Suck on THAT, Re/Max.

Way back when in 1997, I was the first among my circle of friends to leave my hometown and dive headfirst into a new, unknown city with no safety net.  In 1999, I was the first among my new circle of friends to get a Cool Downtown Apartment (very important when you’re 23).  In 2004, I was the first among my circle of friends to do The Responsible Adult Thing and buy a house.  And now, in 2010, I am the first among my circle of friends to be, technically speaking, without a home.

The buyer and I agreed that I would maintain occupancy through January, thus giving me time to search for a new place to live (another post on this is coming up).  It’s just that, legally, I no longer own this house.  And my interests are not represented in any rental lease anywhere.

So in all but the most lenient use of the phrase, I currently do not have a home.

It’s great because it’s forcing me to do what I’ve been putting off since moving out of Pennswood back in the fall of ’99:  Go through my stuff.

I have boxes I haven’t opened since I moved out of Pennswood.  During my stay in Executive House I added some more boxes.  And in the last five years here, I’ve added even more stuff (unfortunately, not in boxes).  As I’m going through all this stuff, I can’t believe a lot of what I’m finding.  I don’t know why I ever thought saving, for example, a 2002 receipt for an oil change at Jiffy Lube would be a good idea.  Some choices are more difficult; exactly how much sentimental value do I need to attach to 1998?  How about 2008?

My VM/SP credential card (mainframe logon) from Mansfield circa 1993?  Yeah, that’s gone.

My paystub from my college years when I worked at a Pilot travel center, showing a takehome pay of $197 after taxes for 42 hours’ worth of work?  Yeah, that’s actually getting framed.

The black bonded leather sofa & loveseat that I thought looked AWESOME when I was 24?  Already gone by way of the “free” section on Craigslist.

I thought I would make one, maybe two trips to Goodwill.  Thus far I’ve gone to Goodwill three times and Salvation Army twice, and I have another bin ready to go.  My shredder has cranked out three lawn-sized trash bags of confetti.  My vintage computer collection — the Atari 800, the Commodore 64 & 128, the Coleco Adam, and all their brethren in 80s technology — is heading off to climate-controlled storage.  Every book comes along for the ride, but every DVD is getting dumped to my personal fileserver.

I’m making exactly three moving trips with my car.  Anything left over goes to the curb.

I even considered parting ways with my DCM KX-12 speakers.  They’re old-school heavy-duty full-cabinet full-throttle full-rock monsters that weigh approximately 4000 pounds each.  The cabinets are indestructible and they stand about four feet off the floor.  These speakers are equally at home powering through a college house party as they are quietly playing late-night downtempo.  They sound great no matter what you play or how you drive them.  And despite all the changes these past ten years have brought, they’ve been there for me without failure.

I decided good speakers deserve trip #3 all to themselves.

There’s nothing currently in the sub-$125k market in midtown condos that appeals to me right now, so I’m spending this week going apartment hunting.  A lot has changed since I last looked eleven years ago.  I’m signing a lease this weekend and, with luck, being completely moved by the 25th. If you have an apartment in downtown or midtown Harrisburg that you’re looking rent out, drop me a line.

Earlier today I completed my trek up to parts north to spend the holiday with family.  As I’m typing this in front of a roaring (gas-powered) fireplace, a dog of intriguing lineage has decided I’m her best friend.  She’s pretending to sleep right now, but every few minutes she inches closer and wedges herself in as close as she can.  I just finished off the last piece of homemade poppy seed roll while watching the season’s final three episodes of Dexter.  Life is good.

2009 has been an amazing roller coaster of a year.  For starters, floor9.com moved a little further from covering nightlife and a little more towards consumer interests.  I called out Privado for printing full, unmasked credit card numbers on their receipts (a practice which they have since corrected).  Circuit City went under and tried to take us all with them through unethical, anti-consumer behavior.  Metro Bank Harrisburg … don’t even get me started (although the story did earn me a link from The Consumerist).  The state decided not to pay 70,000+ state workers for weeks on end.

And then … I ran out of steam.  Don’t get me wrong — lots of other interesting and significant things happened in 2009.  I just didn’t have the momentum to cover them all.  I honestly think I’ve put forth more blog posts this year than I have at any point in the last seven years of floor9.com, and I’m only now starting to recharge.

And now it’s Christmas.  I’m exhausted from a day of shuffling presents around.  We polished off the last of the traditional Christmas Eve made-from-scratch pizza hours ago.   The though of spending the next 12 hours sleeping is awesome.

Merry Christmas* to all.  I doubt I’ll update again in 2009, but I do want to thank you all for being here.  The massive readership over the summer has been, if nothing else, therapeutic towards the shared causes so many of us took up.  And the gigantic spike I saw after the last post let me know a ton of you are still here.  Be safe, and see you in 2010!

* – To avoid offending the fragile sensitivities of Glenn Beck / Rush Limbaugh / et al listeners:  “Please partake in and/or observe an adequate non-secular event”.

If you notice any hiccups on the site, please let me know!

EDIT:  I just noticed that the inline pictures have vanished.  I’ll fix this when I get home.  My SSH access from work is …  bad.

Over the last year I have heard growing criticism of another Popular Local forum’s excessive censorship.  Deleting junk posts is one thing, but it seems that just about any post that fails some convoluted if/then test of content and subject matter gets promptly deleted.  While I haven’t personally verified these claims, it seems that specifically, posts that reference major advertisers, the owners of the forum, and certain politicians are deleted without further review.

That’s not how the blogHarrisburg forums will work.

As stated before, the blogHarrisburg forums will follow a policy of “moderation in moderation”.  Spam posts will be killed.  Posts consisting of nothing but the letter “g” will be killed.  Posts dumping hardcore adult images into innocent threads will be killed. 

And that’s about it.

What won’t be deleted are threads that can make a point intelligently.  In other words, it’s not what you say; it’s how you say it.  Posting “HOLLYWOOD CASNIO SUX LOL” will probably incur a deletion; posting “I don’t like Hollywood Casino because their signs are hard to find” will be just fine.  What I’m trying to do is cut down on all the negatives — drive-by commenting, anonymous trolling, and other examples of jackassery — without hampering people’s ability to speak their minds.

As much as I would like to leave the rules set simply at “don’t be a jerk”, I plan on putting forth some more examples and guidelines so that everyone is playing with the same set of rules.  The last thing I want to be accused of is making phantom deletions for no reason, and I think that this is the best way to achieve that goal.

So between floor9.com and blogHarrisburg.com, 25,000 people see these pages every month.  Let’s use that volume to build a better online community for everyone!

I wouldn’t have had all this time to put into software-bashing, template-hacking, and other joys if it weren’t for the colossally amazing support from the guys at Steadcom.  To say that they have bent over backwards would be a dramatic understatement.  They’ve helped me overcome a DNS hiccup at my registrar, they’ve responded to every support ticket within minutes, and they’ve provided solid, competent answers to any question I manage to throw at them.  In fact, when I first opened my account, I immediately rebuilt the OS into Gentoo (one of the neat tricks that having a VPS affords).  Without even opening a ticket, I received an email from their CEO saying that they had noticed my rebuild, and wanted to know if there was anything they could help out with.  That’s pretty impressive, considering I was on their lowest possible rate ($20) — I’m far from being a profit center for these guys, yet they treat me as if I’m their only customer.

Let me say that again:  Every single interaction I’ve had with Steadcom has been dealt with urgently and thoroughly.  They act as if failing to resolve my concerns would drive them out of business.  And as pleasant as that is now, it makes me absolutely certain that these are the guys I want to work with if (let’s be honest; when) I encounter major problems down the road.   If you’re looking for a new host, be it shared, VPS, or dedicated, I can’t recommend these guys enough.

And, while I’m at it, for bragging purposes:

• Quad-core Intel Xeon E5310 @ 1.60gHz (shared with only EIGHT other hosts, compared to a few thousand on a shared hosting provider)
• 1gb memory (512mb guaranteed)
• 40 gb disk space
• 1300 gb monthly bandwidth
• 4 IP addresses
• Full management, 24×7
• Choice of CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Gentoo, or Debian, changeable on-demand
• Choice of cPanel, DirectAdmin, or Webmin, all completely SSL’d up
• Price?  Let’s just say I was an early adopter. 

The best part has to be the management.  I can send off a ticket to the effect of, “Hey guys, can you set up TLS on Courier for me, harden /tmp, and find out why the MySQL server is sucking down 180 megs of RAM” and bam, a few minutes later my system rocks.  Truly awesome on 27 different levels.

More news on the new frills coming soon.  Right now I’m off to start moving blogHarisburg over.  Joy …