A MONTH OF CHANGES

July has been a very busy month for me so far — one full of major changes in my life.  While all are still ongoing, they point to a theme of self-improvement.  I'm taking the old adage of "life begins at 40" quite literally.

The biggest of these changes is the search for a different career — one that's fulfilling in all the ways that a mere "job" can never be.  Other activities keeping me busy is a major shift in future financial planning (the best way to invest, etc.) and also obtaining a new vehicle (at least I've narrowed down which type I'll be purchasing soon — an SUV).  These changes don't currently include a relocation plan, although I do suspect I'll be moving sometime in mid-2006 if all goes well.

A somewhat lesser change — one that may seem insignificant until I ponder how many accounts I'll need to update to reflect the change — is that I am finally (after six years or so) cancelling my AT&T Worldnet account.  I'm particularly frustrated with the DSL service which has failed on a regular basis over the course of the past year, along with the seeming inability of their "customer service" to fix the problems.  In fact, the DSL hasn't worked at all for the past five days (it happened to fail towards the end of a 4.1GB download) and the service tech managed to screw up things even worse than they already were (for which I was billed for the housecall, plus the full monthly service!).

So, I've switched over to Qwest — my new modem and installation kit should arrive by the end of the week.  Hopefully, I'll get faster downloads and uploads than with AT&T but I know they have better customer service just from having had home phone service through them for the past ten years or so.

The daunting part of this most recent change is the switch in e-mail addresses.  Sending change-of-address notices to my regular correspondents will be fairly easy.  But trying to remember all the online accounts where I'll need to navigate and change my contact information will be very time consuming.  I suppose I'll begin with the Yahoo Groups (I'm on something like 30 mailing lists, although I've elected not to receive e-mail from most of them — this will be a good time to cancel memberships in those where I was never very active).  And I'm not that active in various online forums anymore (save the ones for BitTorrent downloads).  It's the non-regular newsletters that will be difficult to track down where to change my e-mail address (these are mostly travel-related — the only music ones I read anymore are the ones from AfterDawn, which with their recent format change is usually just a bunch of online links now, and Marillion's eWeb).

Yes, even the "little" changes do require numerous other changes that add up.  But in the end, it is all worth it.

Viva la change!