Razing the Roof

In my life I’ve lived at over 50 address. With so many places to have called home it would not be surprising that one or two of those houses and/or buildings would no longer be standing today. In looking back through and updating my “list of all my addresses” I happened to find 3 in Jamestown, NY within about 1000 feet of each other that are razed for their own reasons.

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The progress over 10 years…

Previousness…

I had a job, a roof over my head, ability to purchase clothing and food without assistance.

I was also happily married and in the process with US Immigration to bring my then wife to the United States. After our nuptials and the failure for me to secure regular employment in Hong Kong I moved back to lay our roots. Within a month I was successful enough to return back for our first anniversary. Afterwards the separation got to us, and this 10 year reminder popped on my calendar today:

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Knickknacks, Swag, & Pieces of Flair

October 2, 2024 was my last day at my job as a Principal Software Engineer for Cloud ID at Synacor. Originally hired on September 3, 2013 as a Web Operations Engineer I was culled in the “Synapocalypse” in March, 2014. After re-applying for a Configuration Engineer position I was rehired on April 14, 2014 and kept increasing my position until it was finally obsoleted.

Over the 10+ years of corporate work I acquired a hefty lot of company bling. This posting is to go over all the captured “shinies” and reminisce about how awesome and excessive some things can really be.

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I Envy You, Alan Rickman

I recently learned about a book of Alan Rickman’s diaries that was published after his death titled “Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman“.

I, like many others, used to have a diary as a child. Mine started around 1995 when I was in 8th grade. I used to write 2-3 times a week in my 4″x6″ 3-ring bound diary, and there always seemed to be pages begging for more of my life to be etched into the pages. My later months when I was 16 found me burning the book and throwing it and the seared pages into a fast-flowing brook in Kennedy, New York. All those memories, committed to pages and easily referenceable now gone like the leaf travelling down the stream.

Alan Rickman, born 1946, started to keep a detailed progress of his day-to-day starting in 1992. He was 46 at the time. I’m 41, with a slap-in-the-face-2-weeks until I’m 42, and I’ve decided to begin to keep a diary as well. I’m not going to go buy journals with intricate designs from shops, no. I’m going to do it my own way.

https://github.com/mjheick/diary is my project, and it’ll be hosted. It’s currently in the infant stages of development, but I do have the database mockup done and I can add to that as frequently as I’d like to until the frontend is done.

I feel I have to do this, in my own way, in the style of how Alan Rickman detailed his life. The fact that he did it from 46 to his final breaths amazes me. My Grandfather did this as well until his last breaths, and then my Grandmother continued it on.

I feel nothing of value can be acquired of my legacy except by the people that stumble across it and find value for themselves in it, and that’s enough of a driver to do something as simple as this.

A quote from Alans diary sits with me:

14 September

11am Three minutes’ silence which we shared with Kiss Me Kate cast.

Supper at home. Watching more coverage. Still trying to understand something. Cannot remove the fact of 4 million starving in Afghanistan not to mention the innocents in Iraq. There is such political naivety in the US that it only takes one image of five Palestinians dancing in the street to obliterate the bigger picture.

Madly Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman