Wibblelog

I can’t sleep.  It sucks.  I’ve been having pretty goddamn strange dreams lately, too.  What to do?  Blog about it, obviously.

p.s. mom, you’re not allowed to scold me for being awake at 4:30AM until after I’ve gone back to Boston.

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Left my cellphone on the train this morning. Felt like an idiot. Unfortunately, it was still there when I ran back to the train to look for it. I was hoping for an excuse to get a different phone, because I absolutely hate the one I’ve got. I’m not sure there’s actually anything else on the market that I want to buy, though. I’d take an iphone if you gave me one, but I’d have to hack it to death to make it do what I want. Palm seems to be a dying platform. I’ve found Symbian to be acceptable but not wonderful - I used a Nokia E61 for about a year before getting my current WinMo device. The hiptop platform used to seem promising (I had a hiptop, then a color hiptop, then a hiptop2, then I had to switch because T-Mobile had absolutely zero coverage where I moved in Mountain View), but now doesn’t really interest me, especially now that Microsoft are buying Danger. Android devices basically don’t exist yet. Hopefully they don’t suck when they do.

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Sorry I haven’t posted since the 23rd; it’s been pretty busy. We finally did make it to Ashland - here’s the route we ended up taking in the end, more or less. We left Sandwich on Thursday morning, stopped in Sturgis, MI to have a late lunch with my family there, drove all the way to Rochester, NY that evening, and somehow managed to make it to Ashland, MA by noon on Friday. It was pretty exhausting, and that wasn’t anywhere near the end of the turmoil. The movers had arrived at the new apartment before us, as had our realtor, and they were all anxious to get things … well, “moving”. So, despite running on something like 3 or 4 hours of sleep, (this is the point my mother calls me on the phone to scold me upon reading this post) we took posession of our new apartment for the first time and directed the moving-in operation.

Of course, there was one little problem. The carpets in the new place were utterly filthy. So filthy that we couldn’t even walk around in our socks on them, because our socks would end up black on the bottom. It took a few days of fighting with our landlord before we got them to agree to pay for a thorough carpet cleaning. It was truly one of the most stressful and annoying things I’ve ever had to deal with, and I wasn’t even the one doing most of the work!

The good news is that our carpets are now clean (ChemDry did an amazing job on them, but they were quite expensive…), so we finally managed to settle in a bit and unpack some of the boxes. There’s been plenty of other turmoil, of course:

• $600 spent at IKEA
• One of the cats stressed to the point where it peed on the floor. Twice.
• My car arrived from the shippers with a giant oil stain on the roof
• Comcast being difficult (big surprise, eh?) … “What? You can’t use that cable modem, it’s still in use on this other account! Oh that’s _your_ old account? Oh you closed it two years ago? But that doesn’t make any sense! You should have been getting billed! Oh look, you owe us $742 for service that didn’t exist!” Quality customer service, right there.

I posted some various bad photos of the new apartment from the day we moved in, some less-bad photos from the drive from San Francisco to Boston, and some completely unrelated photos from the week we were on Maui.

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Three days left til I move. The moving truck comes friday. I finally heard back from the director of engineering in Cambridge, and he is pleased to have me transfer there, which is a huge relief. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to sort any of the bureaucracy out until after I had physically relocated, which would have made things awkward. I still need to convince the HR department that I’m moving, but in theory that shouldn’t be too difficult - just some paperwork, more or less.

Things remaining to do:

• Schedule a time to drop of my car to have it shipped.
• Mail *another* large chunk of money to the new landlord, for the first month’s rent. Or maybe it’s the last month’s rent - I can’t keep track anymore.
• Finish packing the shit in my apartment.
• Sell off a few more random items (a computer case, a DVD player, an old Sony laptop…)
• Figure out how to have my stuff at work shipped to the new office (some books and some random crap, mostly. Maybe I’ll just move it myself.)
• A dozen other things I’m sure I’m completely forgetting.

I still really don’t want to go, but I’m always super apprehensive about big changes like this. Knowing that I’ll actually have a place to sit and a computer to use when I get to the office in Cambridge makes me feel better, at least. Until today the only people on the east coast who really understood that I am coming there were a pair of managers in New York and one helpdesk employee in Boston.

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