unethical blogger

Tomorrow morning I will be in court, hopefully finalizing a process I started earlier this year. I will be changing my name.

When I was first considering it, I found the entire idea a bit scary. I have worked tremendously hard to make a name for myself, from my work in the open source community to conferences I've spoken at and interactions with numerous companies and people who have been instrumental in my whittling out a career in software engineering. I have been very particular about being referred to as "R. Tyler Ballance," ensuring that my "self-branding" remains consistent, netting me somewhere north of 36,000 results when searching Google.

Tomorrow I intend on throwing all that out the window, there are more important things in life than Google results (as shocking as that may sound).

I'm hesitant to go too much into the motivations for the change, knowing full well that everything I publish might as well be set in stone on the internet.

Those close to me know that my parents divorced when I was young. After a particularly nasty divorce, my mother and my three sisters parted ways with my father who I have since only had sporadic contact with. After a couple dark years for my sisters and I, my mother married another Navy man, George P. Croy, III. George came into the marriage with his daughter, bringing my sister-count up to four.

Over the past fifteen years or so, I have become George's son. Successfully exploring his emotional spectrum from tears of joy to turning him a bright crimson shade of pissed-off, never once treating me as if I were anything less than his kin. I'm convinced my attitudes towards family, women and friends not to mention my strong opinions on honor and integrity have all been heavily influenced by him

Plainly put, I would not be the man I am today without his guiding hand.

Provided everything goes well at the courthouse, I enter as R. Tyler Ballance and leave as R. Tyler Croy.

Might as well update your address books.

I feel like I'm slowly starting to blog like @cansar with just excerpts of other stuff that other people have said on the internet, so this is the last non-technical post for a little bit, promise.

This thread on reddit just about made my morning, well, in addition to that delicious peach I ate.

The mere thought of my own grandfather on reddit or any other online community I frequent is a pretty big stretch, but to have him be a notable member of the community is unfathomable (not to mention, run a part of it like r/mayonnaise).

I suggest you read the whole thread and enjoy a hearty belly laugh, only so long as you're not doing anything important like driving a bus or performing a colonoscopy.

Updated: As with most things, too good to be true. Although, I must say one of the most well done trolling performances I've seen yet. I remain unrepentant in my enjoying of a good belly laugh however

Saving this thread for posterity

Thanks to @pemullen, I was introduced to Sonic.net some time ago. Unfortunately I never took the time in my old apartment to switch out my AT&T DSL for Sonic.net's Fusion service; the thought of home internet downtime was just too dreadful to even contemplate changing, despite AT&T's absolutely awful service.

Now that I've left that apartment, I can finally take the dive into some delightful Sonic.net service, and while it's not even installed yet, I can tell this is going to be a wonderful relationship just by some of the support emails I've been exchanging with their folks.

From me:

Like an idiot I moved in last weekend instead of this upcoming weekend, so I'm now in the unenviable position of zero home internet service. In the interest of time, can you guys just ship the kit instead of sending some poor tech to Berkeley? :)

I understand that AT&T still needs to install a line, but after that I'm hoping to get up and running as soon as possible, I'm almost to the point of considering opening a book to read.

Oh the horror.

After only a couple hours Kelly R. got back to me:

Sorry to hear that you've been driven to such desperate measures. I know the lead time takes a while from AT&T, but we here at Sonic.net have been working on expediting our end of the install process as much as possible. I'll keep my fingers crossed that this installation process doesn't result in a library membership.

Quite the mixed bag today has been, I went to court (more on that later), I signed a lease (more on that later too), and I worked from home. Since ET and I are leaving this apartment soon, the management company has been showing the apartment during the day. Not a big deal, strangers walk around the apartment, all the windows are opened, all the lights are turned on, doors are opened and closed and if you're lucky enough to be around, you get to field questions.

About an hour or two after the showing of the apartment was over, ET looks up from the couch and asks "Where's Buddy" (a.k.a. Fatso). After looking in all of the usual hiding places, she grabs a can of food and taps the lid and listens. A faint meowing is heard. She opens the closet door and taps the lid again. Meow, meow, meow. I think to myself "no way in hell is that cat in the closet, so I hold the can out the window and tap, tap, tap. Meows are coming from outside of the bathroom window. Our bathroom window opens onto this tiny area between two buildings, and is rarely opened because the view sucks, and we don't stink up our bathroom too much.

Not entirely sure where the cat is, I go to the other side of this little area, in the buildings stairwell and open the window, climb out, and poke around for Fatso, a.k.a Buddy, a.k.a Missing Kitty #1. I can't see Fatso at all but I can hear him. I tapped on the hood for the ventilation shaft and I hear meowing. I tap again, meowing. Reaching my hand around under the hood, I hear more meowing but I don't feel anything.

Thanks to a flashlight and mirror loaned from a friendly neighbor, who's more earthquake prepared than ET and I, I was able to look down the ventilation shaft.

Over the past year or two I've become quite fond of tiled window managers, the jump to Awesome (which I've since dropped) to XMonad was a logical one. My gratuitous use of GNU/screen and Vim's tabs and split window support, already provided a de-facto tiled window manager within each one of my many terminals. The tiled window manager on top of all those terminals has served to improve my heavily-terminal biased workflow.

One computer has never been enough for me, at the office my work spans three screens and two computers, I've not yet discovered a Thinkpad that can drive three screens alone; at home I typically span three screens and two laptops (let's conveniently ignore the question of why I feel I need so much screen real estate). Tying these setups together I use synergy to provide my "software KVM" switch. As long as I've used synergy, I've had to switch from one screen to the other with a mouse, which is one of the few reasons I still keep one on the desk.

Until I discovered a way around that, thanks to Jean Richard (a.k.a geemoo) who posted this little configuration change to synergy.conf:

section: options
     keystroke(control+alt+l) = switchInDirection(right)
     keystroke(control+alt+h) = switchInDirection(left)
end

With this minor configuration change, combined with XMonad, Vimium (Vim-bindings for Chromium) and my usual bunch of terminal-based applications, I can go nearly mouse-less for almost everything I need to do during the day.