12 December 2009
Coffee, Cigarettes, Whiskey, and the Web is moving!
I've made a spot on my regular server for this blog, and imported all the old posts so that they'll remain persistent. Link soon.
05 December 2009
A real estate annoyance or six.
I've started looking for a new place to live again, and I'm still infected with the notion that I could afford to buy a place. I'm sitting on a couple of things before I get together the financial part of the deal but for now I'm looking at places. The whole process annoys me as much as it stresses me out, which is a lot. Here are some reasons.
Are you sure that's "uptown"?
This is probably never going to die, and it's probably been there since well before Craigslist, but it's still really annoying. I search by neighbourhood a lot, because I know neighbourhoods (Chicago is, after all, a city of neighbourhoods, so I'm told), and I know which ones I'd like to live in and which ones are undesirable to me for one reason or another. Don't try to bait and switch me by labeling something further north than Foster and further west than California as "uptown". That's not uptown, that's the middle of nowhere and dangerously close to being nowhere at all. I'm not even sure which neighbourhood that would be, but it's not Uptown and actually not even within easy walking distance of Uptown's centre. That means it should not show up in my search for "uptown".
$199
WTF does that even mean? It's a condo, it's for sale, it's listed in the "Real Estate - By Owner" category... can I pick it up for just two C-notes? Really? What're the assessments, like $10/mo? If you're not comfortable listing the actual price then don't list the property online and go through a broker or someone who's capable of that level of subtlety. Listing a property for less than a grand when it's obviously more is annoying at best and dishonest at worst. If you meant to put a "K" at the end of that but didn't, it still shouldn't be showing up in searches for sub-$150K real estate (not that that's what I was searching for).
For the love of God please proofread your posts!
This goes for anybody who's selling anything whether it be on eBay or on Craigslist or in a real-world forum like a newspaper's classified advertisements. Accuracy in writing reflects precision in thought, and no matter how intelligent you are it makes you look silly if you just toss off some quick copy without even glancing at it twice or—heaven forbid!—actually reading it aloud to yourself before submitting. I am not a grammar nazi by any means, and I forgive a lot of poor grammar and poor spelling in forums and comment sections because I know it's casual writing that's one-off and not really expected to be held up to any sort of standard. If you're selling something though, you need to hold my attention and describe the item you're selling in coherent enough writing that I feel confident handing money off to you in exchange for it. Otherwise it could've just been your cat jumping on the keyboard or something.
ZOMG ALL CAPS AND EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!11!
Unless what you're typing is an elaborate acronym for something or it's a single word you want to emphasize and you don't have access to italics or bold face font, don't capitalize it. Ever. This is a rule. All-caps text reaches the trifecta of being difficult to read, offensive to the eyes, and rude (in online forums, all-caps reads like yelling). If I load a page where the entire description is in all-caps, I just move on. There's no more reason to continue reading it than there is to try to piece together the ravings of a madman. Why bother?
Nobody cares what "market value" is.
I really couldn't care any less if a place is "$40K below market value!!1" because I'm the market in this case. If I purchase it at the price listed, that's the market value, 'cause that's the price it sold for in the market, of which I as a consumer am a component. Don't try to hustle me by making the implication that its value will somehow jump by five figures in the near future and you're just getting rid of it because you want to give the world a good deal.
So there's just a handful of things... and with writing them I have successfully procrastinated away the time I had set aside for looking for a new place today :D. Don't worry, space cadets, I'll be back at it later.
Are you sure that's "uptown"?
This is probably never going to die, and it's probably been there since well before Craigslist, but it's still really annoying. I search by neighbourhood a lot, because I know neighbourhoods (Chicago is, after all, a city of neighbourhoods, so I'm told), and I know which ones I'd like to live in and which ones are undesirable to me for one reason or another. Don't try to bait and switch me by labeling something further north than Foster and further west than California as "uptown". That's not uptown, that's the middle of nowhere and dangerously close to being nowhere at all. I'm not even sure which neighbourhood that would be, but it's not Uptown and actually not even within easy walking distance of Uptown's centre. That means it should not show up in my search for "uptown".
$199
WTF does that even mean? It's a condo, it's for sale, it's listed in the "Real Estate - By Owner" category... can I pick it up for just two C-notes? Really? What're the assessments, like $10/mo? If you're not comfortable listing the actual price then don't list the property online and go through a broker or someone who's capable of that level of subtlety. Listing a property for less than a grand when it's obviously more is annoying at best and dishonest at worst. If you meant to put a "K" at the end of that but didn't, it still shouldn't be showing up in searches for sub-$150K real estate (not that that's what I was searching for).
For the love of God please proofread your posts!
This goes for anybody who's selling anything whether it be on eBay or on Craigslist or in a real-world forum like a newspaper's classified advertisements. Accuracy in writing reflects precision in thought, and no matter how intelligent you are it makes you look silly if you just toss off some quick copy without even glancing at it twice or—heaven forbid!—actually reading it aloud to yourself before submitting. I am not a grammar nazi by any means, and I forgive a lot of poor grammar and poor spelling in forums and comment sections because I know it's casual writing that's one-off and not really expected to be held up to any sort of standard. If you're selling something though, you need to hold my attention and describe the item you're selling in coherent enough writing that I feel confident handing money off to you in exchange for it. Otherwise it could've just been your cat jumping on the keyboard or something.
ZOMG ALL CAPS AND EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!11!
Unless what you're typing is an elaborate acronym for something or it's a single word you want to emphasize and you don't have access to italics or bold face font, don't capitalize it. Ever. This is a rule. All-caps text reaches the trifecta of being difficult to read, offensive to the eyes, and rude (in online forums, all-caps reads like yelling). If I load a page where the entire description is in all-caps, I just move on. There's no more reason to continue reading it than there is to try to piece together the ravings of a madman. Why bother?
Nobody cares what "market value" is.
I really couldn't care any less if a place is "$40K below market value!!1" because I'm the market in this case. If I purchase it at the price listed, that's the market value, 'cause that's the price it sold for in the market, of which I as a consumer am a component. Don't try to hustle me by making the implication that its value will somehow jump by five figures in the near future and you're just getting rid of it because you want to give the world a good deal.
So there's just a handful of things... and with writing them I have successfully procrastinated away the time I had set aside for looking for a new place today :D. Don't worry, space cadets, I'll be back at it later.
17 October 2009
A sleepless life.
Okay so... I'm sure most people either know this or have figured it out about me, but I have a sleep disorder. I stay up really really really late at night and I sleep really really really late in the day; it's kind of like being perpetually jetlagged a few hours. I didn't always know this though. It took decades to figure it out.
The first time I remember having trouble sleeping was when I was living in Athens, in the smallest bedroom of my parents' house, at least a decade ago. I took the bus to school and this was during this bizarre period in Athens' schools where, in an effort to relieve the disparity between the demographics of the schools, buses would travel all the way across town to get to you. For those who haven't lived in the South let me explain. Because of the fact that black folks and white folks lived in different parts of town there was a huge imbalance between the schools, almost as if they were still segregated. My middle school was on Baxter Street, right next to the public library, the catholic hospital (at which my mother worked at the time), and the primarily black part of town (for y'all Athenians, I went to Clarke Middle School, near Rocksprings). What I'm getting at here is that I had to wake up super-early to get to the bus to get me to school on time. Ridiculous, I know, but whatever.
I had to wake up very early, and still I had trouble going to sleep at night. After a while I would miss entire nights, staying up all night reading, sometimes for a couple of nights in a row. I started to lose focus during the day, my grades weren't as great, and I started to forget things more. I started to fall asleep in class. Constantly. I saw a doctor who thought it was insomnia.
The doctor prescribed something. I don't remember what it was. The first night, it worked, beautifully. It was amazing, the best sleep I'd had since I could remember. I was at my father's house, in my room that was obviously a garage that had been finished, with shag carpet. The next night, the prescription didn't work quite as well though I did sleep, and over time the pills lost their effect. I found myself still laying in bed awake late at night, long periods of extreme boredom punctuated occasionally by this feeling of dread when I happened to glance at my alarm clock. That alarm clock was brutal. Watching the minutes tick by without even the slightest hint of sleepiness, stressed me out. It was hard to tell if the thought of sleeping at that point didn't cause me performance anxiety, some kind of psychosomatic thing.
I started to get headaches. My doctor at the time likened them to cluster migraines or cluster headaches or something, and said that they shouldn't happen to a boy my age; the usual demographic for such things, he explained, was women in their 30s. Very helpful. I'd like to think I started to doubt his competence at this point but I'm not sure if I did or not. After all, I did keep going to him for medical advice.
Another medication, this time a mild antidepressant combined with a drug that thins blood and lowers blood pressure. This one worked for a while, several months, but caused me to look—and feel—kind of stoned all day. If I stood up too fast I got lightheaded. It was still excruciating to wake up in the morning and concentration still took extraordinary effort for me. I started drinking more coffee. A lot more. Most mornings I had a thermos on me filled with über-strong oolong tea, which I'd found made me less jittery. I was getting by at this point with less than four hours of sleep a night, catching up on the weekends by sleeping for ten to twelve hours at a stretch.
After a while the most magical thing happened. I went to college and suddenly I could schedule my own classes. My first quarter I had one 8am class I couldn't avoid taking (it was an intro programming class), but luckily it was a subject I already knew pretty well and I managed to get by without showing up every day, even though I did try very hard not to skip it. Overall, I slept better. Staying up late was common, being in the computer science program, and I mostly scheduled my classes in the afternoon. In a couple of cases I put off taking a class for a quarter, and took something else, because it was only offered early in the morning but would be later in the day the next quarter. At this point I felt alright. I was able to live my life just fine even though I stayed up very late, and I was at college so everybody was staying up late. I was the last one to leave every party, every show, and I still had time at night to get my schoolwork done, but I slept very late. It wasn't a big deal until...
...I slept through two midterms. In a row. In the same class. I don't think I need to explain that I failed the shit out of that class. This was brutal for a variety of reasons, not the last of which being it was a class I could have easily tested out of and that it was my first F ever. I got berated by my advisor and I took a lot of shit from my family. It sucked. I'd settled into the idea that I was just making irresponsible choices, that I chose to stay up late and couldn't get it together. I was convinced that all these things were my fault.
After college I moved here, in Chicago, and started work at a local ad agency as a web developer. Having to come in at 9am, I started to have trouble again. Those same patterns from high school, the lethargy, the coffee drinking bordering on outright caffeine abuse, the repeated sleeping through alarm clocks. That last one was a serious problem. It was while freelancing at this same ad agency earlier in the year that I slept through my alarms two days in a row, much to my extreme professional embarrassment, and it was at that point that I did what any sensible jewish boy would do.
I called my mom. I had missed a couple of hours of work and I worried that my employers might be pissed about that. My mom tried to cheer me up and then we signed off and I walked back upstairs. Meanwhile, in Saint Louis, my mom started googling sleep disorders.
By the time I talked to her later that night, when I got home, she'd come up with something that sounded identical to my symptoms, Delayed Circadian Rhythm Disorder. After a long dry spell in my work, I had noticed that when left to my own devices I sleep perfectly, but from around five or six in the morning until around noon. I sleep at around the same time every night and can wake up every noon spontaneously (i.e., without an alarm clock) at around the same time. Also, my body has a particularly low core temperature (94.1°F or so), which had always been mysterious. It seemed to fit.
It took me until a week and some change ago before I had insurance and the time to go visit a sleep specialist. Not too surprisingly, when I outlined the symptoms I was experiencing, he concluded I have Delayed Circadian Rhythm Disorder. After taking one month while working and one month while not working to document my sleep patterns I wasn't surprised, but in a way it was like I'd just found out. I started to think more seriously than I'd allowed myself earlier in the year about how this was going to continue to adversely affect my life. But for a couple of excruciating methods that aren't even permanent, there's no treatment for it, and there's no pharmaceutical that affects it. So I'm stuck being this way.
It's a disability, but I don't want to think of it that way. This is my mutant superpower I was born with. Like Batman, I own the night, and that's kinda neat. Now I just need to figure out how I can hold down a decent job living like this. Depressing as the diagnosis is, now that I know what I'm dealing with I feel more optimistic overall. And with that, it's 3:30am and I've still got some other stuff I wanted to do before bed. Sleep tight, space cadets.
The first time I remember having trouble sleeping was when I was living in Athens, in the smallest bedroom of my parents' house, at least a decade ago. I took the bus to school and this was during this bizarre period in Athens' schools where, in an effort to relieve the disparity between the demographics of the schools, buses would travel all the way across town to get to you. For those who haven't lived in the South let me explain. Because of the fact that black folks and white folks lived in different parts of town there was a huge imbalance between the schools, almost as if they were still segregated. My middle school was on Baxter Street, right next to the public library, the catholic hospital (at which my mother worked at the time), and the primarily black part of town (for y'all Athenians, I went to Clarke Middle School, near Rocksprings). What I'm getting at here is that I had to wake up super-early to get to the bus to get me to school on time. Ridiculous, I know, but whatever.
I had to wake up very early, and still I had trouble going to sleep at night. After a while I would miss entire nights, staying up all night reading, sometimes for a couple of nights in a row. I started to lose focus during the day, my grades weren't as great, and I started to forget things more. I started to fall asleep in class. Constantly. I saw a doctor who thought it was insomnia.
The doctor prescribed something. I don't remember what it was. The first night, it worked, beautifully. It was amazing, the best sleep I'd had since I could remember. I was at my father's house, in my room that was obviously a garage that had been finished, with shag carpet. The next night, the prescription didn't work quite as well though I did sleep, and over time the pills lost their effect. I found myself still laying in bed awake late at night, long periods of extreme boredom punctuated occasionally by this feeling of dread when I happened to glance at my alarm clock. That alarm clock was brutal. Watching the minutes tick by without even the slightest hint of sleepiness, stressed me out. It was hard to tell if the thought of sleeping at that point didn't cause me performance anxiety, some kind of psychosomatic thing.
I started to get headaches. My doctor at the time likened them to cluster migraines or cluster headaches or something, and said that they shouldn't happen to a boy my age; the usual demographic for such things, he explained, was women in their 30s. Very helpful. I'd like to think I started to doubt his competence at this point but I'm not sure if I did or not. After all, I did keep going to him for medical advice.
Another medication, this time a mild antidepressant combined with a drug that thins blood and lowers blood pressure. This one worked for a while, several months, but caused me to look—and feel—kind of stoned all day. If I stood up too fast I got lightheaded. It was still excruciating to wake up in the morning and concentration still took extraordinary effort for me. I started drinking more coffee. A lot more. Most mornings I had a thermos on me filled with über-strong oolong tea, which I'd found made me less jittery. I was getting by at this point with less than four hours of sleep a night, catching up on the weekends by sleeping for ten to twelve hours at a stretch.
After a while the most magical thing happened. I went to college and suddenly I could schedule my own classes. My first quarter I had one 8am class I couldn't avoid taking (it was an intro programming class), but luckily it was a subject I already knew pretty well and I managed to get by without showing up every day, even though I did try very hard not to skip it. Overall, I slept better. Staying up late was common, being in the computer science program, and I mostly scheduled my classes in the afternoon. In a couple of cases I put off taking a class for a quarter, and took something else, because it was only offered early in the morning but would be later in the day the next quarter. At this point I felt alright. I was able to live my life just fine even though I stayed up very late, and I was at college so everybody was staying up late. I was the last one to leave every party, every show, and I still had time at night to get my schoolwork done, but I slept very late. It wasn't a big deal until...
...I slept through two midterms. In a row. In the same class. I don't think I need to explain that I failed the shit out of that class. This was brutal for a variety of reasons, not the last of which being it was a class I could have easily tested out of and that it was my first F ever. I got berated by my advisor and I took a lot of shit from my family. It sucked. I'd settled into the idea that I was just making irresponsible choices, that I chose to stay up late and couldn't get it together. I was convinced that all these things were my fault.
After college I moved here, in Chicago, and started work at a local ad agency as a web developer. Having to come in at 9am, I started to have trouble again. Those same patterns from high school, the lethargy, the coffee drinking bordering on outright caffeine abuse, the repeated sleeping through alarm clocks. That last one was a serious problem. It was while freelancing at this same ad agency earlier in the year that I slept through my alarms two days in a row, much to my extreme professional embarrassment, and it was at that point that I did what any sensible jewish boy would do.
I called my mom. I had missed a couple of hours of work and I worried that my employers might be pissed about that. My mom tried to cheer me up and then we signed off and I walked back upstairs. Meanwhile, in Saint Louis, my mom started googling sleep disorders.
By the time I talked to her later that night, when I got home, she'd come up with something that sounded identical to my symptoms, Delayed Circadian Rhythm Disorder. After a long dry spell in my work, I had noticed that when left to my own devices I sleep perfectly, but from around five or six in the morning until around noon. I sleep at around the same time every night and can wake up every noon spontaneously (i.e., without an alarm clock) at around the same time. Also, my body has a particularly low core temperature (94.1°F or so), which had always been mysterious. It seemed to fit.
It took me until a week and some change ago before I had insurance and the time to go visit a sleep specialist. Not too surprisingly, when I outlined the symptoms I was experiencing, he concluded I have Delayed Circadian Rhythm Disorder. After taking one month while working and one month while not working to document my sleep patterns I wasn't surprised, but in a way it was like I'd just found out. I started to think more seriously than I'd allowed myself earlier in the year about how this was going to continue to adversely affect my life. But for a couple of excruciating methods that aren't even permanent, there's no treatment for it, and there's no pharmaceutical that affects it. So I'm stuck being this way.
It's a disability, but I don't want to think of it that way. This is my mutant superpower I was born with. Like Batman, I own the night, and that's kinda neat. Now I just need to figure out how I can hold down a decent job living like this. Depressing as the diagnosis is, now that I know what I'm dealing with I feel more optimistic overall. And with that, it's 3:30am and I've still got some other stuff I wanted to do before bed. Sleep tight, space cadets.
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