I’ve been working over here at PayPal for one and a half years, and if there’s anything I’ve learned about the way Things Are Done(tm) around her,e it’s that if you ever publish something or make something publicly accessible to corpnet, you have to make it accessible to both Windows and Unix users. We have a tremendous amount of Powerpoint presentations online, but they also have text versions, for those that want them. And that’s kind of what I like about working here. If I really wanted to, I could dive into the deep end of the Unix pool and stay there for as long as I want to.

Of course, this was all before eBay bought us.

eBay is an all-Windows house. PayPal is a hybrid house, and the entire IT department likes it that way. Half of our NOC uses either Debian, Mandrake, FreeBSD or OS X. The other half uses Windows 2K. I have a Windows 2K box (motoko) and a FreeBSD box (haruka) at my desk, and I tend to favor motoko over haruka for most things. eBay prefers to send stuff out in MS-only formats and that tends to piss off some of the guys, even though StarOffice can handle it without difficulty. I guess it’s some sort of principle with them, but I couldn’t care less.

Over the course of the past three weeks, I’ve been slowly migrating my mailbox from Exchange to using the courier IMAP server on the new NOC mail server. See, we get bombarded by so much notification spam, that we needed our own dedicated mail server just to process it all. Why? Because Exchange was bombing big time when 6,000 emails would get sent out in the course of five minutes. The CPU on the poor thing would turn red, and that in itself sends yet another batch of notifications via email. Now there’s a little ironic twist.

Anyway, I spent some time off and on and in between other pressing issues to ditch Outlook altogether and start using a unix mail client with the IMAP Maildir instead of the POP /var/mail/accountname mailbox that I’m pretty used to. It’s not in mbox format, and I’m such a bonehead when it comes to understanding IMAP sometimes, so I had to call the cavalry back in to lend a hand. But after a couple of hours of reconfiguring the IMAP server and then the client a little bit, we finally figured it out and now I have a unix mail client for my corpmail. Yay me! Of course, now, getting used to it is the hard part…

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Beyond the obviousness of yesterday’s significance, I did take the last free day of my week to run some errands and drive around. With the notable exception of a few outings, I had not really gone on a random drive around the local area looking for something to do. I had experienced this sudden desire to get up off my ass, shower, and get ouf of the apartment for a while, just to experience the outside without any destination in mind. I ended up driving over to D&J Hobby to look and tempt myself into buying the core rulebooks for the third edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Wednesday night, I went over to ’s place as I (try to) do every Wednesday night and as promised, we put together a character for me. I tend to favor female elf druids as a matter of testing. It’s either that or male elf bards. I don’t know why, it’s just one of the two, depending on my mood at the time when I make the decision. I know druids, and I know bards. But anyway, I was in the damn store and I was looking around and I realized that the only RPG books I still own are all of those Rifts books. They’re still sitting in the box in my closet. So I started stacking Third Edition books and carrying them to the counter. By the time I passed by the dice pouches, I figured I was about to make a $200 purchase, and I still needed to buy dice! I turned around and I put them back. Christ.

See, the thing is, if I buy a collection of anything, there’s a little voice somewhere inside my head that instantly says, “Buy the rest, moron. You need a complete set.” This is why the economy is bouncing back, because of people like me. I’ll go on Amazon.com and pick up the first of an anime series, sometimes the first two, and then watch it. If I like it, the rest of it is shipped the next day. For example, I bought the first two discs for Hellsing, and after the end of the second disc, I was already adding the rest of the series (that’s available) to my shopping cart and putting a next day air order on that shipment. Of course, it also doesn’t help to have a similiarly inclined anime freak for a roommate. Right when you need someone to intervene, he’s actually cheering you on. Hey, fuckface… you can’t eat anime! “That’s okay, I don’t need food.” … Anyway… Today, while at work, I spent most of the day trying to get myself back into the swing of things, and also bored out of my mind when I finally read the 27,669th email that had accumulated since I went on my “weekend.” I immediately paid bills online (bye bye paycheck), and then I went over to http://www.anime-expo.org to sign myself up for this year’s annual road trip o’ fun down to Southern California. Hmm… ‘cept maybe this year, I’ll fly.

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Nevermind that the song Ironic spouts tragedy, not irony.

According to my calculations, yesterday marked the final day of my marriage. One day before Valentine’s. The superior court’s family division should have dissolved that particular domestic union if all went well. To be honest, I have no idea if there was much of a delay on it or not, but I did get the ‘final’ paperwork on Monday, so maybe I was divorced much earlier than I thought. In any case, last night, the boys and I went over to Furusato to have food and sake. Amazingly enough, Todd managed to down a shot or two of hot sake, in between massive draws of Coke into his mouth. The conversation never really touched upon how I was feeling about the whole thing, though I’m not entirely sure it was a subject they wanted to breach that night. The really important thing was that it was the best authentic Japanese food in the Bay Area and I was buying the drinks. Mostly because I wanted to drink to drink, but not because I was feeling depressed about the whole situation.

In looking back over past entires, I’ve lamented over quite a few aspects of that failed relationship. Partly because of the magnitude of the decision I made to pursue it and the subsequent actions which led to the demise were all of my own doing, and in that doing, not realizing how destructive I truly was. And now, in being in another relationship, I’m kind of looking over the whole thing and wondering where exactly do I get off in trying again. To be honest, there are times when I treasure my bachelor status, and then there are times when I don’t. No matter how you slice it, that experience is always going to be a part of me, and there’s nothing really more to say about it other than this: While this is the final curtain, and all the goodbyes have been said long ago, regardless of what happens, I’m still always going to love her for who she is. I’ll hang on to all the good times we did have, all of the good memories, and try to overcome all of the fights and harsh words and actions toward the end. I hope she finds what she’s looking for, and I wish her nothing but happiness in the end.

As for me… it’s finally time to close this door.

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