(Phaysis)

So the apartment management saw fit to install a new central heater unit. After a week of having to use space heaters to keep the place thawed, the service techs came around Friday morning to cut down the old unit (vintage 1978) and replace the whole thing with a new one. They were even nice enough to leave the task of cleanup to me (how sweet).

But the upshot is that I now have central heat, which is all-too-important this week, what with the latest arctic blast sitting on top of us. We even got some sleet today. Zero accumulations, but sleet nonetheless.

The apartment management declined my written request for a discount on rent for the inconvenience and expense of running the space heaters. Said it was “uncustomary”, and that I only had to deal with it for a week, and that a space heater was provided by management, and yadda-yadda. Notch it up to another thing I dislike about this apartment.

“But Shawn, why don’t you just move when your lease expires at the end of next month, since you hate it so much? Aren’t we all just a little tired of your bitching?”

That’s a (pair of) complex question(s) in search of a simple answer. There is no simple answer. This is my space. I’ve been here two years; it is cavernous, clean, relatively quiet. Sure, there’re shitty things about this apartment complex, but the same is said about everywhere else. I just cannot justify the mental and financial expense of looking for another place and moving. If the lease renewal contract I get next month presents itself with a stupendous rise in rate, then yes, I’ll have no choice, obviously. But if it’s all the same, then I’d prefer to stay.

This is my god-damn neighborhood and has been for the past nine years, thank you.

Hello again. Time for your bi-monthly dose of new site news.

Things are moving slowly as far as stuff for the site. Nothing new there. I have the usual Big Ideas that I’ve had since the inception of Phaysis that haven’t been brought to fruition. But some of those ideas I’m getting new ideas about. Since I am now prone to imbibe a daily intake of coffee, ideas are popping and I’m making little touches to some code here, drawing some designs there.

I’ve set up a portable test server on my laptop and am experimenting with different content management systems, trying to find one that will fit my needs best. Some months ago I took a hard look at my history of glacial progress and decided that if I’m to have any luck with my site that I should stick to learning and using a prebuilt CMS instead of rolling my own. Well, I tried that track and found a few that fit what I needed…kinda. But the knowledge, code snippets, and concepts I’ve gained from examining them, hacking them to work on the limited setup I currently have Phaysis on, I’ve gotten new notions about writing my own CMS. We’ll see how it all fares.

On a negative note, I’ve been getting more spam than ever, and I have a feeling it’s from unsubscribing from a mailing list provided by a local radio station. Where I was once getting 12-ish messages a day I’m now getting 30+, and that was since unsubscribing. So the moral to be learned here today is that you can’t even trust the ones you can trust; they may be in a “business partnership” with other companies who aren’t bound by the first company’s privacy policy. Keep that in mind.

For shame, KROX-FM/101X. For shame.