Life update
So, how’s my life? Well, Austin is scary. Traffic, and more traffic. For people that don’t make friends easily, it’s hard. Away from family. Etc. I live way up in the suburbs, where you can’t walk to anything. I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to take pub transit downtown without having to drive my car at all. There’s a park and ride across the freeway. The bus route circles around, but I don’t know if I can stop a bus at a corner or not.
Trying to get more organized, as preceeding post indicates. I need to sit down and plan out some goals of mine. I’d like to finish a few of the 12 unfinished posts I have sitting around. Get some financial business taken care of. Get my stuff all unpacked. (It’s been three weeks and I still have like three full boxes out of the dozen or so I brought.) Buy and arrange furniture. Be more productive at my job, so I can ask for a raise in good conscience. Find a local doctor. Figure out how to allot time spent on blogs (reading, commenting, and writing), debate modeling, the SIAI, and my dynamic compressor plugin. And other hobbies I’m probably forgetting about. Oh, yes. Piano. I definitely have to limit my time practicing to about 30 minutes a day, because of my RSIs. Maybe I can gradually ramp up as my technique and strength improve. I wonder if I should look for a teacher. And I wonder whether I should continue learning classical pieces or start trying to learn how to improvise.
Trying to hit up some people on Match.com. Sent out a few mails, haven’t heard back in two days. I’ll give it another two and then send out another batch of mails. I’ve only seen two people that seem very interesting. Match has 15 million members, and only 250 or so are females between 18 and 26 who live within 20 miles of Austin and don’t definitely wan’t kids. That just doesn’t seem right. I picked about three dozen from those, of which most only have about a 10% chance of being interesting, I’d say. Well, I might find two or three good people out of all those. Match sucks.
A lot of people there are quite religious. Even a couple of the otherwise really interesting ones. That’s kind of disheartening. I can deal with religious, even “spiritual, but not religious”, but not “my faith is very important to me”. No, that would cause problems.
June 29th, 2006 at 12:23
Be careful with match.com, it has a record of being incredibly sleazy (fake profiles, fake communications etc).
It may sound lame but I’ve found a much better place to meet people are non-dating sites like Facebook, MySpace, even deviantart.com (met a truly lovely Russian girl there).
On these sites people are more open and honest because they know their friends will see it. They don’t expect to be hit on so a good opening line works better and they’re more trusting of other peoples profiles (if they have one) too.
Finally a lot of really wonderful women who would never use a regular dating site can be found at such places. Dating sites like match carry a bit of social stigma that scares some people away.
Of course don’t under-estimate the local watering hole either ;)
June 29th, 2006 at 12:26
On a Lojban-related mailing list, someone mentioned OKCupid.com, and I made a profile there last weekend. I’ve had a much better experience with that one.