Wibblelog

My new apartment is to the point where I’m not entirely ashamed of its appearance anymore.  It’s still a mess of moving boxes, and we don’t have a couch, but I took some pictures anyway.  Click through for photos. (Read the article)

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There are 37 ethernet ports in my apartment.

But only one in the spot where I put my desk.

*sigh*

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I moved into Boston.  I now live in the back bay - no more crappy suburbs.  More news to come as I start having time to breathe again :-P

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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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Stuff done:

• Car is arranged to be shipped
• Rent checks mailed to realtor, who will get the keys to the new place for me
• Well past the halfway point in the packing, and I already went through the “OMG must sort through all these piles of paper!” stage.
• Offered my plants for adoption to various people at work

Stuff remaining:

• Get people to actually come adopt the plants and take them away
• Get some wardrobe boxes or something like that
• Pack all the dishes and crap in the kitchen
• Pack the TV and its surrounding gadgetry
• Arrange to have internet access post-move
• Panic

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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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You read that right. I’m moving to Boston at the end of this week. I’m absolutely terrified, of course. I’ve sold and generally gotten rid of a whole lot of stuff, which will definitely make moving easier. I think I’ll be rid of all the crappy “college” furniture after this move - that is to say, the crappy particle-board stuff that I never should have taken with me to California in the first place, such as the $25 Wal*Mart bookshelf whose structural integrity was dependent on the tallest books in the shelves. I still need to find new homes for all my plants though, as well as arranging for my car to be shipped. Oh, and I should really get my car to the mechanic before moving too, so they can fix the air conditioner, which they broke the last time I had it in their shop.

I really don’t want to move. I’m going to miss this place!

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I’m moving in a few weeks. As I’ve done in the past, I’m trying to reduce the amount of crap that I have to take with me. Those of you who have known me for a while should know that I’ve historically been a bit of a packrat, particularly when it comes to computer parts and other assorted gadgetry. The last couple of times I’ve moved, I’ve sold or given away lots of stuff too, but this time I really mean it. I’m going through all the boxes of gadgets and crap in my closet, and everything that I’m not absolutely sure I need to keep is going away. Anything I haven’t touched in a year is getting purged, mostly by offering it for free to my coworkers. It’s incredibly liberating, and I wish I had done this a long time ago. Busted laser printer? Gone. Giant box full of various cables and wires? Gone. 25-year-old camera kit that I haven’t used in 3 years? Gone, and to a good cause. All the extra old hard drives, video cards, scsi cards+cables, microphones, mice, assorted sticks of RAM … ALL GONE. I figure the money I save by not paying for this crap to be moved cross-country again makes it worthwhile to just give most of this away instead of dealing with selling items one at a time. It’s SO GREAT.

I’m even managing to get some money for some stuff here and there. I decided to sell off my trusty G4 tower, having realised that I’d prefer to have a mac mini that consumes 75% less energy and takes up 90% less desk space. Someone’s paying me like $600 for the thing! SO AWESOME!

I should probably think about getting rid of some books, too, considering that they’re roughly as dense as depleted uranium when packed into moving boxes, and some of these I’m pretty sure I’ll never actually look at again.

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In case you haven’t heard by now, I’m definitely moving to boston. It’s official as of today - I just dropped a security deposit check in the mail for a townhouse in Ashland. The new place sounds like it will be really nice - it’s like $200 less per month than my current apartment in Mountain View, but it’s more than twice the size, plus it has an attached garage and an extra room. It is quite scary putting down money on a place without seeing it first, but I’ve seen plenty of photographs and I’ve been working with a real estate agent who went to check the place out for me. I’m crossing my fingers.

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