As of today, February 10, 2012, I am now officially debt-free. I decided to use my tax refund to pay off the rest of my student loans, which have been sucking down thousands of dollars a month since I graduated. Here are the results:

Yep. It took a few days longer than expected, because Sallie Mae is terrible at ACH. And, of course, their obnoxious rounding means that at some point in the next six months, I'm going to get a cheque from Sallie Mae for 80¢ (presumably plus 6.8% interest). But it's pretty nice to be free…

This …

I used to post these on Facebook as Notes, but since the Timeline refactor, I frankly have no idea how to use Notes; so I guess I'll just post on my own blog. I use last.fm (me) to track my music-listening habits (and sometimes for other things). As of some time recently, I've passed 60,000 scrobbled plays since 2006. Yay!

Here's a graph I made (click for ps version; gnuplot continues to be the best thing ever):

Cheers, all.

I know I'm a bit late to the party, but Merry 2012. As a sort of celebration, here's my favorite animated GIF of all time (courtesy of Evan a long time ago):

Maybe I'll actually write some useful content this year.

One year ago tomorrow, I graduated from college. As my younger friends graduated today (thanks for the quasi-livestream, Skye), I actually realized this fact: it's been a year. A year as one of the dead. A year in the real world. It's bloody strange. On some level, it's unbelievable that I've been out for a whole year. Graduation was just a couple of weeks ago, wasn't it? I can still remember lectures good and bad, evenings in the muddhole, nights working in Platt, as though it were all just yesterday. On another level, though, it almost feels like I've been …

We use the terms "bad dream" and "nightmare" almost synonymously. I contend that this is a frightfully naïve perspective. When we wake from a nightmare, we shortly realize that the floor isn't made of spiders, that all of the clowns are safely at the circus. But a dream in which we are happy… ah! Such a dream can color the real world world a darker shade long after the dreamer has awoken. These are truly the bad dreams.

I got a letter in the mail on Saturday from a company named Afni, Inc., a debt collection company. This letter informed me that my debt of $188 to DirecTV was being collected by them. Of course, I've never had any dealings with DirecTV (aside from interviewing for a job there a couple of years ago), so I knew that this was a bogus notice. Come Monday morning, I called their 1-888 number and, after waiting on hold for 20 minutes, was connected to a bored-sounding agent. She asked me for the last four digits of my social security number …