I can’t believe that I haven’t used this title before, but that’s what the results of my search tells me. Tonight wraps up my last week (and day) in Dallas before I move, and whether I like it or not, I’m off to Seattle tomorrow. I’m pretty sure I’m close to having everything packed that I need/want which is still at my house, but if I forget anything, I’m sure my parents will be able to bring it when they inevitably come up in the next month or two. I guess I get to experience now what all my other friends went through four years ago as far as moving somewhere else goes. Then again, if it wasn’t happening now for Microsoft, it’d be happening in another month for grad school, so it’s really just the location that would be different.
Since I’m still pushing for Vegas at Thanksgiving, the next time I see myself back in Dallas would be Christmas barring any really weird, unforeseen (obviously, since I’m not seeing it now) circumstances. Hopefully if anything tech wise goes wrong I can handle that remotely; I should actually probably test doing Remote Assistance on my dad’s laptop just to see if that might work. I have no previous experience with that feature of Windows so I’d be surprised if it actually worked problem free the first time, but it may be something worth considering until I can make my dad buy a nettop for his office to use at home instead of his work laptop.
So, so long, Dallas. I figure I’ll be back living here at some point in the future, even if that point might not be visible at the present time. We’ll have to see just how long it takes for me to consider Seattle to be “home”; my guess is that it won’t be that quick, but a drawn out gradual process over the next year or two.
Personal - Dallas
I guess it’s sort of to be expected that the week before you move somewhere, there will be many “lasts” that happen. For example, yesterday was my last time to eat at El Fenix, today was my last day at work with Mr. McDonald, and tomorrow will be my last day to actually sleep here. I guess that also means that next week will be made up of many “firsts” also. At least it will be easy blogging material.
I’ve decided how I’m going to categorize my posts once I move: I’m going to make a new category called “Personal – Seattle” that everything will be put into for as long as I live there. The current “Personal” category I’ll rename to “Personal – Dallas”, and any future trips back here will be in a new “Dallas” subcategory of “Trips”. I know that you probably don’t really care, and in reality I don’t even care that much, but when I get around to making the changes this weekend, it will be nice to have my ideas written down for reference in case I forget. It’s such a complicated change, you know, there’s a big chance that could happen.
Personal - Dallas
Now that my computer, desk, and all other furniture in my room is gone with the exception of my bed (but not to worry, a different bed was shipped up there), I’m working from my laptop in what I thought to call about an hour ago my “remote office”. In most situations such as this the location of such an office would have to remain a mystery, but this time it just happens to be on a TV tray out in front of our HDTV. Not exactly the most comfortable office in the world, but I was told that another desk will be in my room by tomorrow evening, so that’s why I say this is only my temporary remote office.
Tomorrow will be my last day to go in and work with Mr. McDonald, and then on Friday my car will be shipped. Yeah, my car actually wasn’t being transported by the same people today, but it ended up not being a problem for my computer as they just loaded it up in the van as I had wrapped it up. I even got a comment about how well wrapped it and my monitor were which I would have sworn was sarcasm (since they weren’t by any stretch of the imagination) if it wasn’t for the fact that the mover said it completely sincerely.
Personal - Dallas
I’m making this post from my phone only because I forgot to do so before beginning to take apart my computer for the night. I had thought about posting before taking a shower, but as is now quite apparent, I forgot to do so. It’s been a while since I’ve had one of these “forgotten posts”, but you could argue that I’m just a little bit preoccupied with other things right now.
The packing took a long time (close to 5 hours), but it managed to all get done. With the exception of my computer stuff, everything is now in boxes that will be taken away tomorrow morning. My computer won’t actually be in a box since they didn’t have a size big enough to fit the dimensions of my tower, so the genius plan for that is to just ship it in my car. If my car wasn’t big enough to hold my computer, then I think we might have had a slight problem on our hands.
Personal - Dallas
The movers will be coming tomorrow to pack all (or rather, most) of my stuff, and then it will all be loaded onto a truck and taken away from me on Wednesday. I say they’ll be packing most of my stuff because I’ve gotten confirmation that they’ll let me keep my computer unpacked for the time being so that I’ll have it tomorrow to use. The plan is that they’ll simply leave me the packing materials, and I can do it myself. This resolution is quite agreeable with me, and it means that I’ll have to rely solely on my laptop for one less day.
Most of today was spent getting all of my consoles back into their boxes and placing stuff out on the floor so that it would be very easy for me to direct exactly what would and would not be getting packed. Effectively, this let’s me keep using the closets for storage of stuff that’s going to stay here and not need to worry about identifying individual items for the movers. Easier for me, easier for them, and hopefully more efficient/quicker also.
Personal - Dallas
Well, perhaps “never” is a bit too strong of a word to use, but the intended meaning is that this is the last Sunday I’ll be living here. So, how did I spend my last Sunday? Well, aside from watching TV and playing WoW, I (hopefully) taught my mom how to shock our pool and also began to clean out stuff from underneath my bed. Fun, informative, and productive: what more can you ask for in a weekend?
I’m still not sure what day the movers will be coming to take all my stuff, but I can hopefully take that to mean tomorrow isn’t the day. I’ll probably start putting all of my game consoles up in their boxes soon in order for transport, but it’s nice to not have to worry about packing everything. I simply point and say what does and doesn’t go, and the moving company takes care of the rest. Yeah, I seriously don’t mind letting Microsoft handle everything at all.
Personal - Dallas
As of this exact instant in time, I haven’t heard anything about what day the movers are coming to relieve me of my car and most everything else of any entertainment value in my house. This is actually a good thing for me because while I’m on track to get all of my movie ripping done tomorrow night, another night or two of being able to do some TV show action would be nice also. Basically, the reason I care is because whatever I get ripped/converted here will be watchable during the time I’m without my DVDs (so effectively, up until I move into my permanent apartment). I’ve also discovered that I’ll need to rerip a couple DVDs due to annoying subtitle issues, but that’s just something that I’ll need to deal with later.
Today I also went over to Warren’s house (yes, I realize that yesterday I went back to my anonymous people references) in an attempt to move his iTunes library from his desktop to his laptop. Apparently, Apple doesn’t think that’s something people need an easy way to do. My initial solution was to copy all of the songs to my portable hard drive and transfer them that way, but the initial time estimate on that was going to be four hours long. So, the solution I ultimately got working (or at least assume I did since I never got a call from Warren saying it didn’t work) was to share the directory on the desktop and just have him copy everything over on their network. Not the cleanest solution in the world, but it’s at least a solution. Apple, might I just throw a hint your way and suggest you solve this issue by making it “just work”.
Personal - Dallas
If it weren’t for the fact that I’m an incredibly lazy human being, I could have three or four more websites up and running by now. As it stands, I’ll hopefully have one more online in a couple of weeks. With that will also come a switch of my web host most likely so that I can manage all of my sites under one hosting account. That could potentially introduce some weird issues as far as updates go, but hopefully I should have everything sorted out well enough in advance that any transition would go as smoothly as possible.
Tomorrow my grandparents are coming out here for lunch, but aside from that, my day is pretty much like any other. I do need to run down to HP in order to work on someone’s computer, so I’ll probably do that sometime in the mid-afternoon. I also need to work on backing up all of my data on this computer sooner or later so I can disassemble it into pieces and prepare it for transport up to Seattle. The disassembling may or may not be truly necessary, but the backup most definitely is. Ideally once I get up to Seattle and reform my technology world, I’ll have a much better backup system in place than I do right now (which is none at all except for the occasional burned DVD).
Personal - Dallas
One problem that exists with counting down to anything here stems from the fact that all my posts come at the end of the day rather than the beginning. For example, let’s say we were counting down until Saturday. Calendar wise, there’s two days left (today and tomorrow); however, from when I’m making this post, you could really argue that there’s only one day left. That’s why I thought about making this post yesterday, processed the problem I just outlined, and set it aside until today.
So, regardless of if you want to count today or not, I have a single digit number of days left in Dallas. This number is either 8 or 9, but the fact remains that it’s still very small as opposed to back in November. With this last 8th or 9th day in Dallas, I headed down to HP for my likely near final time and then came home and make progress in Twilight Princess. It’s extremely unlikely that I’ll beat the game before all my stuff is taken away next week, but if I ignore doing other things that I need to do this weekend and concentrate solely on it, I could see myself getting most of the way through. Actually, I can’t really remember how many dungeons there are in it total, but I’m pretty sure I remember it being more than Wind Waker. Just so I can stay with the Zelda theme after all my fun stuff gets taken away, I’ll probably pop Minish Cap into my DS and play it again since it’s probably my favorite handheld iteration of the series ever.
Personal - Dallas
I typically try to avoid any sort of association with the “South” (clothing, accent, etc.), but considering that the Northwest seems to have no regional pride at all, perhaps I should take these last few days and make note of my end of being a Texan, at least in the aspect of where I live. On a semi-related note, I refuse to call the area of the country where Washington/Seattle is the “Pacific Northwest”. Maybe this is just be being way too reasonable, but exactly what other “Northwest” do we have? The Atlantic Northwest? The Gulf of Mexico Northwest? Three totally unnecessary syllables if you want my take on the whole thing.
Not much cleaning got done today, but there wasn’t really a pressing need for any to get done either. I started replaying Twilight Princess, but I’m going through the Wii version this time rather than the Gamecube one. Fortunately I’m so far removed from my initial playthrough that the whole “mirror image” swap doesn’t bother me in the slightest, although I have realized a couple places where I remembered the map being the other way around.
Personal - Dallas