Hey, I said I’d be posting a lot of stuff now that the cat’s out of the bag, didn’t I?

First of all, you have got to read this rant over at AutoExtremist. Over the years, out of all the automobile manufacturers out there, I’ve decided I like Toyota the least—because of their unrelenting arrogance and the unmitigated blandness of their (admittedly reliable) products. For anyone who feels likewise, you’ll eat up Peter DeLorenzo’s latest tirade. I mean, how can you go wrong with a guy who describes Toyotas as “the rolling equivalent of automotive vanilla,” “motorized pabulum,” and “anesthetized transportation”? I thought I was the only one who hadn’t drunk the Toyota Kool-Aid yet, but Mr. DeLorenzo gets a standing ovation from me.

Secondly, muchos gracias to Newegg.com and FedEx. Together, they both managed to deliver all seven boxes of my new computer parts one day early, to the correct address on the first try, in perfect external condition, and via the help of a very pleasant and personable FedEx driver. I think this is the first time that my computer shipment has gone 100% perfectly since the D300 I ordered from Dell in 1997. (Falcon and UPS both conspired to fuck up my machine order in 2000, and the last time I updated my rig, FedEx dropped the parts off at the wrong house.)

Now, there’s still a chance for failure—the CPU heatsink, thermal grease and three 120mm fans are still en route via UPS from a different vendor. They’re in Jacksonville, FL right now and should be delivered tomorrow. I doubt anything will go wrong there, but of course I’m still keeping my fingers crossed. And of course, I still have to check out all the equipment when I get home to make sure there were no errors, missing items or damages incurred, but Newegg is always very good about this kind of stuff. I don’t expect any disasters.

In other news, now that I’ll be working from home and setting my own hours, my wife and I were talking about how this would give us much greater opportunities to spend more time in her home country of Thailand, and other parts of Asia that we’ve always wanted to visit—like Hong Kong, Japan and mainland China. Eventually we’d like to get so that we can spend a few months at a time overseas, and with my capability to pretty much work from anywhere, this can be achieved much easier than now—where I can’t work remotely and must take vacation days to leave the country, and will never be able to earn enough to do so until the second half of the year.

As an added bonus, my new “boss” is married to a Chinese woman and he likes to spend a lot of time overseas himself. Eventually I think it’s his intention to live there, but even now he’s intending to travel to China for a period of 2-3 months this very year. Another one of my new co-workers is going to Hungary, his wife’s native country, for a month. The beauty of it is that we can all do our work from these remote locations; all we need is an Internet uplink.

I think I am about to embark upon a very interesting time in my life, and possibly a very fun time. I want to ensure I put forth the effort required to make the most of these new opportunities, for as life has proven to me time and time again, one who does not take firm hold of an opportunity is doomed to lose it. Sometimes those opportunities will carry risks with them, risks that must also be taken before the potential for reward can be realized. For the last several years I’ve taken risks like that in order to seize opportunities, and almost without fail, they have led me to better and better things. At this point in my life, when my family is financially sound, we still have our health and no long-term worries, there could not be a better time.

Now, tomorrow evening I’m going over to the “developer lair” (where the other guys from my new workgroup spend many of their on-the-job hours) to sign an employee agreement, go over some paperwork, bring the guys up to speed on the banner advertising I’m working on, and get a developer copy of WinXP to install on the new rig. (They’re a Microsoft partner organization, so they get a lot of complimentary licenses for Microsoft products.) We’ll also need to talk about procuring the design software I’ll need, since I won’t have access to a legal license anymore after I leave my current job (all of my current-version software has been operating under license from my employer). I’ll also be able to pick up the check for the company’s part of the costs of my new development machine, so that’s cool—way earlier than I expected that to be ready.

I just need to spend tonight really getting down to work on those ad banners; I haven’t had much time lately because I had other freelance obligations to finish up. It’s actually fortunate that there are still a couple pieces missing from my computer shipment, because otherwise I’d have trouble resisting the urge to spend the evening assembling it instead. As it is, I’ll probably just unpack everything and inspect it to make sure it’s all there and all in good shape. I’m also curious to see what kind of fan is on the northbridge chipset of my A8N-SLI board. I hear the original fan design was ungodly loud and terribly prone to failure, and that Asus will send you a new, better-designed, quieter fan for free if you just call up and ask for it. This has been going on for about a month or two, so I’m hoping that maybe they’ve started putting the revised fan on the boards from the factory. We’ll see.

Well, it’s noon. Guess it’s time to get back to “work.” To be honest I don’t really have that much to do today…well, I do, but all of it is pretty unimportant crap that I don’t really feel like spending time doing. Rather than just “create an ad,” it’s “create three copies of the same damn ad at three different spec sizes.” Major, major fun, folks. Ah well. It’s a living…for another couple of weeks! Heh heh.

Dude, I just feel like celebrating. I want pizza!