Happy Holidays to all!

Well, I just got back from the holiday get-together with my family.  The nephews made out like bandits when it came to loot - I don't think I ever got that much stuff when I was a kid!  I got a few utility-type things from the parents, my brother hooked me up with a couple PS2 games I wanted, and my sister and brother-in-law hooked me up with a set of golf clubs!  Granted, they used to be my brother-in-law's, but as he's had three back surgeries in two years and has been pretty much told he can't play golf again for at least the next two years, he said he'd rather see them being put to good use instead of gathering dust in the closet.

Personally, I think it was a long-term plan of his to get new clubs, but we'll see what happens in a couple years

Hope everyone out there has a Happy Holidays and gets everything they wanted!

Posted by TechParadox @ 2:15 am EDT | Permalink | 2 Comments

More about me and my life...

Hindsight being 20/20 I guess I should have thrown down a little info about me before unleashing the divorce post. 

My name is Frank.  Age you can get from the profile entry.  I'm currently living in central Illinois - if you take a look at a roadmap of the state and find I-70, look for the point where I-57 intersects.  That's Effingham, where I work and will most likely live after the divorce finalizes and the house sells (at least until I can find a better job and get the hell out of the area).  Right now I'm about ten minutes away from there in Altamont.  It's a nice area to live in, but if you want any kind of options in choices of cultural events, places to eat, or general entertainment then you'd better be prepared to drive at least two hours - we're "conveniently" located about that distance from St. Louis, Indianapolis, and Champaign-Urbana.

History time:
I was born and raised in the area and have always been sort of a loner-geek at heart.  Growing up that way and being a straight-A student in a small town was the typical episode in geek/gamer youth - ostracized by the jocks, ignored by the girls, and barely enough people of a similar mindset to hang out with.  Graduation was a given (4th in the class thanks to having co-valedictorians) and college was expected.  Unfortunately, most universities don't look at a GPA when deciding whether or not to give you a scholarship, they look at your class ranking.  Fourth in a class is nothing to sneeze at, but they look at the percentile - fourth in a class of thirty means you didn't graduate in the top ten percent, so sorry, no full-ride for you, can we give you a $500 scholarship instead?  Trying to get into a decent school as a white male with no athletic ability from a middle-class family with barely enough money to put you through one year is an exercise in great frustration.  The local community college was a good fallback, though, and they had a good transfer program to the state university.  Hindsight again being 20/20, I should have gone into the comp sci program, but I didn't want to get stuck with taking a metric assload of math classes, so I went for my other favorite subject.  Two years and a lot of hard work later and I had an Associate's degree in Biological Science and I transferred to EIU.

And I burned out.  Hard.  I had been running my ass off taking classes and trying to make a living and I just got to the point where I said, "What's the point?"  I was sick of taking lab classes and examining specimens.  I was tired of being forced to take classes that would never have any kind of bearing on the science work I was going into.  And I didn't see any future in working for a research lab.  So moved back in with my parents and I took a few months off.  While gathering myself and finding my direction I continued my newfound fascination with the world of the internet and met a woman who talked me into moving out to Ohio to live with her.  Things didn't work out so well there but I found somewhere else to live and spent about two years in Columbus.

And then I met my wife.  We met because one of her co-workers and my mother worked together and they conspired to hook us up.  Things seemed great.  We dated long-distance for several months and things were clicking on all cylinders.  She offered to quit her job and move out to Ohio but as I was working a dead-end job in Columbus, I opted to move back to Illinois and hunt for a job here.  We got married in October of 2001 and things were good for a time.  I found work as a graphic designer thanks to work I had done with Photoshop and Illustrator while in Columbus.  We bought a house and moved in with plans of fixing it up to our liking and then selling it somewhere down the road when we traded up to something larger or moved because of a change in jobs.  Since I was working evenings, I started back into taking day classes at the community college again, this time on the Comp Sci track I should have followed back in '93.

In '03 we had a bit of a setback.  The wife was getting sick of her job in '02 - office politics and other BS were just grinding her down and she wanted a change.  I was supportive of her wanting to change but reality had other plans.  In May of '02 the company I was working for (I won't name them but they produce phone Books that are Yellow) decided that they could get their work done cheaper by their overseas branches and announced they would be closing down the production facility in Effingham at the beginning of the year.  Everyone was hit hard - there were people there that had put ten, even fifteen years of their lives into working for the company and it was going to be gone in a heartbeat.  Fortunately the state of Illinois has a "Displaced Worker" program that will pay for two years of retraining, so I was able to get the last year of my schooling paid for.  I even got them to reimburse me for the certification exams I took and I came out of it with an Associate's degree in Network Administration as well as A+, Network +, and Microsoft Certified Professional certifications (MCP on Windows 2000 Server).

Unfortunately, around here that and $3.50 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks, and not a hell of a lot more.

Right around the same time I graduated the unemployment money was running out, so I began a frantic search for a job.  I got one working for a local ISP as their phone monkey who would handle day-to-day account matters, general troubleshooting, resetting passwords, and the like.  It was at this time I realized there are a LOT of people out there who do not have the education needed to be able to manage a PC on a day-to-day basis.  I've got a whole rant about that I'll repost later.  It was a crap job with crap pay, but it kept money coming in for the time being.  I kept hunting for more but with finances as tight as they were there was no way we could afford for me to lose any time off to having to travel to interviews or to finish out a Bachelor's degree in Comp Sci.  Fortunately I was able to trade up in the world a bit and got a job working as a support specialist for a major dental company's software division.  I now handle phone support for one type of software on one platform and a narrow range of hardware.

But things still weren't well on the home front.  The wife was still sick of her job and wanted to be able to hunt for something new.  We did the math and figured that while it would be tight we could survive on my salary alone while she was hunting.  She quit her job and began her search.  She started spending a lot of time on the internet , into the wee hours of the morning.  She found a few possibilities in an area of Minnesota near the twin cities, which actually worked out quite well since we have friends that live up there and her extended family lives in the Fargo, ND area.  Since we usually would visit her extended family in the summer she took off for MN a couple weeks early to stay with the friends and do some job interviews.  When I finally joined her, she seemed different.  More distant, less interested in us.  She would get phone calls on her cell phone and leave the room when she took them where as she used to stay in the room regardless of who she was talking to.  She claimed they were from a friend she had met while playing cards online, a guy named Dan who was supposedly a gay man from Texas.  These calls and her out-of-the-ordinary behavior persisted for a few weeks and I had the sneaking suspicion something was up.  And then the calls stopped and she announced that she would no longer be talking to him, that he had pissed her off and they were no longer friends.

Things flowed along in a somwehat uneasy vein for the next six months and then in October she announced that she did not like the way things were between us and she wanted change or she wanted out.  The way she voiced her opinion smacked of her already having made up her mind and having no plans of patching things up.  I voiced my concerns and feelings that we should try to work on it and fix things.  She agreed that we should go to counseling and then said she wanted to go separately instead of jointly.  Not exactly the behavior of someone who wants to fix things in a relationship, eh?  I couldn't get an appointment with the counselor immediately and before I could get one worked in the wife announced that she basically had no intent of things working out and she wanted out.  End of story, thanks for playing, see you around.  The basic upshot of her reasoning is that she feels more like my mother than my mate, that my behavior won't change, and I lack drive, direction, and ambition.  Funny things to hear from a woman who has basically dominated our relationship to the point where I can't do anything right, who won't listen to my reasoning for doing things the way I do, and who hasn't done anything to change her direction in life other than quit her job and announce that she wants a divorce.

Ok, I've rambled enough - time for a break.

Tech Out

Posted by TechParadox @ 9:08 pm EDT | Permalink | 2 Comments

My wife said it was either her or the video games...

...God, I'm going to miss her.

Sure, we've all heard that old joke relating to some hobby or another.  But in my case, it seems that reality is stranger than fiction - my wife of five years and I are splitting up.  And no, the video games are not the source of the issue, but they do play a part in it.

I won't go into great depth as things are still a bit up in the air, but suffice it to say that she feels things aren't right and wants to get the heck out of Dodge where as I was more than willing to try to patch things up.  She threw out a bunch of reasons for it, all of which sound like excuses.  But I'm not going to fight it.  Looking back over the last five years, I can honestly say I can't remember the last time I was really happy.  Sure, there have been short bursts here and there (flying out to California and seeing old friends, my nephew being born, and a few others), but I can't remember ever feeling truly content and satisfied with the way things were.  Which tells me that maybe it's the right thing to let it go.

No one ever gets married with the intent of it ending...  and yet upside of 50% of marriages these days end in divorce.  I just never thought mine would be one of them.

I'm trying to keep my spirits up and maintain a positive outlook.  I lived on my own before, I can certainly do it again.  And this is a chance for me to make a fresh start and do a few of the things I've been planning on but haven't gotten around to in the last five years (for whatever reasons).  I'm planning on finishing out my Bachelor's degree, hunting down a new job in an area that is a bit more urban, and moving on with my life.  Maybe I'll finally get my ass in gear and start taking those martial arts classes I always wanted to do, or get the plotline for a sci-fi novel that's been kicking around in my head put down on paper for posterity's sake.  The world will be my oyster.  I just have to get through the next few months of hell 

Posted by TechParadox @ 1:42 am EDT | Permalink | 2 Comments

PS3? Wii? Fuhgeddaboudit!

So the insanity is set to kick off tonight at midnight and the fanboi debates will rage on into the darkness...  Which one is better?  Which one is all dat and a bag 'o chips?  Which one do you want to have your manbabies?

In my case, neither one.

Let the fanbois camp out for days on end to try and get a system to hawk on eBay.  I'll wait it out and buy one six months or so down the road when the in-store stock rebuilds to acceptable levels.  Hell, I'm so far behind the console technology curve right now I'm about to get lapped by the last generation of systems.  I was late to the party in the broadband realm, so I never bought an XBox.  I figured what was the point of having a console that had a huge online draw if I didn't have the speed to back it up?  And now the world has moved on to the 360 and I'm still lagging behind.  Hell, I just finally got a PS2 about a year ago and I'm still working through the games I've purchased for it.  That brings me to one of the grand paradoxes of being an adult gamer:

When you finally get yourself to the point where you can afford to purchase the next-gen system you wanted, you'll be lucky if you have the time to play it.

Maybe when I get everything settled from the impending shakeout (more on that in the future) I'll have the time to play all the games I've been stockpiling for the last couple years...


Posted by TechParadox @ 7:21 pm EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments