jcm's blog

I never used to like buying so many random books, but as time moves on and one grows older, it’s something that becomes more enjoyable. I have a (slightly insatiable) appetite for knowledge that tends to leave me continually frustrated – I probably also have some kind of attention disorder considering the way my interests will swing from one topic to another. But I like being how I am, just it takes some getting used to never fully being satisfied. Here’s the Amazon purchases/arrivals from the last week:

• Mac OS X Internals. Can you believe Amit finally wrote a book on it? Well, he did, and this one is going to kill my free time once I have some free time to devote to it! This guy is seriously smart and seriously likes PowerPC – we’ve been in occasional contact for the last couple of years. Since I know the editor on that book too, I’m even more convinced.
• The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. After all, I want to support this guy in his quest to actually build/buy his pirate ship. I think that’s an insanely cool thing to do, and I think the whole FSM concept is a good one too. I’m going to especially enjoy reading this in the company of right-wing religious types who can’t take a joke, if I find some.
• Principia Discordia. Since I’m on the trail of more interesting religions, I figured I might as well read this classic too.
• The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Boating and Sailing. I need to re-learn a lot of this stuff. I’ve got my eye on a couple of other titles too – and once I move, and spring approaches, I’ll look into finding a local sailing club in Boston/Cambridge that I can get involved with.
• Born on a Blue Day: Memoir of Aspergers and an Extraordinary Mind. I like this guy (Daniel Tannet) because of his ability to explain his “condition” to the world around him. I’ve seen the recent UK documentary a couple of times and discovered his blog too.
• The Qur’an. I’ve never read it (we would say “Koran”) and figured that it was a good idea to try to understand the beliefs and values of Islam since I’m constantly frustrated and annoyed at the actions of the many extremists who take it all out of context.

I’ve been trying to come up with a 5 year plan for those things that I want to achieve now that I’ve decided to settle down with one job for the time being. Although I have less personal time, I am about to embark on an interesting journey and want to combine that with a lot of other tweaks in my personal life. For example, I’m on an aggressive diet at the moment and want to re-establish my interest in climbing, cycling and other activities. I want to learn to sail (again), take up fishing, learn to fly, go on more crazy adventures – and other stuff.

Jon.

So I got my approval to work in the United States. That came with a folder a half inch thick worth of supporting evidence that was necessary in order to convince the powers that be. I now need to go see some people and have some poking and prodding before (hopefully) they will issue me with a magical rubber stamped piece of paper in my passport and I can move. At this point, the clock is ticking – it’s likely that I’ll be out of here within two months at this point.

I’ve got a lot of fun ahead of me. I don’t have a US Social Security Number (SSN) and I can’t get one until after I move, but I probably can’t get a US bank account without an SSN either. And nobody really wants to let a house/appartment to you if you don’t have a US bank account… so I asked a friend and got the reply I expected – namely that I’m going to have a month of pain after I move. Figures. I don’t actually expect this to be easy, but I’m hopeful that I won’t get caught up in too much needless paperwork and legal red tape crappiness.

In preparation for the move, I’m moving my mail and other stuff onto machines that aren’t at home. I can’t move stuff onto dmesg and panic directly, because I need some kind of SLA to exist – so those machines are secondarying for me from this point in. Instead, I’ve setup a couple of new virtual machines with linode, Bytemark and so on. Some virtual machines like fremont.jonmasters.org and london.jonmasters.org are in the process of being made ready for this stuff. They’ll then host email and round-robbin on web content.

Jon.