LOTR of course, but it’s still part of ’80s nostalgia, especially for those of us who played the original 1st Ed AD&D modules. It’s a geek thing.