unethical blogger

I wanted to wish everybody foolish enough to keep my RSS feed in their news reader a happy twenty eleven from Victoria, Canada. While I won't do a big 2010 "year in review" style post, I wanted to point out some milestones the year has had for me:

• In 2010, I became a married man. Hooray new tax status!
• In 2010, Slide was acquired by Google, giving me the liquidity to use previously purchased stock to buy a nice BLT sandwich on Wed. September 15th.
• In 2010, my lovely wife finished her paralegal studies. Bringing her degree count to two, eclipsing my zero.
• In 2010, I moved from San Francisco to Berkeley, adding two more modes of transportation to my morning commute
• In 2010, I managed to not die in any fashion, comically or otherwise.

The name change that I mentioned in my previous post is now official. This means I now have to update everything. I'm in for a world of hurt between the DMV, banks, brothels and strip-Parcheesi clubs.

The only thing you need to do is update your address book, lucky you! I know at least one friend of mine has, who messaged me to say:

I put your old surname in the "Maiden Name" field in Address Book. Just thought you'd want to know.

I spoke to my step-dad George on the phone immediately after the hearing was over and asked if there are "any perks to being a Croy?"

Still haven't gotten a response to that one yet.

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.