First off, my phone has more minutes, so you can all call me again. (You know, in case you have been not calling me for lack of minutes or something. :P) It had been sitting at below 10 minutes for the past month or so, because I didn’t want to add more until I was able to swap phones with my mom, and then I didn’t want to add more until my credit card rolled over another month, and blarg. I bought refill minutes through Calling Mart (recommended to me by Ben), and I recommend them for a nice discount on your refill minutes. If you use them, say that <my andrewid> at gmail.com referred you and I get points or something that are probably useful in some way.

I read this article today. Besides the part about owning less (which I’m finding myself agreeing with more and more), the part that really got to me was how the best things to spend your money on were experiences, or items to fuel experiences.

This is really true. When I think back to my time in San Francisco, I most remember things like the awesome pop-up restaurant dinner, the wine tour of Sonoma, or generally time with awesome friends. These are things where I would have been happy to spend more money and still feel like every dollar was worthwhile. (Although I still have a problem sometimes with not spending money when I go out with people… perhaps this is something I should work on fixing.)

Things I purchased like shittons of cards, gamecube games, or DVDs may have been interesting at the time, but they’re now sitting in boxes (some unopened) not being used anymore. The purchases I find worthwhile in retrospect are things like my camera, that facilitate experiences and memories of experiences.

So yeah. I don’t know what the point of this entry is anymore. Life is good. Spending money on things is not as good as spending money on experiences. Free experiences are good too. Yay life. Yay friends.

Today ended up being more annoying that I would have liked.

Started off fine with a lot of bug fixes, but I was getting pretty frustrated with the humidity by early afternoon. By about 4 I had taken two showers and was washing my hands and arms every few minutes because I was feeling sticky and couldn’t bear to sit in (stick to) my seat and use (stick to) my mouse and keyboard. This was despite having two fans blowing on me. I’m really not used to humidity anymore.

Also got a bit frustrated by work when I couldn’t write some relatively simple test cases. Since I am now using No Machine to connect to my work machine, a lot of the settings in my build have to be switched around (since I prefer to kick test runs off from my laptop rather than have No Machine also send a Firefox window across the US). This results in issues with certain tests and general frustration.

There was also an issue with a request to backport a test fix. Due to the time zone difference, I kept missing the people I needed to get approval to check in. I came back from failed dinner to find some follow up emails inquiring as to the status, and still no approval. That eventually got resolved, but it was more annoying than it should have been.

Speaking of failed dinner, Pittsburgh decided to rain this evening, resulting in the cancellation of our dinner plans. This wasn’t terrible except we had previously turned down dinner plans with Al-Tim, Keith, and Dan because of our existing plans. So meh.
It also meant trekking back through all the humidity and rain (from campus), which meant I was sticky and gross and sad by the time we reached home.

But friends really do make everything better. It’s nice having someone around to talk to and do household things with (cook, do dishes, do laundry). Also Al-Tim, Keith, and Dan came over after their dinner and there were games and general awesomeness. As a result, I am now feeling rather happy.

So yay for life.

Still feeling more and more like I made the right decision every day, even despite the current weather here.