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There’s a reason that a story, at least any good story, is made up of threads, each of them with a beginning, running along, intertwining with the other threads, but never quite connecting.  Threads wrap together, getting stronger, until there’s this big rope that could tie a pit bull to a tree or hang a man from the gallows.  Not all of these little threads are of the same length.  Each ends at its own specific time, when it’s supposed to, but because there are more threads, the rope, and the story, goes on.

Life is the same way.  Life is a whole bunch of threads, wrapped together.  We tell stories like this because it’s how we live, and sometimes, we’ve got to just let some threads end.

For those of you playing the home game, do me a favor.  Mark a win in my column.  I’m not going to give you all the details.  Chances are, you probably know them.  If you don’t, then it’s not really worth talking about, not now.  Of course, we all know that I can’t keep the threads of my life from becoming threads of my stories.  Neither can anyone else.  Someday, the details will be out there for everyone else to see.

Just for now, relax with the knowledge that I have never felt better about myself.  It could be that I’m just pumped up from a day of excitement, but I don’t think that’s it.  After all, most of that excitement was stuff that brought me down and made me question whether or not I’d make it at all.

Those of you who were worried about me, you were right to be.  You know what, though?  I found something in myself that I didn’t know was there.  I found a way not to let anything go, but to just let it end.

See, if I’d let go of a thread, then I wouldn’t be holding onto the rope.  That, I’ve still got.  That thread is just a little further down now that I’ve climbed past it.

Because sometimes, a rope is a lifeline.

It’s Christmas Eve, and I’m sitting at the kitchen table here in Florence, drinking a cup of Starbucks Ubora. The coffee’s hot and the weather, while not exactly cold, is a bit nippy, as it should be two days after the winter solstice. The rain has stopped, thank goodness, and it looks like we’ll be having a traditional South Carolina Christmas. That means no snow, no real need for a jacket or coat, but at least the sky is bright.

I didn’t do what I intended this year, namely finishing a book I started over last year’s vacation, but I don’t think that matters anymore. My life has something of a mind of its own, and for that, I’m grateful. I’ve never been good at making my own decisions.

At the same time, I’ve got a headache.

Living alone, I don’t have to put up with noises that I don’t make, not for the most part, anyway. The dogs bark sometimes, but not much, and there’s nobody yelling at anybody in my little apartment. Here, visiting the family for the holidays, it’s different. They yell and scream about almost everything, and damn, they’re annoying.

I’ve been living alone for more than ten years now, and I’m just starting to realize how nice that is. I love my family, but if I hadn’t left when I did, I’m sure that I’d have lost my mind by now.

On the other hand, it’s starting to become time to make a new family. I’m sure that it’ll turn into something not so different than what this one is, but I can’t ay I’m dreading it. I think I’ll look forward to my own kids making noise, my own wife getting distraught and upset over little things, and the way that I’ll start playing some music just to drown out all of the din and confusion.

It sounds strange, I know, but I do want the hectic life that comes from being a husband and a father.

Oh, wait.  The telephone is actually 19th Century technology, isn’t it?  Haven’t we been mucking about with the same basic principles for almost a hundred and fifty years?

So, like many people in my line of work, I started looking for something different.  I never played much with the telephones, anyway, barely ever learning how to transfer a call or dial into a conference bridge.  I was a server guy, particularly a UNIX server guy, and that only mattered to the world at large when they started falling apart.

As an aside, I happen to be really good at putting things back together when they’re falling apart, but for strange reasons known only to those guys even Satan fears called “Upper Management,” they decided that such duties were best left to poo-flinging monkeys instead of well-trained people, and I was relegated to an architecture role.  “Design it so it never breaks,” I was told, then got my wrist slapped when the works were gummed up with monkey poo.  Go figure.

Anyways, I started looking around.  What opportunities were out there for a really good server guy, where there could be exciting new technologies to work with?  There’s old tech, like Sun and IBM, and there’s Boom Tech, the companies who made it through the original Internet craze, like eBay and Yahoo!.[1]  Then there’s Google, who’s leading the way, and there’s a whole host of Silicon Valley startups again who are hot on the Google’s heels.  The problem is that none of these are out my backdoor.  I started looking into opportunities with companies like these, even went far into serious negotiations with eBay — I happened to be exactly the kind of guy they needed to come in and save their horrid system — but there was no way that I was going to move to San Jose.  There were other talks, too, but none of them worked out.

Then, it occurred to me.

Academia is a lot like working for a technology startup.  There is no limit to the number of interesting projects to work on.  The difference is that funding doesn’t tend to be a problem and you never have to worry about mergers, acquisitions, layoffs, or the deadpool.

It was with that in mind that I started talking to an old friend working at Clemson University.  A year and three days later, he finally worked through all of the red tape to offer me the position.  Today, I had my first day.

I can’t say for sure that starting a university job is all that different from starting a corporate job.  There was the same amount of paperwork to fill out, a blinding number of people to meet and names to remember, and all of the usual peculiarities like finding somewhere to sit, getting appropriate access, and setting up a new computer.  Something was different, though.  As much as I could tell that they were glad to have me here, none of them were overly excited as to be disingenuous.  There were no fake smiles, no pumped-up corporate attitude, no pep rally.  These people are just ready to get to work.  The bottom line here is to be innovative and get work done.  There are no sales people, no marketing departments, no corporate agendas.

I can tell I’ll like working here.  I’m sure that the work will be exciting.  In the coming days, I’ll be giving a little information on what I’m working on, but more importantly, I’ll be talking about the difference in structures and atmosphere.  This is a life that I think I can stick with for a long time.

[1]  What’s the proper way to punctuate a sentence that ends with a proper noun which just happens to itself end with a punctuation mark?  “Yahoo!” is the company’s full name, including the exclamation mark.  Did they ever think about how that makes grammar associated with their company look?  Even when it’s in the middle of a sentence, it looks ridiculous.

Geez, where do I begin?  I’ve been an early adopter of most software for as long as I can remember, definitely with each version of Mac OS X since I made the switch from being a Linux user.  I’ve loved it, but now we’ve got a problem.

Leopard’s not so good with wireless.

I know that I’m not alone.  There are thousands of users complaining about this problem, at least three of whom are in my department at work.  It’s okay, though, because I know that Leopard was a gigantic leap forward for Apple.  The real problem comes from the people.

See, Apple doesn’t give direct support in forums for its software.  There’ll be a fix, sooner or later (mostly sooner, sometimes later), but until then, you’re at the mercy of the community for support.  That’s fine with me.  What’s not fine is the attitude.

By far, the most ubiquitous response is, “You should just buy an Airport Extreme.  You know that’ll be compatible.”

I don’t have a problem with hardware incompatibilities.  I know that I run a different operating system than most of the world, and because of that, I can’t expect the best third-party support or the highest-performing native drivers.  You tell me that my Logitech webcam isn’t working because it’s not an iSight?  That’s fine.  You tell me I shouldn’t have bought that Visioneer scanner because they only make Windows drivers?  That’s fine, too.  What you can’t tell me is that I have to use first-party network gear.

The entire point of wireless network connectivity is to be truly mobile.  This means that anywhere you go that has a wifi network, you should be able to connect.  Apple will never own the networking market, neither enterprise or SOHO, and they don’t want to.  What they do have to do, though, is play nice with devices branded by Cisco, Netgear, Linksys, D-Link, Belkin, and others.

By the way, I name each of those because I’ve seen this problem with each of those vendors.  It’s a driver issue, or a protocol issue.  It’s not a hardware issue.

So out came my MacBook’s restoration CD and in went Tiger.  Once again, I’m happy with my laptop.  There are things about Leopard that I’m missing, but I feel confident that Apple, who has just seeded the second draft of their first update, will fix this in time.  It won’t be until that time, however, until Leopard is ready for me.

I’ve had some great Halloween costumes over the years.  Until now, the most memorable was in 2001, when I dressed in full chain mail and took top prize in four costume contests.  Now, I think I’ve outdone that as Buckethead.

This was a cheap costume to put together.  I dropped $1.97 on the mask at Wal-Mart, which I had initially thought would be the hardest piece to get.  The guitar, a B.C. Rich Warlock, I already had, and though I bought a Marshall MS-2 mini amp to stick to my belt, I don’t consider it solely for the costume.  The hardest thing was getting the KFC bucket.

From the beginning, I knew I wanted a clean, unused bucket.  Seven KFC trips later, I was prepared to use a dirty one.  Try as I might, I couldn’t fine anyone willing to lay one on me.  Several times, I offered to buy a 20-piece as long as they just wouldn’t put the chicken in there.  People got weird.  They’d never give me a solid reason, just saying that they couldn’t fork over half a cardboard tube.

On Monday night, I hit my eighth KFC.  A sixteen year-old kid was behind the counter.  I said, “Man, I hope you can help me.  I need a clean, empty, large KFC bucket.”

“Here you go,” he said.

I thought that being Buckethead for Halloween would be great for two reasons.  First, I’d get to carry a guitar around at work all day.  Second, nobody would get it.  I was half right.

The first thing I heard when I stepped out of the car was some guy shouting, “Buckethead.”  That would be the pattern for the day.  Half of the people I ran into would ask, “What the hell are you supposed to be?”  The other half would answer so that I didn’t have to.

Have I ever mentioned that I work in a large corporation?  The most surprising Buckethead fan turned out to be one of our Vice Presidents.  She’s cool.

After work, I took a long walk down the street for some Starbucks.  The walk usually takes me twenty minutes.  Today, it took an hour and a half.  Everywhere, people were stopping me, praising my costume, asking me to play them a few riffs.

I didn’t stick around for any of the costume contests.  I just didn’t have the energy.  Instead, I left downtown around dusk, stopped at Wendy’s for some fries and a Frosty, then came home and collapsed on the couch.  I’m exhausted.  Either I’m not as young as I used to be, or it’s easier to walk around in 150 lbs. of armor than it is to carry a guitar and a chicken bucket.

“So, I went into the bathroom, and I checked the stalls, you know, just to make sure I didn’t walk into one that was already occupied. And in one of them, there was this guy, and he was dressed like a cop. I thought he was that nice young man from the Village People, so I tried to get an autograph. That’s all it was, man. Just a simple misunderstanding.”

I think we’d all swallow this easier than the horse pills Craig has been trying to feed us.

“The FBI raped a warehouse owned by David Copperfield.”

The preceding was overheard on FOX News at 1430 EDT on October 29th, 2007.

For those of you without tracking devices attached to my car, I’ve been out of town over the weekend. Because of the reinstall, I’ve got a lot more work to do tonight, so expect details to come tomorrow.

• Jeans, socks, shorts, and shirts for four days.
• Deodorant
• Toothbrush
• Toothpaste
• Electric Razor
• Macbook
• Macbook power adapter
• Bose in-ear headphones
• iPod
• iPod cable
• Motorolla RAZR
• Motorolla RAZR charger
• Four external hard drives, total storage, roughly 1.5 Terabytes
• A dozen unwatched DVDs
• B.C. Rich Warlock electric guitar
• Line6 TonePort UX2
• M-Audio Studiophile reference monitors
• Marshall MS-2 mini amp
• A box of assorted guitar picks
• Extra pack of Ernie Ball Slinky guitar strings
• Three guitar cables
• Panasonic over-ear studio headphones

I’m at my parents’ house for an extended weekend, taking care of their dog and mine while they’re at the beach. Hopefully, I’ve brought enough stuff that I won’t get bored.