DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Contrary to what I told all the folks I was hoping would help me move, I really do have a lot of junk. It was not a light move in any sense. We’d purged beforehand, shredding years of old credit-card statements and tax returns, and driving two carloads of useful but unloved furniture and clothes to Goodwill and the Salvation Army, but even so we were left with a house full of stuff.

Can a pack rat learn feng shui? A friend opines that by accumulating junk, one is expressing doubt that the universe will provide that which is needed, when it is needed. It seems to me if there’s anyone you don’t want to offend, it’s the universe, and so I immediately pledged to offload a large percentage of my accumulations. That was last December.

I still pledge to do that. Really. Erm, do I have to do it right away?

It’s at this point I tend to use a phrase that makes my pragmatic German relations laugh: I like the idea of keeping only the things I currently use… I’m just having trouble with the implementation. I think I don’t have a ton of certifiably useless junk stored away, but I probably do have a ton of stuff I’m fond of but won’t actually ever use. And hey, my new house has a garage. Maybe this is the universe’s way of telling me it’s OK to keep those 10 cubic yards of chattel.

Somewhere, in three of those boxes, are about 250 old science fiction paperbacks from the 1980s… Heinlein, Harrison, Asimov, Adams and so on. All my life I’ve lugged these books along, from apartment to apartment and house to house, with the idea that I’d eventually have a library where I’d display the collection. I find it ironic that, now that I have a room for such a library, I also have a new design sense, or perhaps a lack of design sense, or maybe it’s a sense of a lack of design. In a word, I demand austerity. I want unadorned space. I don’t want empty shelves — I don’t want the shelves in the first place. So I’m pretty sure I don’t want a room lined with the entire Tor catalog, 1981-1985.

I had never seen the word impedimenta before writing this piece, but it’s so wholly appropriate I may actually go re-label all the boxes in my garage.

I rented a big truck on the day we moved across town. You’ve seen them, lumbering inexpertly around wide turns, packed wall-to-wall with boxes and furniture and potted plants, driven by stressed-out and dirty and exhausted people who have apparently piloted one of these things about twice before in their lives. It isn’t just the tentative way they change lanes, it’s the way they stop traffic, set out pylons, and call in for airborne support when they have to back into a driveway. New drivers of big trucks need a football field to execute a three-point turn.

None of this is true of me, of course.

So I sit down in the truck, fire up the motor, pull the handle to release the parking brake, shift into drive, and lurch halfway across the driveway. The acrid smell of unhappy brake pads rises immediately. “What a maroon,” I think, “the previous renter must have tried to drive with the parking brake on.” And then I realize that the hood isn’t latched, and yes, I did put two and two together shortly after that.

I stood on my deck, eating an apple picked from my yard. When I finished, I threw the apple core as far as I could. And it landed on my property.

Sure, you could say, you’re a computer nerd, and you throw like a girl. You’d be right. Still — it’s a big yard.

The move went pretty well. I am indebted to the hardy souls who donated a day of their lives and worked tirelessly without complaint to haul my stuff: Patti, Bim, Chuck, and Pete. Thank you!

The crew put in about six hours of difficult labor. Then my wife and I put in about six more… we cleaned the old house, and packed the car (twice) with the handful of items that hadn’t fit onto the truck. Then we began the project for this month, unpacking. This house has more storage space, but it’s all different, and we’re having to find new ways and places to hide all our junk.

I was excited to realize I’ve been socking away all manner of useless electronic crap that I can now donate to the CRC. For example: an external ZIP drive that works great but requires a computer with an external SCSI-2 port. Or: two CueCats, never used, still in their original boxes from Wired. Or, from the scary tangle of wire that filled four boxes: seven ADB cables, thirteen RJ-11 phone cords, fifteen power cords, and a selection of unidentified ribbon cables. It will be refreshing to downsize my collection.

If you can read this, I congratulate you! You have braved the rough DNS waters to surf to my server’s new home.

I spent nearly five hours today standing around while a series (and, many times, a parallel) of Pac*Bell and PBI technicians tried to make my new DSL work. The first tech tried a router and 3 modems. All showed synch, but none passed traffic.

The installation tech had to leave (PBI folks are forbidden from working overtime) but they dispatched someone else, apparently missing the message that something in the central office was broken. The second tech confirmed that the first tech was correct in diagnosing a problem “elsewhere,” and then he went and sat in his truck for 90 minutes waiting for P*B to change hardware in the CO. The hardware apparently got changed, but no one thought to call me or him to say so.

Finally, after 6:00 PM, the line came up. And then about 11:00 PM I got my server installed and configured. And then by about 12:30 AM some of the DNS and whois changes began to take effect.

I think this site actually showed less than 1 hour’s downtime, although individual client experiences vary with the performance of their local DNS caches. I saw traffic coming it shortly after booting up the server, though, so that was gratifying. All in all it was the least painful server-and-DNS relocation I’ve ever done.

This is fun: online intelligence testing from the “High IQ society”.