mindlace

Sorry that it’s been so long since I posted; life has been busy, but fruitful.

At the moment I am trying to get a work visa in Germany, and living with the wonderful and charming Claudia. This features lots of kafka-esque moments, wherein I try to convince people that have no understanding of the work I do that I am sufficiently qualified.

Besides that, my zero-owned-matter quest proceeds apace:  I have fewer than 10 physical books now (an enormously difficult thing for me to do), and am in the process of selling off my car.

The clothing-rental thing would work if I were in the states; I haven’t looked here in Europe yet. Unfortunately it is not particularly cost-effective to rent your clothes, and has rather dire consequences for one’s ability to make a sartorial statement.

In any case, once the car is sold the largest piece of matter I will own is an Aeron chair and associated desk. Not quite ready to give up on that, but for the moment it is in the states.

My work is interesting – getting to implement a scrum-like development environment for a web-development firm, as well as improving their toolchain all round – svn, redmine, automated testing, etc. I am enjoying the challenge of moving an existing team towards a better method of working.

I’m still shoveling through my mountain of debt, incurred while attending college, and it seems unlikely that I will be free from it until at least the end of ‘09; I am seriously looking forward to a future when I actually get to allocate more than a quarter of every dollar I earn somewhere other than “paying for yesterday”.

For those of you who follow my twitter feed, you know I’ve already broken down and pre-ordered a Kindle 2. Despite announcing it many months ago, I have not given away most of my books. I suspect my reticence is in not wanting to give up the content. However, I have a workaround. I’m going to use delicious library to catalog all the physical books I have, so that I can gradually re-acquire my library in ebook format.

Anyway, so this should get rid of the bulk of my non-car owned matter. As part of the move I’m going to try to come up with an estimate of how much mass remains in my possession, so I can accurately track its diminishment.