Choo-Choo to You

I just ordered tickets to Texarkana aboard Amtrak. This is a first for me, the riding Amtrak thing. Leaving Saturday morning at 9:30, arriving at 9pm. Coming back 5:30am a week later on Sunday to arrive home at 7pm. After being a rail afficionado for a lifetime, I finally have the opportunity to ride the rails. I’ve heard it’s classier and more comfortable than Greyhound; I can leave my seat and walk around, and there’s food available onboard. It’s just that in this part of the country, it takes forever to get anywhere.

Amtrak, in Texas, has to share the rails with freight trains, which get priority; Amtrak just leases time and space. So the trips promise to take longer than marked on the schedules. And god help us if there’s a train breakdown somewhere on the tracks, or a train hits a car; that’s at least a 3-hour stop. And nobody can leave the train except at the rail stations. Good thing I don’t smoke anymore.

So I’ll be staying at my cousin’s place, on the couch. Her housemates are night-owls. There’s pets and smoking and alcohol and cold conditions. My mother, who lives in the apartment out back, has promised to let me use her car when necessary; hopefully there won’t be too much inconvenience on either part. This’ll be my first time in Texarkana without the available use of my own car since I moved back from North Carolina in ’98. I’m not used to that level of living, coordinating with others to get around instead of hopping into my car at-will. Get settled in my ways, y’know?

Also, this’ll be the first time I’ve spent a whole week in Texarkana since I moved to Austin. Usually I’m ready to return to the comfort of my own bed after four days, so it’ll be a stretch. I may hate life after the week is over, I may find myself, I may cancel the train reservation and hitchhike back home. I don’t know. Hopefully it’ll go well.

So this is a warning to those of you in Texarkana who are my friends and family (and who still bother to regularly read my mostly-dead journal): I’m coming to Texarkana for the Thanksgiving holiday. Prepare your tables.

Emo-Bitten

So yeah, I’ve had a dumb weekend. Friday was ok, but saturday found me in a hell of a bad mood. Sat inside most of the day going between snoozing in my chair, cleaning the house, reading documentation on the Ruby programming language, and feeling bad about my life. Moody McGivesafuck. Brooded over myself as I changed venue; left the house at sunset and ambled over to Epoch where I absorbed myself in journal writing and reading more on Ruby. In one weekend I’ve read nearly the entire manual. Finally, my friend Jonathon came around and we discussed things; felt better about my current state.

By this morning, I felt fine. Took my time getting out of bed. An hour of reading the Internet did its job on distancing me from my snoozy feelings of a pure morning. Did laundry while making lunch, then read some more Ruby docs. Got dressed and went to Epoch. More reading. It’s my goal to learn enough Ruby to proficiently use it with Ruby On Rails to build a site for a friend of mine. After several hours there, I started walking; took the long way home in the crisp air. Autumn is approaching, and this full moon is making things nice. I haven’t driven my car since I got home from work on Friday; it’s a weird feeling. As long as my car’s not up to snuff, it’s in my best interest to let it sit in the parking lot whenever I can. It’ll still drive decently, but the smoke, the smoke.

So I’ve still got this outstanding dental issue. There’s the molar that needs a root canal. That’s still gotta get done. I’m fine with that; I’m fairly certain I know where I’m going for that. But just an hour ago I discovered something else that may’ve happened this week since my recent dentist visit: I noticed in the mirror that my crooked incisor tooth is broken. There’s a crack right across it on the front; may’ve happened while eating, since the tooth has a filling on the backside. This scares the shit out of me. I don’t know what procedure is done for cases like that. Bonding? Patching up? Removal?

I’m becoming a poor man, and my bad teeth are to blame.

Scary shit.

Addendum:
Ok, so what I thought was a crack in a tooth was just the edge of the tooth-colored remnants of dinner. After brushing, it’s no longer there. I feel like a fool. I still need the root canal though.

And Now, a Setback

I saw a dentist a few days ago; my right teeth have been bothering me for a few weeks. Aside from a deep need for a deep cleaning, he gave me some bad news. It’s time again for a root canal.

This is on a tooth that was patched up last year at Castle Dental. Remember my travails with all that dental nonsense? It seems the prior dentist either didn’t remove the whole cavity before doing the filling or he didn’t do the filling well. Either way, I have a cavity that’s just about reached the nerve, a filling that’s coming loose, and I’m screwed bigtime.

My dentist referred me to a specialist in Westlake to do the actual root canal procedure; I called that office yesterday to set up an appointment and got a quote: $743, which is absolute BS.

“Oh no no no, that won’t do. You said you accept my insurance, don’t you?”

“Yes, we’re a contracted agent, but you’ll have to pay out of pocket, and then your insurance may reimburse you according to their policies. If necessary, we could even let you go half-and-half on payments.”

“Still, I can’t do that. Cancel the appointment.”

So today, I called my insurance. It’s true: the specialist is a contracted agent, and they accept my insurance, but that only gives me a 20% discount on services since they’re a specialist. Any regular dentist would fall under the usual insurance fee scale meaning my copay would be $212, a much more agreeable sum. So I’m left with searching for a regular dentist who does root canals. I know of one clinic, but I don’t know if I want to deal with Castle again. Their work on my first root canal was prompt, in-house, and covered under my plan, but I’d have to deal with Castle Dental again.

My tooth is starting to hurt. Time to make a decision soon.

In Which the Hobbyist Gets Business

My time of dabbling and dawdling with HTML, CSS, and server-side scripting are potentially yielding me some business. Two seperate friends of mine have been talking with me about building websites for them. They’re both hobbyist craftspersons, and they need sites that are beyond the basic “business card” site. They need galleries, user authentication, project dossiers with potential sales linkage, news/blogging functionality, as well as the usual Contact, FAQ, About, and Links pages.

It excites me that I get to build these sites. It’s been over 6 years since I built my last for-pay site for a tattoo-artist friend back home. So it’ll be swell to get my hands back into the code and do some good stuff. Hopefully it’ll all work out well, and that I can learn something while I’m doing it.

That’s every designer’s hope, I guess.

The technological solution I have my eye on is called Maypole. It’s a Perl-based solution, very similar (according to the documentation) to Java Struts or, as I can figure, Ruby On Rails. It’s a generic application framework that, in its default unmodified state, provides basic methods and templates to manipulate and display data in a database. Its design paradigm is that of Model-View-Controller, and as such is based on the expansive Class::DBI package for the data model and the powerful Template Toolkit for the view.

By default, Maypole will Do The Right Thing: the basic application can be had with the only cost to the programmer being 20 lines of code. Expanded functionality can be done for a bit more work.

I’m currently reading through the documentation and learning more about it. I’ve messed with it a little bit; got the sample application up and running, hacked it enough to make it run well on my laptop without Mod_Perl installed. There are plenty of other coders who are messing with Maypole – it’s still in active development. So it looks like a good fit for what I’m needing.

It’s my hope that Maypole is a good fit, and that I can use it to build these sites to the standards of usability, power, and flexibility that my customers want and that I’ve been blathering on about for years.

Drive Away

After some careful examination, I decided that getting that ’99 Civic would have been an awful $9500 mistake. Seriously. Luckily my bank would’nt’ve financed it; they turned it down because it was a year too old. After discussing financing with the dealer, they took my credit info, checked my history, and made me an offer: they “sweetened” the deal by dropping the sale price to $6650 + TTL, and “threw in” a 2-year service contract.

So, with $1200 down, about $230ish a month for 3 years, I took those numbers to my boss who plugged them into his spreadsheet. He calculated that the interest on the finance was a whopping 22.1%, and that interest charges would amount to over $2500 for the finance term. Sickening.

I turned the offer down, and the dealer offered to explain things in further detail, saying I’m operating on partial information and that I should give him and the business manager a chance, etcetera. I still declined, and he offered to let me test drive other cars and so on; I drove a Neon and was completely unimpressed. He showed me a “sample” spreadsheet with the offer terms: his sheet said 11%. It was then I noticed that the 2-year extended warranty was actually on top of the price of the car — a trump-up to increase the finance amount. Gracefully, yet fatiguedly, I declined the offer. I most likely will not be returning to that dealer.

I learned this week that I can go to my bank and get prequalified for auto loans; it was my assumption that I had to have a vehicle already picked and ready to buy. Not so. Thursday morning I applied with my bank for a personal, unsecured loan (Wells Fargo’s version of prequalifying). The banker left in her notes that this loan will be for a car, so there will be collateral. We played phone tag on Friday, so I don’t know the outcome of the application, whether I got accepted for my requested amount or if they’ve made a counter-offer, or if I’ve been declined. Knowing this bit of information will affect what I’m looking for.

Until then, I’m resting from the used car battle.