This is a reanimation of the Vicaribus blog as lived by Miro Kazakoff and Ehren Foss in 2004 and 2005. The photos may be spotty.

Tulip the Bulldog

Posted by ehren

It's been four days since my last post, and I thought that was terribly unfair to msnbot.msn.com, who dutifully checks this webpage at least 20 times a day in search of new content. It's 11:04 and I have a big steak dinner in me, and the space-age washing machine at El Padre's is... it sounds like it's going to travel through time. In any event, I wasn't sure if I had the energy to really tackle Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and then I saw that Miro took care of it. Rock on.

Throughout our stay, which was relaxing and productive in many ways tangential to the boxes on my actual To Do list, Remus continually failed to devour me whole. 20 lbs of dog with 18" legs is not a creature favored by evolution, but awfully cute.

I talked to a real live human recruiter on the phone today -- not someone who is directly able to offer employment, but someone who purports to represent someone who might someday offer employment -- and while she was looking for someone to start immediately (I won't get there until mid-September), we did have an informative conversation about what the market in Austin is like, how much I might expect to get paid, etc etc. I've becomed dangerously accustomed to an extremely luxurious professional lifestyle. None of my clients really set hard deadlines, and despite my persistent fears the hours never really impinged upon the bus life. I did miss the "16 Stages of Ecstasy" dance cycle at the nudist colony in order to do two hours of work on a MySQL interface layer, but if I get a traditional 9-5 job I won't ever be able to say anything like that, because it would completely blow everyone's minds.

Tomorrow I have another phone call, maybe an actual interview (I don't know) with a company selling web applications to help manage securities transactions. I haven't used Java since the Spring of 2001. We'll see how it goes.

The drive from Minneapolis to Madison was very pretty; We opted for a scenic path along the Mississippi River, past bluffs and dams and locks and sharp little riverfront towns propped up by the nostalgic bed & breakfast industry. From La Crosse we turned inland on I-90, Miro was on a phone call in the back and I was bored with no music, so I backtracked about 5 miles to WI-71, and we took it for maybe 40 miles to 33, then US-12, which turned into the Madison loop expressway, and by then the sun was setting.

No pictures are available from the last week, as just today I found my camera underneath the passenger's seat. I woke up at like... 6 this morning and that, combined with about a gallon of high-octane coffee, has caused my right index finger to start twitching sideways, except when I hold my hands up all the other ones shake so I'm going to bed.

I've made about 20% of progress into the big BUT WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? post and now that I've talked about it I'll have to finish the damn thing.