...calls attention to security flaw of blotting words in sensitive docs. More here.

Ah, home. The new one. We moved last weekend and I'm starting to feel settled in, though still no DSL and my computers/servers are still at the old place. I've got this site moved into its new home, but can't remember the damn root password for the name server and therefore can't point DNS to the new home. But it's moved, too, and it was probably the smoothest website move I've done in a long time -- just mysqldump, tar gzip up my files, add a few lines to the httpd.conf file and restart apache and the website just worked. Copy over a couple more files and everything worked. Now configure sendmail...

My physical home...it's odd getting used to a new place. Especially this move because I haven't lived with roommates since college, but it, too, has been smooth. What I can't get over is the amount of stuff I have, and that every time I move I throw away gobs and gobs of it. The other day I found a old envelope full of bills from 1992. There was a note from Josh's first doctor -- the one that circumsized him, a letter from John from jail wishing us Happy Easter, my ex's wisdom teeth that I finally threw away (who the hell keeps an ex's wisdom teeth?), my petition to have my juvenile records sealed, a card from an old, old friend I haven't thought about in a long time. Memory lane is long and infrequently travelled. My very first driver's license and I look so weird -- but do I really or is the picture tainted -- old eyes looking back at young ones from almost half my lifetime ago...though I could just be strung out, too.

And what a strange week -- I've seen or heard from every ex from the last 5 years. Break up with one guy and somehow all your ghosts reappear. Saying hello, how are you doing? Can I have a job? Did we have sex in NY? Jesus if you can't remember, I sure as hell won't.

But I'm not phased by any of it. It feels good to start fresh. New place, new freedom. Job just keeps getting cozier, crazier. I'm still abusing my body with cigarettes, but even that I'm ready to give up again. I was analyzing the smoking trend -- I've restarted smoking after the last three break ups. I hadn't realized that before. Not sure what I'm going to do with that knowledge just yet, but next time I'll be better prepared.

I've been reading A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. She is an amazing writer. And it both saddens me and heartens me to listen to her voice. She talks about creativity and the need to produce and the way women were treated and thought of in the 19th century. A paucity of female writers, and such a dissonance in the lives and characters of fictional women vs. the lives of real women who were treated as the property of men to be bartered with and sold at any age. How angry men sound when they write of women. We are revered as oracles, disdained as dancing dogs, but either way bereft of property, money, and the sanctity of our own rooms. And there is always the horror I feel knowing the conditions we used to live in, and also the great and weighty relief that I live here, and now. I write whatever I want, I live independently, I work in the tech world, often the only woman in a group of developers, but also, always the one with the most respect. But not because I'm aggressive, and not because I love my power and lord it over, but because I'm good at what I do and respect the people around me. But I would never have been given a chance to prove that if I didn't live here and now.