...the noise remains.

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Naturally, absolutely everything will be broken for a while. You'll get used to it, if you aren't already.

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Then, somewhere, I could hear the sound of any future children of mine being unborn.

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I started my job on Monday, and it seems to be a rather good one. The office is near the northern boundary of what I'd consider downtown Chicago, and my apartment is at or below the southern one, so between home and work is about 10 square miles of urban goodness that, had I the time and were the weather more acclimate, I would be taking thirty thousand pictures of per day.

I still need a bunch of furniture for my place. My computer currently sits on a plastic folding table, and my TV is on the floor. Also, stupid little things like paper towels and oven sheets and various related sundries. These are all things that will have to wait for my first paycheck, as any money I might have once had was spent on the move or on coffee.

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Tomorrow morning I leave. The big move. To Chicago.

People keep asking if I'm nervous or excited, but the answer is that except for when people ask that question, I'm trying very hard not to think about how I feel, let alone feel anything. For the last few weeks I've had to distract myself with TV shows and movies constantly to keep my brain spinning. If I stop thinking about other stuff, I'll end up thinking about the fact that I'm moving to Chicago tomorrow. Like a shark, if I stop swimming I die.

It's gotten worse lately. I've found that only a few shows are both light and soothing enough to distract me from reality, so I've been watching Community and The Big Bang Theory almost non-stop for the past 3 days. Of course, the things I would watch them on are all packed away, so tonight is going to be a bear. I'll see what distractions Hulu can provide.

My room looks weird without a bed in it.

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People have wondered why I have pictures of Chicago up there and not, say, pictures of Detroit and its myriad suburbs where I've spent my whole life. There are two answers. The first is that I never take pictures of Detroit, perhaps because Detroit is ugly and depressing and I'd have no problem if it was sold to Canada. The second reason, the one I'm more likely to say out loud, is because I love Chicago and take any opportunity I can to pretend I live there.

In my bedroom, on either side of my television are two framed, vintage Chicago tourism posters I bought from Costco one day a few years ago when I had more money than I knew what to do with. Above the TV are two framed, black and white photos I took in Chicago during one of my many trips.

I like Chicago, alright? I've been to New York and Los Angeles, and your various other middling metropoli like Miami or Seattle. None of them hold a candle to Chicago in my book. Besides being generally gorgeous, Chicago seems to have the best attitude. Ask someone for directions in NYC or LA and you're likely to be treated as if you are physically robbing someone of their time, wringing it from their lives like brown water from a mop. In Chicago, everybody asks everybody for directions. People have asked me for directions while I've been visiting, and I've been able to help them because the city has such a simple downtown layout.

After I graduated from high school, I went on a trip to Chicago with a friend as my big "see the world" trip, and I've been clamoring to get back ever since. I took a trip there at least once a year thereafter, at first as vacations, but eventually for job interviews. I've been out there for numerous interviews now for various web development-related jobs, usually timed at the absolute coldest points in recorded history.

Finally, though, one of those interviews didn't end in disappointment and a spiraling bout of soul-crushing depression.

I got a job in Chicago!

So, naturally, I'm moving there. The job starts pretty soon, so I've had to pick out an apartment and set up utilities and everything from here. I'm getting a loft that's probably a bit nicer than I can afford, but since I have to get the place sight-unseen I'd rather err on the side of niceness so as not to get there and find out I was duped into renting a refrigerator box by some cleverly angled photos.

I've been having to distract myself a lot lately to keep myself from going crazy. My own apartment. My first place on my own. A job in a new city. Renter's insurance. Mindsplosion.

Since this is my first place, there's an annoyingly large number of things I have to get for myself. If you're alarmingly generous, here's an Amazon registry of some of the stuff I'm going to have to get myself.

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Imagine the luck of a person to randomly pluck a stranger from a crowd and ask them if they know about video games, and that person happening to be a gaming industry journalist (of sorts) who knows a great deal about video games, and someone who also used to work in retail, assisting customers in the video game department.

Granted, if you grabbed any 20-something guy with two working hands and he'll probably have at least some experience with video games, but you have to admit that I was a pretty lucky shot. It'd be like standing in the popcorn aisle of the grocery store, unsure whether to buy white popcorn or yellow, asking the first person who passes, and him turning out to be Orville Redenbacher.

Well, maybe not, but come on.

Her quandary was, she explained, her husband wanted a Nintendo Wii for Christmas, and she just couldn't believe that the tiny box they come in includes everything needed. It is a small box, after all.

So I explained that, yes, unless you want extra controllers or games, you don't really need anything else.

I didn't tell her that I was in the room when Nintendo first announced the Nintendo Revolution, or that I was also in the room a year later when they announced that the Nintendo Revolution was now called the Nintendo Wii and first demonstrated its wacky motion-sensitive controller.

Though, I did have to fight an urge to get her to buy more controllers and games and accessories and stupid Monster Cables and extended warranties. The Circuit City "upsell" mentality can be hard to shake, even though I always hated it and rarely did it. I liked working at CC because I could legitimately help people decide which game console to buy (or more frequently, buy for their kids).

I worked there in my senior year of high school. It was a brand new Circuit City that had just been built in a mall (the first Circuit City to be attached to a mall) and, knowing I had to work somewhere, tried my hardest to get hired there. I was too late for the first round of hiring for the store-opening staff, but a few days before the store opened I got a call to come in for an interview.

This was my first actual interview (I'd worked at a grocery store a few years earlier, but all I had to do was fill out a form and show up) and I was terribly nervous. The interview was set up for shortly after school, but rather than going straight there I went home first, showered, got all fancy, brushed my teeth for about 90 minutes, and stared at myself eagle-eyed in the mirror for a few minutes trying to keep myself from throwing up.

When I got to the store a comfortable 10 minutes before the interview time, I was told that whoever I was supposed to interview with wasn't there, so I'd have to come back in a few days.

So a few days later I repeated the process of primping myself up like a rosebush, trying to suppress my nerves to slightly below the level of fainting, and then went to the store, only to find out that whoever I was supposed to interview with wasn't there, so I'd have to come back in a few days.

So a few days later I repeated the process once again, showed up for my interview to find out when I should come back again, and the person I was to interview with was actually there.

The interview was a complete mess. The questions were all read from a script, and the kind of vague questions that I don't think anybody can actually answer without having known the questions were coming. Things like "tell me about a time when you used teamwork to solve a problem." Buh.... well I, there was a project... no, hang on...

I was 17. I didn't have any life experiences, I didn't know what my biggest weakness was (with retrospect, I'd probably say my biggest weakness was being 17). These are questions formulated by HR drones who were contracted by Circuit City Inc to cull together questions meant to assess the hireability of adults. Me. 17. Not adult.

Expecting to be asked real questions about my life and skills, I was completely thrown off by the scientifically compiled questions from a piece of paper. I stumbled and muttered through it. It was a terrible episode. It's one of the memories I have that still makes me cringe from embarrassment.

Even though I did an absolutely dreadful job in the interview, the HR monkey sent out by HQ to handle hiring for the new store seemed satisfied enough that I had at least said something. I wanted to be in the computer section, and this hiring person didn't know anything about computers, so in light of my performance in the interview she wanted to set up a kind of non-interview interview with their computer department manager so he could figure out if I knew anything about the blasted computers, before passing me along to either the store manager or the front door.

So I spent the next few days filling my head with all of the PC-related minutia I could find, and then showed up for my non-interview-quiz-thing, and was told that the guy I was supposed to see wasn't there, so I should come back in a few days.

That was it. I was done. I made the appointment to come back, but after being hosed 3 times, after stressing myself out and getting dressed nice and looking like a proper human 3 times only to find out I wasted my time, I'd reached my limit. If they were going to treat me like that, I didn't want to have anything to do with them.

The day of the quasi-interview-conversation-assessment I had no intention of going. I wore a hooded sweatshirt and jeans to school and didn't shave. At the end of the day I was going to go home and think about how I'm far too unique and intelligent to get a "normal job," but as I approached the freeway exit that lead to the mall on the way home from school, I thought, "eh.. maybe I can go there and yell at them for screwing me over so many times I couldn't even remember," and headed toward the store.

Once there, still in my scruffy hobo attire, I announced my presence and stood around the TV section waiting for someone to get me. Eventually I was told that the person I was supposed to meet with, the PC department manager, wasn't there....

...so why don't I just interview with the store manager instead, since records indicate I'd already had my first interview.

Huh. Even though I didn't technically "pass" the first interview, and the hiring woman only set me up with the meeting with the PC department guy to see if I knew what RAM was, I'd gotten a defacto "pass" because nobody there communicated with each other, or showed up to work when they had appointments. Whatever. I didn't care at this point at all. The only reason I was there, really, was because I wanted to at least meet appointments that I make, and not just fail to show up without warning, as had happened to me for the fourth time just then.

So, not caring, unshaven, and wearing a sweatshirt I went back and met with the store manager. I told him about what I knew, happened to mention that I wrote for a video game site at the time and did some reviews. He asked me what the last game I reviewed was, which was a "Commandos" game, and he asked me to give him a mini-review of it, so I kind of re-iterated the last paragraph of my written review (which wasn't hard, since I'd done it the night before). He offered me a job in the video game department, which didn't pay quite as much as the computer department, but since I knew the subject matter pretty well I would probably get along just fine.

I was a little shocked, but I'm good at hiding that, so I accepted the job and went home to figure out what the eff just happened.

It had to have been that, since I legitimately didn't care or want the job, I came off as more confident than I really am. Instead of being a nervous wreck, I was rather ambivalent and was able to answer the questions with ease. Sure, it helped that he was asking me real questions and not phony HR gruel, but still... even though I was dressed poorly and looked sloppy, I got a job.

Including then, every job I've ever been hired for was one where I wasn't sure if I wanted it during the interview. The jobs I've always really wanted I've never got, perhaps in part because I wanted them so bad I was nervous or uptight. Having realized this, I try to manually not care about interview when I have to do them, but that's hard to pull off.

The Circuit City I worked at was very poorly run (indicative, perhaps, of the rest of the company), and in any instance where I had to actually interface with Circuit City employees or rules, I hated the job. The rest of the time, though, when I could help people, I loved it.

My first day of work there was Black Friday. I had to show up at 4AM, and was told that all I'd be doing was ferrying DVD players (their big loss-leader of the day, I think it was $30) from the warehouse to the front as they ran out. I did that for about ten minutes, but as I passed the video game department I was stopped by a woman who was standing in front of the Nintendo Gamecubes and wondered if what was in the box was everything she needed, or if she was supposed to get something else.

Once I helped her, someone else wanted help, and then another. I spent the rest of the day (until 9PM) helping people pick out which system they should get for their kids, which games they should buy, or whether various accessories worked with specific systems.

I had absolutely no training, but I didn't need any. I knew video games, I knew how to answer questions without being a jerkface, and that was all I needed. I actually didn't get any training until about 3 months later when a manager asked me if I'd done [some CircuitCity lingo] and I said I didn't know what that was; yeah, they forgot to train me in any store policies or procedures.

Sometimes I contemplate loitering around the video game and electronics sections of Costco and offering people advice, since one of the ways the store keeps prices low is by not having salespeople to help them, but that would probably be an inefficient use of my time. That lady with her Wii question, though, flooded my head with memories of being a lowly salesmonkey at a now-failed retail establishment.

I was glad, though, that I could walk away from her without having to offer her a CityAdvantage coverage plan.

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It used to be that all you'd see is cop shows, doctor shows, and lawyer shows. To mix things up, the genre of people-helping-cop shows has been invented.

And these are only the ones currently airing.

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I've replaced it with a reCaptcha system for weeding out the non-humans. You should only need to do this once in a while, since it remembers that you're a human for a while.

The necessity for such things is based on the fact that there's scammers and spammers with automated scripts trolling the whole internet, trying to inject dummy data into any form in hopes that it's a form that sends someone an email, and others that find blog comment fields and automatically stuff them with "Wow what a cool blog. PS check out these awesome weight-loss supplements!"-caliber material.

Previously I was using a homebrew system where you had to correctly identify a displayed color. I did this because the "type what you see" tests can be needlessly difficult, and because I used to hate using tools that I didn't make.

Well, I've gotten over the second thing, and reCaptcha took care of the first thing. Besides being the most disabled-friendly method of humancheckery, it performs a valuable service. By typing in the words displayed in the images, you're actually helping to digitized old, scanned documents.

reCaptcha shows two words and asks you to identify both. It knows what one of the words actually is, but doesn't know what the other word is (you never know which word it knows and which word it doesn't). By identifying the word it does know correctly, you're telling it what the word it doesn't know is.

More information about that whole process is available in this video:

I also removed the account aspect of this site. When I had a store here a million years ago, thousands of people signed up for commenting accounts thinking they were signing up for store accounts, so there were a few thousand unused accounts taking up virtual space. All you need to do now is type your name. No passwords required.

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While I was at the bookstore, I saw my sociology teacher in the sociology section. I guess she was skipping, too.

I read the book pretty quickly, enjoying it quite a bit. Later, my family took a trip to Colorado so I bought Angels & Demons, DaVinci's prequel to read on the plane and powered through it rather quickly. I liked it even more than The DaVinci Code.

Then something happened. The fact that TDC's plot involved scandelous (fictional) allegations about the catholic church got mainstream attention, and the book became mega popular. Mega ultra dodeca-epsilon popular. Everybody and their cousin had read the book.

I felt the same way I felt when Pokemon got insanely popular in the US well after I'd started playing it and getting into it. Suddenly my independent decision to like something had become nullified by a cultural requisite to like that thing by default, or to dislike it as a reaction to that. When people talked about it, I always wanted to say, "Yes, I've read The DaVinci Code but I read it before anybody had heard of it!!" but that always sounded made-up. I tended to just not talk about it.

As the years passed, something happened to me. I grew up, or became world-wise, read a few better books, or became a culture snob, something. Now, when I look back at these two books, and a few other Dan Brown books I've picked up and never been able to finish, I realize that Dan Brown is a horrendously bad writer.

This is seemingly a well-known fact. Brown's books are almost universally panned by critics as "horribly bad writing, but a real page-turner." Those sentiments mirror my own entirely.

It's an important distinction, and one that few people might be able to sufficiently understand. Dan Brown is very good at coming up with compelling stories, which is made obvious by the fact that his books sell millions of copies, but he is very bad at writing those compelling stories down. If you reduce the profession of writing to only the act of putting words in a row, Dan Brown is remarkably bad at his job. However, if you consider only the act of formulating an interesting story, Dan Brown is quite good at his job.

When those things meet, however, chaos erupts.

Dan Brown really ought to get himself a ghost writer. His writing is so bad that it makes me hate reading, and writing, and books, and stories. Last Tuesday, after several years of delays, the sequel to DaVinci Code, The Lost Symbol released. Its initial printing run was over Five. Million. Copies. I got a copy for my Kindle, and have been slogging through it in bed while trying to get through a cold, and it's just painful.

I think Brown is completely aware of his ineptitude at creating prose. It was probably made evident to him when it took him three years longer than expected to write The Lost Symbol. Reportedly, whenever he would submit something to his editors they would send it right back. The sequel to DaVinci Code, whatever it should be, would automatically sell millions of copies, so they had to make sure that the book was at least written in English. That what this final product is reflects the best anybody could do with this writing is startling.

One of the biggest problems I've discovered with his writing is that Brown seems to be absolutely terrified of pronouns. Admittedly, they can often be daunting as a writer, as sentences like "John told Paul that his pants were too tight" can be ambiguous as to who exactly "his" refers to, so sentences with pronouns (like any other sentence, really) needs to be carefully constructed.

Rather than put in the effort, or perhaps in fear of getting it wrong, Brown simply avoids them. The book is filled with sentences similar to, "Sally told John that John needed to buy Sally a new pair of shoes to wear to John's birthday party." Surely, in that instance, "Sally told John that he needed to buy her a new pair of shoes to wear to his birthday party," would be just fine, but Brown doesn't risk it.

The fact that he doesn't have the confidence to use pronouns properly reflects the caliber of his writing very well. Everything is awkward, forced, and uncomfortable. He switches back and forth between completely disparate styles of prose. In one minute, he's writing a William Gibson novel, listing the brand, make, and model of every single product mentioned in passing; then, suddenly, he's completely abandoned it.

He was sitting all alone in the enormous cabin of a Falcon 2000EX corporate jet as it bounced its way through turbulence. In the background, the dual Pratt & Whitney engines hummed evenly.

That's from the first chapter. Yes, the Falcon 2000EX, not the 2000LS model, the EX. With heated seats. And you'd better believe it's got Pratt & Whitney. This stuff is vital to the story, and not just thrown in to prove that the author googled "Brands of jet engines."

Only a few chapters later, the stilted prose hit its apex when a chapter ended with this sentence:

Ten miles from the Capitol Building, a lone figure was eagerly preparing for Robert Langdon’s arrival.

A lone figure. A lone figure??? Is this a 1944 radio drama now?

"A lone figure" is a visual description. It's something you see. Hark, in the distance, a lone figure! But the context is that, what the hero doesn't know is that someone is waiting for him. It's pure narration, basically saying "there is also a bad guy in this book," and the best we get is "a lone figure."

As soon as I read that, I knew I had to turn my brain off.

Dan Brown is quite good at researching and developing stories. He should stick to that, and get somebody more competent to actually write the stories down. This can't happen, though, because he's already too famous. Sometime around his second or third novel, someone at his publisher should have said, "Look, Dan, these are great stories but they're written like high school creative writing assignments. Why don't we pair you with one of our ghost writers, so you can focus on coming up with the stories and leave the writing-down to him?" But how could they have known he would ever become so popular. Bookstores are full of books by bad writers. They sell a few copies, the publishers deposit the check, and they move on to the next bad writer.

By letting Brown's writing skills go unquestioned, the entire publishing industry has doomed itself. Since I was reading Dan Brown books at the age when I was first developing my own storytelling style, I may have inadvertently modeled some of my writing after him. Why shouldn't I have? He's a bestselling author!

Now that I know otherwise, I'll probably forever be second-guessing my writing. "Wait," I'll say, "did I do that because Dan Brown did it?"

A lone figure clicks the 'Submit' button to save this blog entry.

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I am continually unable to shirk recognition for that thing I did with an Altoids tin. How Stuff Works, a site that deals primarily in the nature of how stuff works, has written an article about me and/or Electroids as part of their series of "Tinnovations", or quaint uses of Altoids tins.

Among the chosen few are people who've made speakers inside Altoids tins and fine art from them. Also, curiously, is someone who's selling kits for mini Altoids flashlights, which is curious because I was doing the same thing before this person, and also because this person happened to have been a customer of mine shortly before he started selling his own. Curious, I say.

HowStuffWorks also mentioned me in their Stuff You Should Know podcast in an episode about Tinnovations. iTunes monkeys can click here to hear it.

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