blogx
musings of mark since 2001

Another week in, and one more day and night at this house for me. Storage is turning out to be kind of a problem, mainly having the $ for it to cover at least a couple months until there’s enough in the kitty to put down on an apartment deposit, along with the first month’s rent.

No word yet on the application for the Muni Trails & Parks worker, that will probably happen after I’m long gone and like other openings there’s a gazillion people trying to get it that are much younger and eager than I. Did an interview on Friday for a “guns for hire” company that might work into a 2 to 4 week gig doing xhtml and css markup. The client in question’s web site is nice visually but sorely lacking in the usability and under the hood categories. Four of us on the short list for that job even though, so like the other interviews am not holding my breath but at the moment it’s the most lucrtive, I’ll know more sometime tomorrow I hope.

A good portion of the Province are glued to the TV and the Vancouver Canucks hockey team in the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, clicking over to it once in a while seems to be a fairly close game to keep the fans happy. They should sell lots of beer tonight, a flat of 24 cans came into the house in the afternoon so I’m keeping quiet as a mouse here in the 120s.f. (12 feet by 10 feet) room in the back corner of the basement I’ve called home for the past 1-1/2 years.

We have really reached new lows in Canada when there isn’t any front page news nor mass protests resulting from the knowledge that we’re willingly allowing people to be tortured.

Best video of Neil Young I’ve ever seen:

Getting down to the wire now, just a little less than a week and it’s into the car and back to the mainland to get some sort of crap job until times are good enough to have a place to live and plug the computer into again. Haven’t found a place to store the little bit of stuff I do have, need about a closet’s worth of space for my worldly possessions and surely there is somewhere on this island chock full of expensive property for that.

The last time I was homeless everything went into a little cube at Maple Leaf Storage in downtown Vancouver, and about every other day I could stop by and get a clean set of clothes but this time there isn’t the money or the need. Not enough clothes anymore to worry about that, a holey pair of jeans to wear when the other pair is in the wash, a couple sweatshirts, few holey pairs of socks, and the set of clothes my brother bought for me at Nordstrom is it, so that will fit in the hatchback easy enough.

Throw in the little red bag of shaving stuff and the like and we’re good to go. It might be worth it to just camp out on Bowen for a little while with the interview at Municipal Hall being a likely possibility. A lot less crime to avoid, and I can throw in the Coleman stove etc. and live in a little bit more style than what it would be like in the city. A lot less work here too though if you aren’t in the construction or food service industry so if the Muni doesn’t come through the Coleman gets stashed (if you live in one of the city’s forests, a stove/tent is fine but with a car in the city it’s just extra baggage and it’s easier getting work with transportation other than the bus).

It will all be worth it in the end, the rent money for the month went to necessities like food and the phone bill and it was really, really nice to only have a few days this month without anything to eat. Still 25 lbs. underweight - it hasn’t been that good, but a little more energy now and its not so miserable. Still a few loose ends to clean up, got last year’s taxes done and don’t have anything to pay on my income of 5K thank goodness, but there are still some people on the web server for a while yet and that sort of thing.

I’ve been using Subversion to keep track of changes to markup and applications, and while it’s nice to have when things go wrong and you need to roll back a version or two using the command line all the time for it was a real pain in the butt. Tried a couple of the GUI clients for it, there’s a KDESVN even but having yet another window and it’s accompanying item in the taskbar is annoying.

To my delight, I’ve discovered that the Konqueror file manager that I use all day long simply needs it’s view changed to SVN and the client starts up right there in another tab. Very handy having the SVN client right in the file/window manager, a file can be changed and then checked on the local server, the subversion copy is marked for a commit and the same window with another couple tabs open can handle the ftp’ing.