davemclain.com

After the July of Doom, I have been more active than before about trying to pare down my spending, especially in the realm of food. My parents gave me a rice cooker a while back, and rice as most of the world knows is a really good basis (or entirety) of an inexpensive meal. Also well known is the wonderful pairing of beans with said rice, a pairing with which I have been experimenting. At the moment I’ve only messed with white rice, but I hope to change that soonish. I have tried variations with black beans, charro beans (pinto + seasonings), refried, and various spices and salsas thrown around, including bacon in a couple notable meals, but I have found the winner:

This beast of a meal, provides 2 solid meals:

• 2/3 cup of rice: $0.10 (bought a 25lb bag of rice for $7, a while back)
• Can of black beans: $0.45
• 1/3 of jar of HEB medium salsa: ~$0.95
• 3 or 4 Tortillas: ~$0.20 (I actually don’t know how much I paid for this)
• Total cost: ~$1.70; Average meal cost: $0.85

Crap, I just blogged about a meal.

I don’t know who could possibly be reading my blog that doesn’t already know about this, but I’m on my way to property ownership. Today, I countersigned the final item on a contract to purchase the house located at 5105 Split Cedar Drive, Austin, TX 78735.

I’ve set up a page, http://davemclain.com/the-house?, that has pictures of the exterior of the house and its unreasonably awesome backyard. Also, be sure to visit the realtor’s site to see interior pics. The next time I’m out there with somebody who can get me inside I’ll be taking extensive interior shots as well, since the current pictures don’t include any of the bedrooms.
There’s a whole mess of stuff from here that can lead to us not making it all the way to closing:

• Financing falls through
• Inspection turns up something that we can’t come to an agreement about
• Austin decides that the blue carpet is home to endangered dust mites
• I freak out and don’t go through with it (this one is less likely than the dust mite thing)

Basically the stuff that is left isn’t o much stuff that’s dependent on me, as it is stuff that’s out of my hands, so given my apparent propensity to worry I try not to think about it and instead think about stuff like how quickly can I tear the carpet out of the bathrooms and can I afford hardwood floors in the living room or should I go with something cheaper?

I’ve been looking for roommates already, and I think at least one guy (Michael Swanson) is basically in, but I am now fairly confident in everything going through, so if you’ve got recommendations or are looking for a place, drop me a line.

Also, I have no taste when it comes to color. The closest thing I’ve ever done to decorating was when I bought some posters my freshman year, but ever since that year I’ve lived in white rooms with bare walls. Heck, one summer, while working for Microsoft in Redmond, I was so ambivalent to my living situation that I didn’t even have a bed, I just slept on the ground for a month before finally buying a sleeping pad from Target, which I used for the rest of the summer. If anything in the preceding paragraph depressed you and you are excited by the prospect of decorating a place, I’m going to have a budget, and if somebody else doesn’t spend it, it’ll just go to waste on Dominican Joe’s chai tea and Mexican food.
ps, as you may have noticed from the pictures this house has no white picket fence. I don’t think the style of the area would be particularly conducive for a white picket fence, nor am I enamored with the style. I apologize for the deception.

Last week I saw this video http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/10/urban-bee-keeper-vid.html, and since then I’ve been reading what can only be described as all the beekeeping materials I can find. I recommend Beginning Beekeeping for Kentuckians.

I noticed (as did my mom) that many of my recent posts involve the word suck. Life does not suck, it’s just that in a life that is generally quite good, the things that go wrong tend to stand out more than the things that are just slightly above the medium level of greatness.
The transition out of college continues to amaze me even though it has been 4 months since I last saw the inside of a classroom. Success is much less measurable when there aren’t things being returned to you with evaluations on easy to understand scales.

Congratulations on your improvement in learning new marketable skills, you’ve brought yourself up to a 92.5. Unfortunately due to the fact that you aren’t calling your friends your Social Skills have dropped to a 67, if you don’t get off your lazy butt, you’re going to do terrible on the final.

And yet, despite the flux, I feel like i’m getting the better end of the stick.

I apologize to those of you who feel that they ought to have gotten more advance notice, but don’t feel left out, nobody knew this was coming, not even me.

I was cruising crewseekers.net a few hours ago and one listing caught my eye about a delivery of a 46 foot yacht from Houston to Edinburgh with brief rest and resupply layovers in the Bahamas and the Azores. One of their junior crew broke their leg Saturday afternoon. The schedule is very tight and so they desperately needed crew willing to ship out tomorrow, they’re paying 3000 dollars and covering expenses for a flight back to Houston from Scotland. The listing said to call as late as necessary, that the posting would be taken down when the slot was filled, and I did. I told the skipper that I only had experience on a lake and on a much smaller boat, but apparently just having a warm body and knowing port from starboard was enough.

I’ve spent the last hour and a half throwing together the stuff I need for the 2 month trip plus a few weeks in Scotland at the far end. I don’t know that I’m going to tell my boss tomorrow morning, but we ship out at 10 am, and I’ve got to get to Houston. My lease is expiring May 31st, so if somebody is willing to move me, there’s 1000 dollars in it for them. I wish I had another day to clear everything up, but the later we wait the worse the potential of running into a tropical storm which apparently raises the insurance rates for transatlantic voyages immensely, so really the latest that you can leave and get good wind, but still be safe is April Fool’s Day.

Apparently, I don’t update this site enough for my sister. I think that may be due to the whole gainful employment thing. I feel a lot more guilty doing things like blogging when somebody’s buying me by the hour.

I’ve gone over on cell phone minutes, from here til Friday all communication with me cannot include daytime phone usage. Apparently T-mobile charges 40 cents a minute in overage charges. I probably would have bought an iPhone today except for the continued lack of 3G network access and the fact that I forgot I was right next to the Apple store.

Apparently I’m still on the list of people nearing graduation, this has mostly been just a whole mess of spam, but yesterday I got a call from a recruiter in New York asking me to come to a company night. Man, I need to get off that list.

I followed a facebook ad link because somebody wrote an Scourse clone. Scourse is a fast scheduling application that scrapes UT’s course schedule and lets you choose a schedule graphically. Anywho, I pulled up CS 345: Programming Languages as it interests me and I have only one semester left.

It’s waitlisted.

Not closed, not restricted, not cancelled. Waitlisted.

Apparently registration has already begun. OHCRAPOHCRAPOHCRAPOHCRAP. When’s my time? “Tue, Apr 17 11:00am - 5:00pm and 6:00pm - Midnight ” Cue a Charlie Brown style: AAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!

So now one of the classes I need to graduate (MIS375) is waitlisted and my next opportunity to get in classes that every Junior and Senior in my majors are trying to get is Saturday. At this point, my sisters have better shots at getting ideal schedules than i do, and they don’t get to register until June-ish.

I have no additional knowledge regarding the continuing Song of Ice and Fire series, though i wish i did. Those who have read this series and know me very well (Austin/Alfonso) may have already deduced that my primary laptop (formarly named Arya) has bitten the bullet, and that I have installed linux on the hardware. This is as a result of my overly complex naming scheme whereby machines are given names from House Lannister if they are running Linux and names from House Stark if they are running Windows. The system is further complicated by the distinction that clients get female names and servers get male names. Hence Tywin is the Linux file server/gateway, Catelyn is the Media box running Windows MCE and Tommen is a Linksys WRT54G which calims to be something else, but is actually running Linux under the hood.

Anyway, my laptop was Arya (Sansa is a tool) but through repeated crashes and a general malaise towards XP paired with a lack of desire for Vista, I pushed back into the territory of laptop Linux with Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft. And it Just Works ™. The extent to which this shocks me is difficult to understate. I tried to run Gentoo Linux on nearly identical hardware almost two years ago and met with a near total lack of success. Wireless was a pain in the butt and buggy as hell (where the worm never dies). X would crash not infrequently. Even browsing the web was crappy because of the lack of standards and the inability to just fire up IE. Don’t even get me started about trying to get Suspend to disk to work. All those things worked out of the box. Suspending to disk for the first time, i nearly flipped out. The biggest surprise is wireless. For the past year or so i’ve been using USB wireless adapters because my internal wireless card just would not work under Linux. I popped open the Gnome networking configuration dialog, popped in the SSID, the WEP key and it Just Worked.

There are still things that are going to be problematic (Visual Studio) but they shouldn’t be insurmountable. And to think I was considering getting a MacBook. Bah!

Of the following 3 good things, 2 of them happened to me today:

• I received, in writing, the highest paying job offer for this summer yet
• I found out that I got A’s on all the tests I took before the break
• I got a free t-shirt

Of the following 3 bad things, 2 of them happened to me today:

• I had a terrible night’s sleep because a cat kept licking my head
• I passed out in a pool of my own vomit
• I got rear-ended in stop and go traffic on 360

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

Do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way where I am going. ~ John  14:1-4

Man, I need another break.

It’s sometimes disturbing how much my methods of thinking are narrowing down to financial, statistical and computational analysis. I wonder how different a person I would be if I had not chosen these majors, and my current job.

Now that i’ve had a stern talking to and my continued enrollment in the University of Texas is confirmed at least through December of 2007 (and hopefully also at most through December 2007) suddenly long term employment is less than 12 months from now as opposed to slightly more than 18 months. This means that I’ve got another summer for potentially interning. I’ve got a part time job that pays less than an internship i could get over the summer, but has potential to become a full time job that would be acceptable to say the least in terms of being in Austin.

I’m not sure what the implications would be of taking a different job for the summer, but many application deadlines are over the next week, so i just farmed my resume out to 8 or so employers, half in Austin, half elsewhere (including one in Seattle (Amazon.com), somebody needs to slap me). I’m not sure i can accept any of them, which makes me feel kinda weird about potentially interviewing with any of them, but I’m not sure if it’s possible to even make half of what I made last summer working at ACM. I guess it all comes down to the NPV of the uncertain full time position.