What if IKEA were a first-person shooter?

This is a screamingly funny piece from The Morning News: IKEA Walkthrough 2.3.1

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Wow. So today was the first day of orientation for the grad students in the CMU HCI program. I had more than my share of trepidation.

Highlights? Well, at various times through the afternoon, three of my classmates-to-be came up to me and said, "Kevin Fox, eh? I know all about you. I've been reading Fury." Scary. Or should I say, "umm. Hi!" Now I just need to get to know them

I was a little disappointed, as was another classmate I could (but won't (ahh, blesed privacy)) mention, that the interaction seemed so strongly one-way. I'm triply glad that I started the yahoo group three months ago, so we knew each other to a degree already, becuase other than a go-around-the-room introduction and a big group lunch, all the info has been them telling us, without consideration for the fact that we left pretty much everyone we knew, and it would be nice if we spent a little of our orientation week performing teambuilding exercises, or at least breaking off into groups for something so we could talk through something other than the perogies in our mouths...

It's all good though, and I'm sure it's going to be better. My friends that I have here have all been here between one and three months, and so have had plenty of time to crest the isolation wave, emerging on the other side as re-adjusted people.

I know I'll get there soon. 'Till then knowing I'm not far is hopefully good enough.

The other realization of the day is that I didn't leave Yahoo to get my masters in order to get a better job when I get out than I could otherwise have gotten, but to get a better next job after that, or after that. Basically, I expect that this is the last time I'll be in school, and once I know that I'll have the steady income-stream, unterrupted by educational dams, promising power and clean energy (oops, unstretch that metaphor, sir), anyhow, once financial constancy is assured, I can work towards the finer things in life, like a home, and maybe a family (though I, err... well, I'm not there yet. There's that whole girlfriend thing to deal with first, let alone wife thing).

Anyhow, getting my Masters should give me the rest of the educational cards I need for my deck, so I won't feel like I have to go back before moving up to a director role somewhere.

And, of course, I'm going to learn a hell of a lot.

And my apartment is shaping up nicely. My mom and I are the masters of IKEA assembly. We find mistakes in the manuals now.

Final note: How odd is it that my mom picked me up after my first day of (ahem, graduate) school? Well, I'm dropping her off at Greyhound tomorrow morning, so then it'll just be me and me...

...err, and you, of course.

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Fun for today:

Sitting here, vegging on the computer, twiddling my virtual thumbs while doing a little bit of cleanup waiting for the nice young men in their clean white coats who are coming to take me my furniture.

I'm eagerly anticipating, both with vim and a little trepidation, the moment when, lugging up my queen-size mattress, my delivery-folk (god I hope and pray it's 'folk' and not 'person' (is 'folk' always plural? (is folks merely a hypercorrection, trying to pluralize a plural? (but I digress (even more) ) ) (wait for it...) ) turn the corner and realize that the stairway up to my attic-apartment (which shall henceforth be known as 'the loft' because I like the way it sounds, and because 'loft' is the last four digits of the phone number here) resembles the typical home-type staircase nowhere near so much as it does the skinny, steep stairs that grace the deep centers of medieval cathedrals towers; stairways intended to help the devout ascend, and little else.

Certainly not queen-sized mattresses and assorted other furnitures (speaking of hypercorrecting plurals into plurals).

The $69 delivery sounded like only a marginal benefit over renting my own truck to get these things home until I found out that it includes delivery to my apartment, not simply to the front door.

Word of wisdom for the day: The glory of IKEA is not that you assemble it yourself, but that you can, as the need arises, disassemble it as well. I seem to have this habit of living places where full-sized furniture has trouble getting through...

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I helped my friend Pamila move on Saturday, shuttling stuff from her storage space to her new bedroom in an apartment she shares with two other women. While doing so I was thinking about my own impending purge, store, and move.

A couple weeks I met my fellow incoming CMU grad student Kerry (at her going away party!) and we talked about the journey from SF to PA. She's moving out of her Oakland one-bedroom into a two bedroom place in Shadyside. Since she'll be there for two years, and isn't sure where she'll be going next, she's packing up and moving everything. Professional movers, $1800.

On one hand, I've been telling myeslf that $1800 can pay for a fair amount of IKEA furniture on Pittsburgh, money better spent there than shipping my stuff across the country, when I'll be coming back in a year. Also, 'my stuff' is one of the things I'd like to test-divest, and get a better perspective on what should go and what needs to stay.

On the other hand, storing stuff coses money too, and no small amount. Researching a few months ago, I found that a 10'x10' storage space (Public Storage) in Berkeley costs $250/month. Multiply that by 13 and it's $2750 for the year-plus. Why pay Berkeley storage premiums when I'm not even in Berkeley? Storing my stuff in Vallejo (20 miles north) would drop the price to $140/mo, or $1820.

Plus truck rental fees.
Plus the labor of moving my stuff.

The last time I moved (well, not the time I moved across the hall six years ago, but really moved) I promised myself that it would be the last time I'd move myself. And I had a lot less stuff back then... The stuff I'm running away from. Such a quandry...

The short of it is that I have a two-bedroom-apartment-full of stuff, and I need to decdide where to put it. I know what storage is like, but I know nothing about the apartment I'll be getting in Pittsburgh, 1 bedroom or 2, furnished or bare. I need to find that out before I can make any other decisions. The right answer might be to split it, putting some in a smaller, less expensive storage space, and shipping some via less expensive means. I'm unsure about my ability to pack my car up with everything I'll want and need for a year.

It bears more thinking about, but not until i have all the information I'll need, so I'll just concentrate on the 'purge' portion of my preparations until I know where I'll be living.

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Thought for the day: Everything they sell in IKEA is the designers equivalent of sans-serif.

They should use that in their product naming:

"Ahh, you got the Trebuchet shelves! Cool! I would've, but they're a little too elegant to go really well with my Helvetica coffee table."

"Yeah, I had to ditch my Optima dresser. It was just a little too serif-y to go with my Avant Garde bed.

See? Full circle.

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On 1/25/02 12:02 PM, "Sarah Howard" wrote:

Hi,

I've seen some of your journal entries and I'm just wondering, where does the interest in IKEA come from? (seriously).

Thanks,
Sarah

Hi Sarah,

I like IKEA because they present a more appealing aesthetic than my local Sears, Levitz, or Lamps Plus. The general design is consistent enough that almost anything goes with anything else, and the prices are in general lower than other 'department stores' and certainly lower than the stores that have the same kind of 'artistic' stuff like Scandinavian Designs, Z Gallerie, and the like.

Mostly, it's friendly, it's an experience, walking through the whole showroom rather than just finding the department that has the thing you came there to buy. It's like the difference between going on Pirates of the Caribbean versus walking through a halloween store. Also, there's some satisfaction in assembling my own things. I'm proud of my Ikea furniture, because in it I have a poor man's unified, upscale design, while still getting the pride of having designed it yourself and the money left over to accent your space with nice personal touches.

Or maybe it's just a big lemming cult thing, but what's the difference?

Hope that helps!
Kevin

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Went to IKEA tonight, and I took a bunch of pics for fun and research to take back home.

Now I'm home and thought it'd be the perfect time to try out iPhoto's automatic Photo Album maker.

See for yourself.

More important, I bought lamps, which means I now have light, which is a Very Good Thing.

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I should be sleeping. This marks my final defeat for the day.

In the wake of a job that gives me precious little time of my own, I set out this morning to see, with everything arranged most favorably, if I could create a work schedule that would still give me some degree of personal time.

Despite all my efforts, I abjectly failed.

Okay, so I thought I would get to work at 7:30 this morning, and to do so (and to visit Em and Kisa) I stayed over at Em's house last night. Further changing my schedule, I took my shower before going to sleep, so I could be up and out and off to work early in the morning.

Morning came: so far so good. Left the house around 6:30, got in to work at about 7:15 (25 mile commute instead of 45). One of the first in the office, I actually got to relax. For the better part of the morning I was working on mocks and debugging my Powermac which inexplicably slows to crawl whenever I launch iTunes (v 1.1, running MacOS 9.1 on a dual 400Mhz G4 box) regardless of whether music is playing, or even if I quit the app. Every time this happens I have to restart, or suffer with a text editing experience much like typing over a 300 baud modem and a tendency to drop characters.

Ever resourceful in finding ways to increase personal time, I also brought laundry to work, to give our new laundry service a try. At $25 a bag it sounds like a good way to free up hours of my own day and a (relatively) reasonable price. The catch is we're supposed to pack laundry in their bags, but the first time you naturally don't have their bags, so you use your own. Mind you, my bag is huge, holding about 40 lbs of laundry.

Nevertheless, I was still set upon leaving at 4 to come home, only I forgot to let my manager know so come 3:15 I get a plateful of work that keeps me in until 6:45. At about 5:00 the laundry guy comes to my cube to pick up my laundry (nifty!) and he shows me what their 'regular bags' looks like. The site says their bags hold about 2-3 loads of laundry, but it looks more like 2-3 sinkfuls to me. The thing would barely hold a couple towels. Anyhow, I sent my bag off with him anyhow, though I really don't know why since I'll probably just get a call tomorrow asking for authorization for $150 to do my laundry (no thankyouverymuch) and I'll get my old dirty laundry back tomorrow or Wednesday and be right where I am now, only feeling like more of a humanitarian for participating in 'take your laundry to work TWICE day.'

Frustrated at that, and at being at work for nearly 12 hours on the day I was trying to prove that I can shape my destiny and make my life tenable, I finally finish up work at about 7:15 and decide, since my day is shot anyhow, to put a positive spin on it by bringing up from my trunk the parts to the POÄNG chair I bought on Friday and assembling it for my cube. I lug the four pieces (chair frame, ottoman frame, and two cushions) from the car to the cube, and take the boxes apart, only to discover that I got the wrong stain for the chair which, while it would look fine in my office, wouldn't match the one I have at home and, more to the point, wouldn't match the matching ottoman (truly a Will & Grace moment, yes).

Argh. Repack the chair, take it back to the trunk, drive home, stopping by IKEA 30 minutes before they close, making it out of there (god only knows why I happened to have the receipt in my wallet. I'm usually really bad about that) about 10 minutes after their 9pm closing.

Driving home I decide for one last stab at satisfaction and dropped by the Starry Plough for Monday Irish dancing and got to dance a four-hand reel for the first time in about 6 months, so that was good.

Parking, I just knew I'd get another ticket for expired registration tabs and, after grabbing a frozen dinner from the market and getting my mail, I notice my DMV registration has finally arrived, so I go back out to my car and put the sticker on, then come up to my apartment, about 28.5 hours after I last left it (or, to be more fair, 16 hours after I left for work).

Don't even get me started about missing Rosh Hashana tomorrow. Maybe it'll be something to atone for during next week's Yom Kippur.

Anyhow, I'm going to try again tomorrow, even if it means I only get five hours sleep tonight. Outta here by 6:00, at work before 7:30, leave work at 3:30 or 4 and get home around 5:30.

Well, at least that's the plan.

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An article at Fox News brings up a good point of how to think globally by acting locally: Buy something. Anything.

Red Cross donations are great (and boy have donations been rolling in, with $11 million and $6 million (as of this moment) raised via Yahoo! and Amazon, respectively), but the the economy has also been injured, as signified by 12,000 Continental Airlines layoffs, with more to come soon in other industries.

In an effort to shore up my own psyche, I did a little medicinal shopping at IKEA yesterday to the tune of $520. If there's something you've been needing or thinking about getting for a while, now is probably the best time (for the country) for you to get it...

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Well, not actually weekend, as it's just Friday, but I just wanted to toss out some bulletpoints:

• Stayed working late last night, left at midnight.
• Gonna get a Poang chair for my office. Good for thinking, and napping... Mmm... Napping...
• Comments are fixed. Long story, messy, but suffice to say that UNIX is a magical beast, and not all magical beasts are nice, or fully understandable.
• Comments will be ported to mySQL soon, and will be incorporated into the permalink-version of posts (more like Dave does it.
• I have finalized an order of priorities for projects, as well as a work schedule (well, and 'around-work' schedule) for getting them done during evenings and commutes. The priorities are:
  1. Metacookie
  2. Blogger Purity Survey
  3. Randompixel
  4. Underblog
  5. qwer.org
  6. more...
• Working on my self-evaluation for the annual performance review
• I am sooo telecommuting on Monday. Heck, Yahoo even got an award from the EPA for that stuff.

Okay, lunchtime. Hasta!

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The words seem so alien to someone who hasn't had a summer vacation in four years.

I walked out of my last final Tuesday night and didn't know what to do next. Between work and school I'd been keeping pretty busy, and even when work and school themselves didn't consume all of my time, procrastinating is a full-time affair (hence, this journal, amongst other things). So now that I don't have any responsibilities for the next few months, what do I do?

Well, I've got a list as long as my arm (in 24-point type, anyhow) of things I want to do with this site, and other web projects, which you'll be seeing the fruits of gradually, but soon. I've also got a lot of IKEA labor, building furniture and more furniture, remaking my apartment. (There are three stages to apartment living: "Place where I keep my stuff and sleep," "Place where I keep my nicer stuff, sleep, and keep meaning to clean" and, "Place that is a real home, where everything has its place (and is actually kept there), and is both beautiful and functional." I'm in stage two right now, working towards stage three.)

So, the current plan is to spend a few weeks at least working on these projects that have been put off during the semester, and then open up to contract interactive work again, which should keep me busy and happy 'till the end of August, when the Fall semester starts up.

In the very near term, I'll be implementing more functionality right here, starting off with making the links on the left-hand nav more useful and interesting, and finalizing my solution to those who think bright blue just doesn't cut it as a color pallete.

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Spent the beter part of the day preparing for, driving to, parking at, sneaking into, shopping at, and recuperating from IKEA. They've been open two weeks and still at 11:30am there's a line of 600 people outside the door, being let in a hundred at a time whenever a total of one hundred leave.

Forget parking in, or even sidewalks to, the latest Bay Area success story, but I can't recall the last time I had more fun shopping for furniture. They even had paper cutouts of all the desk-pieces and to-scale drawing paper so you could plan your work experience. That they devote so many more resources to helping people plan their workspaces than to plan their bedrooms shows that they really do understand the difference between Europe and the USA.

In other news Emily and I saw Frequency and gave it a pretty-good thumbs up. Very nice. PS: Is it posible for Dennis Quaid to star in a movie that doesn't have a happy ending? Do they figure it's not worth hiring him if you don't get the big toothy grin for a payoff?

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I'm going for my belt test today (green tips, Taekwondo). I actually thought it was supposed to be last Thursday, and that I'd have to miss it, so I haven't been studying/practicing at all, and now I'm cramming. ("Is right backstance with the right foot forward, or left?") Anyhow, to further complicate, I don't even have a yellow belt. That is, I've earned one, but I never actually went and bought one, so I've got to see if I can find one amidst my studying in the next 4 hours, or borrow someone's for the test.

Augh!

Also, tomorrow is IKEA day. Emily and I are going to see how much of Sweden we can fit in our respective cars.

Lastly, the winners of the 5k award are going to be revealed on Monday. I can't wait! (For those who haven't taken a look yet, check out my entry, War.)

Cross your fingers and pray for the apocolypse.

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