So, as is quickly becoming common knowledge — but not so common that I don’t have an urge to write a Me FAQ — I’m leaving Concordia where I’ve been working for, well, forever, or four years, whichever comes first. This shocks people, but that’s probably because as far as they know I’ve always been in Montreal, because before I was in Montreal, I wasn’t on the ‘net.

I was on FidoNET, though. I think being on FidoNET should get you a bit of cred. ARPANET gets you cred. FidoNET gets strange looks, most of the time, or sad nods. I can’t even remember my node number anymore. But I digress.

Right, so I’m going to go work at e-smith — or what was e-smith but is now a division of Mitel — which means moving to Ottawa. I haven’t had to move house in six years. That’s the longest I’ve ever lived in one place. This is a complicated story that I will only explain in person. I’m sort of glad to get out of this apartment, which has always been less than spectacular. But it’s the boxes and the packing and the lifting and the moving and the driving the truck and the cat and what am I going to do with the cat? and the subletting and the apartment-hunting.

And the surprisingly deep reliance on the computing facilities of my soon-to-be-former place of employment.

I’ve spent an entire weekend logically moving. Going room (server) to room (workstation), packing up boxes (tarballs) and loading them into trucks (other tarballs) and moving them all to a new home (friend’s colo — wankel++) and then unpacking (Guess.) and taking all of this stuff from a handful of machines and shoving it all in one place.

What’s frightening about this is that we’re not just talking about a home directory here; rather, mail for three domains and half a dozen people, a half-dozen websites including the ever-amusing forums of — and I quote — Chiff and Fipple, the Poststructural Internet Tinwhistle Experience — and a running news server. I think it’s the news server that made it surreal. It’s sort of like moving house and then the movers see all the safes.

But it’s done. Or at least the presentable bits are; just like a physical move, my logical move involved unpacking all of the stuff other people see and then hastily shoving a bunch of unpacked boxes into the closet.

They could shut down my workstation now and I wouldn’t know. Weird feeling.

[Reposted in November 2003 from my short-lived journal on Use Perl.]