Blog Silent

My associate, BigHoeSmacka, informed me today that he thought I was being delinquent in my blog updating duties. I’ll admit, I’ve been running behind since my return to the South Bay.

The good news is that I’ve found an apartment here in Mountain View (where I am sitting at this very moment). I just took a quick drive through the neighborhood and saw a “for rent” A-frame…a few walk-thrus I was the proud renter of yet another Silicon Valley apartment unit.

(There is a lot more in the extended entry. These insomnia posts achieve maximal length very quickly.)

You cannot imagine how very, very different that is compared to 3 years ago and you would have had to been on a waiting list for a place like this. The 2001 tech crash really changed dynamics here. They say it’s cyclical here, always.

My associate Mice reminded me via his blog that I had been meaning to join Netflix. I have done so.

Speaking of, he and I, and the rest of our co-workers have had a fairly busy period of activity of late. Our department was re-orged and thus we have a new boss. We got the chance to meet her last Wednesday / Thursday and between those two days had a dinner at Santana Row’s Maggiano’s.

Back to the apartment, it’s a pretty simple one bedroom at the end of 237. It’s a very nice commute from work and the neighborhood is pretty nice. I’m close to the very downtown Mountain View and there’s a very nice park right around the way.

I have to admit there is some odd comfort to being back here in this odd little crossroads in the valley of heart’s delight: The Safeway, Borders, El Camino Real.

Anyway, like most of the Silicon slums, this place has the distinctively uhh.. not retro but old cabinetry, the same old boring lino countertops…it’s all so…here. I’m taking it as a challenge to attempt to decorate this place stylishly on the cheap (given that I only have a 6 month lease). I’ve been inspired by magazines like “Ready Made” and “Budget Living”. It’s amazing how those downtown types seem to be able to weave many nothings into something. I’d like to take a shot at that lower-East-Side-chic.

On the up side, the Comcast guy came today and hooked up the basic cable and the cable modem. For the first time one of these service providers actually were in the first half of their ‘window.’ The guy was also totally competent. It was a real first. Sad comment. Anyway, I picked up the Linksys WRT54G wireless router / AP and am really enjoying it. The speed on the broadband here is much better than on a certain sucky DSL provider in San Francisco. Linksys is of course owned by a certain other Networking Juggernaut

I was thinking about joining the TivoLution this evening but I wis dissuaded as a Tivo requires a phone line. I don’t want to get a phone line just for the Tivo but I may wind up doing just that. I’m thinking that I should hold off on doing so so that I will not be inclined to Tivo the day away, but will do things like go to yoga classes or something similarly not involving my couch.

Well…not that I have a couch in the place just yet. I’m going to have movers come tomorrow with the contents of my storage unit.

OK, so as if moving out, heading to Tahoe, Moving in, new boss, need to decorate, going-out-of-one’s head trying to get started with things were not enough, I’m getting harassed to update my trivial site. Dah!

And Still there’s more…

I have decided to sign up for a yoga class (like every other person in Northern California). I learned while learning to surf that my lower back is ><voice style="hans-and-frans">weak and flabby</voice>. I want to build this up before the summer. Additionally, I think that more back strength / endurance would be wise given my work in the hunched-over industry in which I ply my craft.

I’m also going to sign up, if I can find it, for an Arc Welding or Calculus class. It’s odd that I’ve chosen the two extremes of study (pure labour, pure abstraction), I grant, but one too many episodes of Monster Garage may have gotten to me. The calculus is because a long time ago I let myself believe that I wasn’t particularly good at mathematics. That’s baloney. I was improperly taught, undermotivated (my fault), and generally uninterested. I did pretty well in my Business Calculus classes at Texas, but I want to take the engineering versions so that I can study the higher mathematics of Differential Equations and Game Theory. Why? Maybe just as a way of knowing that I am actually very competent in an area in which I thought I was weak.

Hm, I guess both the yoga and this have an overlap.

Lastly I am going to recommit myself to learning the Objective-C programming language. I really like using my Mac and want to learn how to customize the hell out of it with code.

So that is a lengthy update to update for 2 weeks of silence.

Bet you wish I had been silent!

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