jmoiron.net

As some of you who pay close attention might have seen, my site was in limbo for about a month as I switched away from my friend's server and migrated over to my own. What you are seeing is both a result of this switch, and a result of a migration from an older design to this new design that has been in sporadic development since January. If you don't see a difference, but think the site looks oddly better than it used to, then I made some good decisions. I still have a lot of work to do on it, but its finally usable up to the point that the previous version was. Of particular note, you'll find that the 'news' section has finally been killed (as it should have been a long time ago), and the comments and posts were all consolidated and correctly merged into one repository. This has inflated some post numbers (mostly those beyond 120) by no more than 20, so although all links will lead somewhere, most of them made in the past year to "permalinked" stories will point to the wrong one. I tried hard to figure out an elegant solution to this problem but sometimes the most elegant solution is to break backwards compatibility!

Anyway, since doing this merge (late February some time) I of course did not want to write until the backend to manage the reconfigured database was done, and since my server was promised to disappear, work on the backend stagnated and the updates stopped.

Fortunately, I'm finally back. The past two months or so have been filled with stress and frustration but also periods of elation. In late February, I got to witness Guitar Wolf at CBGB's; a 90 minute (+ 2 encores) hard rock spectacular that would unfortunately be one of their last. Their bassist, Billy (aka Bass Wolf), sadly died on March 31st due to heart failure that I heard on good authority was a result of a drug overdose of some kind.

Before this tragedy, I thankfully got to appreciate the penultimate concert-going experience: I got to see The Pillows twice. Their two concerts were absolutely incredible! The fact that I got to see Noodles again (twice), which would have been great on its own, was completely eclipsed by finally fulfilling what I thought was an impossible dream. They rocked the doors off of Piano's one Sunday in March, closing an unfortunately short set with an encore of "Blues Drivemonster", which was amazing. I got the chance to barge my way into conversations with Manabe (the guitarist) and their Drummer, and pleaded with them with a delicate ballance of force and pathetic-ness to play Swanky Street the following night.

It was hot at the KF Main Stage that Monday, just like it always is. A new aquaintence of mine, Janiel, was setting up to record the show from side stage (and one day I hope I get to at least watch that footage), and the band was doing their pre-show excersizes. When they came out on stage, the burned their way into an amazing set that included many songs I hadn't heard the day before. The crowd broke out in a frenzied chant for Kim Deal, which I have previously tabbed. The lead began playing it, but when the band didn't follow he playfully began laughing and they regrouped center stage. Manabe wailed on his guitar the opening 3 chords of Swanky Street and flipped a thumbs up my way (I was only 2 or 3 rows back), and the band rocked the fuck out! Jimbo and I went nuts and the crowd was overcome with pure rockness; it was the best show I've ever been to.

This period devoid of any kind of writing was also filled with some stress; some job related stress dealing with a few bugs that turned out to be incorrect usage of memset() and calloc(), and some school related stress in my epic quest to create a java interpreter (that never quite got finished, but was more than in working order). All of that is behind me now; the sun has been out, the weather has been above 55F constantly, the days are finally stretching past the border of 19:00, and my server is up and chugging along quite nicely.

Other people seem to be looking up, or at least working towards positive changes. Jason Evans (a co-worker of mine) found a new job in the city, but his departure from the center has for now been received in the most positive light as far as keeping in touch and leaving us with the ability to survive without him. An old member of my compilers group (the oddest group of computer science students I've ever worked with) has joined the center, and things are finally coming together for the project that I'm working on as well as our new website which I somewhat obviously "designed". Johnny has found a job, Krupnick is going to El Paso to work for 9 months, Wei seems in good hands as he weighs his options, and Jeremy, considering his upcoming car purchase, seems to have things figured out.

Its springtime as usual in northeast America. I hope someday I'll feel nostalgic about these times off in some far away place.