Forty two or 2A

Somehow in my imagination, being named Andy Arthur that hexadecimal of my 42nd birthday being 0x2A seems special even if it’s a pretty meaningless number like so many others. I think a lot more in hexadecimal though these days as I do more computer programming, especially low-level stuff that uses hexadecimal addresses to represent long strings of binary numbers in a compact format. And I doubt I’ll ever make it to 0xAA, I’m more striving for 0x46.

I was washing my truck at the end of the weekend thinking it’s now 13 1/2 years old. Lot of rust after soon-to-be 13 hard salt-encrusted winters that I tried fairly unsuccessfully to fight off with the car wash. The frame doesn’t look that bad but the rocker boards, bed quarter panels and the trailer hitch have not faired so well. Yet, it really doesn’t seem all that long. I can still remember when I had that Ford Ranger, when I was just still a fairly neophyte coordinator, which I can remember not unlike yesterday.

The reason why I think about that number so much is not because 13 is an odd, maybe unlucky number, but because it’s a marker of how far I am from my 55th birthday. Not so far away, but also quite close when I look at my career now of 18 years since I was an Assembly Intern, becoming a Researcher, a Communications Coordinator of various titles, then the Deputy Director of Research and now the Director of Data Services. Seems odd to think it was 18 years since graduating from college. In contrast, 13 years seems like a very low bar.

I do believe the best is yet to come. I have a job that I enjoy immensely, it’s a lot of building and joining records together, teasing value out of public and commercial data sources to provide the State Assembly with the resources they need to get their message out. I get to fix issues with records, query them, write SQL, bash scripts, and R/Python code to turn them into things that are quite useful. I see a lot of value in products I’m developing, the fight now is to push people to fully utilize the data further. But I have time to do that and further develop those products. It’s just a lot of fun, and I’m working incredibly hard which makes the days go by quickly. In a few years, I plan to have a more then a half a billion data points on New Yorkers.

Truth is I’m still searching for a home on my 42nd birthday, though my apartment is fine. It’s literally falling apart in all ways but at least I have a new fridge that works great and is very energy efficent. It sure is nice to be able to ride my bike to work or hop on the city bus. Especially on snowy winter days like that! You can’t do that if you live out in the country. Don’t get me wrong, I like hick towns that smell like cow shit and wood smoke and you can hear the ringing of gun fire during the autumn months, and some day I’ll own land, but I’m not sure if it will happen this year or next, though I keep looking. I’ve saved up quite a bit of money, so I could if I wanted to skip the mortgage and financing route, though I’m not really sure I want to buy in New York. It’s not just the burn ban – it’s the gun laws and the whole state’s urban culture that I find repulsive. That doesn’t mean I’m a Trump lover or a Republican by any means, but I shouldn’t have to go through a bunch of crap to buy a gun nor should EPA show up at my door just because I shoot some guns or make a little black smoke at bonfire getting rid of debris. Kind of like I do up in woods.