Looking back, I probably thought that if I didn't blog about it, it would go away.

2009 has not, so far, been kind to Travis Briggs (Travis Briggs' blog, this is the blog of Travis Briggs).

My main problem is that on January 12th, I was laid off from my job. With a conciliatory tone, my boss explained that my work was exemplary, that he was thoroughly impressed with my contributions, but that there simply was no longer room for me at the company. Another developer got cut at the same time as me. It turns out that they let me go exactly on my 2 month 'anniversary'. The most crushing immediate impact of being laid off was that they cut off my health benefits immediately (not at the end of the month). I ended up having to pay over 200 dollars for prescription drugs later that week-- and that was only for a half month's supply! I read through my options, and COBRA would cost me like 415 dollars a month, so I should probably get that, seeing that my prescriptions would then only cost 45 dollars and I would be covered for other ailments (at about the same cost as a month of drugs now).

Notice that I introduced the above as being my 'main' problem. Additionally, I have recently turned twenty-four (on the 13th, the day after losing my job). I'll admit there was the passing joy of celebrating the occasion with my family (my mom baked an awesome double-layered peanut butter chocolate cake) and some friends. However it seems the main function of this date was to call into relief the fact that the past 2-3 years have been wasted. I've given up a great job (Brightcove) had multiple failed romantic relationships, failed at saving any money I've earned and barely made a dent in my student loan payments, and failed to accomplish anything significant or worthwhile outside of my professional life, which in itself has not lived up to its full potential. My social circle (friends and acquaintances) has shrunk rather than grown, besides the fact that I am a fat, unemployed computer programmer living in his parents' basement.

Mother. Fucker.

I'm a generally optimistic person, though, and I'm convinced things can get better. Not that they necessarily will-- I know it will take work and dedication and of all things luck on my part-- but that they can. Here's hoping.

He's like the surprise Christmas present that you forgot to open Christmas morning. Tonight, while pondering the awful things going on in Gaza and how completely incompetent and ineffectual our asshole President is, I remembered that the dark knight (ahem) is on his way. It made me really happy, and I'm literally filled with hope that he can do something about this mess and our economic troubles.

Two other things. I'm going to the gym tomorrow (tomorrow!) and I'm signing the fuck up. My fat pants were snug to put on today, and that's just intolerable. I've been fat before, and it makes the second time easier. But getting even fatter than I've ever been, when I've already been pretty fat? No fucking way. NO FUCKING WAY!

I don't even care. I have no life, I can go to the gym every fucking day. All it means is taking a later train home. And I can afford a personal trainer too, to 1) teach me a bunch of fancy-pants exercises and best practices so that I maximize my workout and 2) inspire me to keep a schedule/appointments (harder to blow off the gym when you have an appointment with a trainer).

As for the second thing, I FINALLY bought a book that I've wanted for more than 3 years. It is The Computer Music Tutorial by Curtis Roads. It's basically a textbook for all things computer music. Not just MIDI, Digital Audio Workstation, home-music-production stuff. We're talking synthesis, digital signal processing, etc. Hardcore stuff like you'd learn in Bianchi's classes if he was teaching grad students. I already own The Csound Book, a similarly intimidating tome. However I found The Csound Book to be too application specific, though it was fun to work through some of the tutorials.

Anyways, with the new book, I finally plan on pursuing my dream of programming/creating a virtual analog synthesizer in Audio Unit format. This goal is a bit 'rained on' by my discovery the other day (while doing 6+ hours of research) of Rham which is EXACTLY what I wanted to do. My heart is so broken, I was tempted to use a <blink> tag.

But at least I'm not going to be fat anymore.

Oh and Christmas was nice.

Damn right: http://cowbird.110mb.com/46.html.

Also, I, Travis Briggs am going to spammishly (Travis Briggs) pad this post with my name (which happens to be Travis Briggs) in order to attempt to reclaim my #1 Google spot which seems to be oscillating between Travis Briggs (the real Travis Briggs) and some dork with a livejournal. I'm considering making the front page of my site automatically re-direct to http://www.boxofmonocles.com/travis/briggs/travis-briggs

It's nearly 11 and Thanksgiving is pretty much officially over. I'll admit guiltily that I didn't see any part of the televised Macy's parade, for I woke up at around 12:30 PM.

No matter what happens in my life, I'll always remember the fact that my mother is a cooking MACHINE. She had 3 types of pie ready before I had even woken up, not to mention the extra turkey that she cooked yesterday. There were two separate rounds of appetizers, the latter including stuffed mushrooms and baked stuffed shrimp.

It was my niece Hailey's first Thanksgiving, which was a largely uneventful occasion. She was paraded around to some of her father's (my future brother-in-law's) family. During the meal, she sat in her bouncer seat and watched football, making high-pitched cooing noises (at 5 months, she's still far too young to share).

I also did a little bit of impromptu music recording with my uncle Buddy (who's not really my uncle and not really named Buddy). He plays some mean folk/blues guitar, and I let him play Rosie for a bit. Eventually I plugged him into Pro Tools, and he laid down a track (which he unfortunately messed up a bit, but I'm going to maybe try and fix it up).

The day was without pageantry, without poignancy, but still had a lot of old-fashioned, feel-good charm. My family is good people and we do love each other. And I'm thankful for that.

I switched my hosting today from BlueHost over to WestHost. So my hosting has apparently changed color and moved out west. To Arizona it would appear. I opted for the "big 10" package which, for 10 dollars a month for 12 months, gives me 150 GB of storage and 1000 GB of transfer. I will use paltry fractions of this capacity.

The process was pretty painless, thanks in a large part to the excellent import/export database tools in phpMyAdmin. WestHost offers VPS, Virtual Private Server, which allows you to have a virtual machine on a shared host. Because of this, they give you GCC (a popular source code compiler, for the non-programmers) and you can do whatever you want from there. I installed Ruby and Rails from scratch (because I wanted Rails 2.1 for no other reason than it's the most current version), then proceeded to configure my rails app to be the document root via a virtual host, before configuring FastCGI.

Honestly, I didn't really expect any of this information to be of particular interest to anyone. I more wanted to post as a marker for me when I look back, so I can say "Oh, this is where I changed hosts".

My old hosting was supposed to go offline at Midnight, so we're past the point of no return, baby!