originally posted october 27, 2003
building an attention span
The air is crisp and cold outside. The weather forecast this winter calls for 20 inches more snow than usual; that's a relief from last winter, when we had 40 more than normal. Thanks to the end of Daylight Savings Time, the sun sets long before I get done with work.
About two and a half months remain on my lease. I've thought about moving to a less expensive place next year, trading away my walking-distance commute in exchange for a few hundred dollars' savings per month. On the other hand, I'm still not doing jack crap with my free time.
another glimpse of college life
On the weekend of October 18, I visited my brother Adam up at RIT in Rochester. At 280 miles, that trip took me five hours with no traffic. My parents and youngest brother David left earlier in the morning for their six-and-a-half hour drive.
RIT isn't actually in Rochester, but rather a suburb called Henrietta. It's a perfect little college town, with a plethora of big-box stores. Within a mile of campus, there's a Target, Home Depot, Lowe's, Wegman's grocery store, Wal-Mart, Circuit City, Best Buy, Sam's Club, and an enclosed shopping mall. There's even a large store dedicated to card, strategy, and role-playing games. For a college student that knows someone with a car, it's perfect.
I lived in dorms my entire time at CMU, making the transition to an apartment all the more jarring. Going to the Sol Heumann dorm at RIT was like going back in time. Rooms are small but well-appointed, far nicer than the dungeons of Donner Hall that CMU freshmen know all too well. All the rooms have access to digital cable, but it's not at all necessary when you factor in the massive file-sharing network that brings together college students like I rarely saw in my day.
During one of the getting-to-know-you exercises in my freshman year of 1999, one of the geekier kids on my floor remarked that he had a gigabyte of MP3s. That drew mostly confused looks: what were MP3s? Then Napster and other services grew popular, and by the end of my freshman year it seemed like everyone had several gigabytes of downloaded music. As more and more freshmen came in having already used these services on their own cable modems, the whole thing mushroomed out of control. I still remember the outcry after 71 students lost their network access due to MP3 sharing during my freshman year. This landmark event underscored the point that college students will not be denied the right to share copyrighted material.
RIT shares its network connection with the University of Rochester, SUNY-Buffalo, the University of Maryland, and some other colleges. Binding them all is a giant Direct Connect hub where my brother fills his hard drive with movies that download at about 800 kB per second. (Other dorms have 100 megabit ethernet; Adam has to make do with only 10 megabit.) One user was sharing over 500 gigabytes all by himself, including over 200 GB of anime alone. Over 15 terabytes of games, movies, music, and untold hours of pornography are just a click and a few minutes away. When RIT's brass tries to shut this operation down, I expect riots in the streets.
stuff I stopped doing
Back as late as March, I spent a few days each week going out to eat, usually at small bar/restaurant places around the Strip District. That sent my food bill up to the neighborhood of $500 a month, compared to about $350 more recently. I can't say I miss the experience of quietly eating overpriced hors d'oeuvres and drinking beer at a smoky bar. Two of my preferred spots have since died out; the Foundry Ale Works closed in early June, and I just noticed a "For Sale" sign on Busker's this month. Nowadays, I grab a cheap fast-food meal when I don't feel like cooking.
I also stopped reading. Earlier this year I went on a small book-buying spree, including about 1400 pages' worth of Neal Stephenson. I've read about 450 of those, which amounts to less than half of Cryptonomicon. With my work week down to a more sane 40 hours, there's really no excuse not to get back into reading.
I think I've given up on non-root vegetables. After I stopped having salads and cold-cut sandwiches, my lettuce and onions just shriveled up into nothing. My carrots and potatoes, meanwhile, will always last until I eat them. Sometimes when I get too tired to go out but too uninspired to cook, it's never too difficult to throw a potato in the oven for 75 minutes.
My alarm clock has become useless. Since my company allows me to work flexible hours, the normal 8-to-5 schedule has slowly drifted to 10-to-7. Especially during the baseball playoffs, that really left me with no time to do anything by night. My alarm has been set for 7:20 AM or earlier every day for the last two weeks, but I haven't been cooperating. Even this morning's special of Guns 'n Roses didn't get me out of bed very fast.
However, there's still one bright spot in all of this. After months upon months of planning and schedule conflicts, I finally get to visit Boston and see my good friend Meg this coming weekend. I got a halfway decent deal from site59, but that site isn't nearly as kind to single travelers like me as it is to couples traveling together. No matter what, I'm going to Boston this weekend, and I'm not packing anything with a Yankees logo on it.
Back to October 2003, or to the year 2003.
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