Douglas Triggs (doubt72) wrote,
Douglas Triggs
doubt72
  • Mood: happy
  • Music: Cowboy Bebop - N.Y. Rush (RFD)

Big News

Good news first... Got a new job. I gave notice to Echostar yesterday, and in two weeks (minus one day) I'll be starting at USA.net, my old company. I'm looking forward to it immensely, not least of all because Echostar sucks to work for. But the job itself looks pretty cool (actually back doing something somewhat technical doesn't hurt), and I may have the chance for some advancement there. It's a very slight raise (to the tune of under $1000 a year, after taxes), but I'd almost have taken B&N and a major paycut to get out at this point... Except that in the process I turned down a transfer to the escalation group (no more phones, just email and web stuff), and I found out that I might have had a supervisor job for the asking (the rumor mill says) if the USA.net job had somehow fallen through (they're seriously going to be scrambling on that one... In the space of a month, they're losing ALL of their best, most experienced people in the phone group, so who knows where they'll find anybody to fit that position). When it rains, it pours.

Two... Paid off my last student loan. Woo!

Three... Broke down and ordered an iPod (of the 20GB variety... That ought to hold me over in the short term, although the way things are going, I might be able to fill that up with nothing but classical in not too long of a time). Also, ordered a laptop. My budget for it a year or so ago when I was still planning all of this was $1500... In the meantime, laptops have gotten a lot cheaper, and so I decided (instead of dropping the budget to the laptop I originally wanted, and after a great deal of vacillation) to keep the budget the same, and fill the budget with laptop. I ended up getting a bit of a monster Dell (1.6GHz Pentium M, 17" 1920x1050 display, 512MB RAM, a 64MB graphics card, 80GB HD, a dual-layer DVD burner, wireless -- not bluetooth -- a backpack to carry it in, a three-year warranty... Blah, blah, blah. The Windows XP Media Edition and the warranty were part of the "deal of the week," I probably wouldn't have gotten them otherwise).

Of course, now I'm thinking of picking up a PowerBook or iBook at some point in the future to go with it as a UNIX box if I ever have the spare cash (depends on how much I manage to save up over the next few months... There's some appeal to having a monster 17" laptop and a super-portable 12" one, too). As it was, I was seriously considering getting a PowerBook to start with, but for the same specs (even with corporate discount), the PowerBook was $1000 more expensive, and that's pretty much what it boiled down to.

Bad news... I broke a tooth this weekend. Went to the dentist yesterday morning, and I'm scheduled for a root canal next week. There's enough decay in the tooth that the dentist only gives me 50-50 odds that I'll still have the tooth in a decade, but I'd rather have the tooth for ten years and THEN get a bridge than just getting a bridge now, so what the hell.

Other bad news... The pancreatitis that I had last year (which is presumably still healing itself since the pain went away some time ago) seems to have resulted in mild diabetes. I really need to give it some help and lose some weight (which ought to help the hypertension, too), but I have some hope that this is temporary, at least. It's aggravating, nonetheless.

And that's about it in recently eventful Doug-land. Overall, I'm really pretty happy.
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