Certain people have been pestering me to update my diary. It's only been 9 months... (-:

Consulting

Well... It turns out I'm a software consultant. Who knew?

Anne's company needed some perl scripts, so I wrote them. It started as a two week contract, back last October and turned into two months. It was fun, because I had lots of friends at Geocast, and it was easy work, and the money was good. So...

I formed my own company, kbobsoft, and started looking for more work. Found it at TiVo. Been working for TiVo since March.

I've never been sure whether "software contractor" or "software consultant" is better. I use the two terms more or less interchangeably. I think "consultant" sounds snottier.

TiVo:)

TiVo is an incredibly cool company. They have the best engineering organization I've ever seen. Their product is pretty cool, too. I really hope they survive -- they deserve to prosper.

Oregon, Ho!

We finally did it. Moved out of Silicon Valley, and into beautiful Lane County, Oregon. We're making new friends pretty well. Here are a few: sethcohn, rybolov, Kyrgan, naturedarren.

We bought a big-ass house 15 miles outside Eugene, on 50 acres of forested hillside.

QWest sucks

Yeah, they're an RBOC, so you expect them to suck. But QWest exceeds expectations. Their slogan is,

QWest. We suck harder.

The first three weeks we were here, they turned our POTS lines off and on randomly. We scheduled appointments (with a granularity of a whole day) to get them turned on, and the dispatcher didn't bother to send anyone to our house that day. Anne spent a total of six hours at a phone booth in town pleading with them to turn our phones back on.

Today I'm sitting at home (all day -- can't schedule appointments any closer than a whole day) waiting for them to install the T1. We ordered it on May 15th. I bet they won't show today. Another whole day wasted. I wish I could charge them my usual rate. (-:

PC Training Center

Since we only have a modem at 24 KBps until QWest gets off its ass, I rented a funky little room at the PC Training Center in Eugene. I don't know why it's called that -- it's really a mom & pop computer store. The owner, Stan, refuses to sell systems with Windows preinstalled. You can order a system with any Linux distribution you want (probably BSD too), or you can order it with blank disks that you can install Windows on yourself. That's cool.

My office is 11x11, and it's full of the previous tenant's stuff. I pushed enough of it out of the way that I could set up two TVs and two TiVos. I'm subletting Stan's DSL. He has an E-Smith gateway/firewall, and I have a coyote firewall, so all my packets are double-NATted.