This is probably one of the worst flames I've seen in a long time. The funny part is that he complains about "AA zealots", while he clearly is a "non-AA-zealot" just as bad as any "AA zealot" can possibly be. I know a few (definitely a minority) of people who dislike AA fonts. But as far as I can tell, it's really easy to disable them. And from all I the average user will like them better, so it makes for a sane default to enable them. So, yes, you zealot, I want my fonts blurry, because I find them easier to read. Sorry for having a different personal taste. Oh, and then there is an explanation why AA fonts can actually be easier to read then black-and-white fonts. Because they grey levels are more consistent (which btw, is one of the tings LaTeX does very well, keeping the grey level) than if you have to make each pixel either black or white. Let's say we want to make a line 2 pixels to the right and 1 pixel down. In fonts these things happen... Here are your options: (Sorry, I forgot one: the hole in the middle...) the right one is obviously using AA and is "blurred". The left one is "too dark in the middle" and the other two are deformed. Now let's blur them a bit, like the average non-eagle would see them: The last one clearly is the best representation of the intended shape (a diagonal line of even thinkness). This is of course different if the intended shape was that it becomes slightly "fatter" here, or deformed. The only sane default for vector fonts is to assume that lines should well, not become deformed or thicker. I agree that a excellently made black-and-white pixel font might be done in a way that these deformations don't hurt. It doesn't apply to your favourite Helvetica font IMHO, because that font was designed for printing quality. Now go, and play configuring your "window manager", while I get some work done with openbox as my WM of choice. Because it just sits there in the background and allows me to have all my windows maximized on their own desktops except for my terminals which tile nicely without any zealot WM.

I really like the Tango Desktop project. I have in fact installed a "preliminary" release from art.gnome.org, which is easy when using the Gnome Art package. One thing that makes Tango stick out, is its styleguide. I also really appreciate it's color palette. However, this palette is rather tied to a particular look - e.g. a white background. I was wondering whether one can (with reasonable effort) design icons with a flexible palette. And then have a tool to "instanciate" the icons for a particular, probably different palette. So people in a dark mood could easily generate a "dark tango" version out of them. You can't really do that by just doing a palette replacement. However, if colors were specified as "50% orange, 50% background" it would work out. Or even "50% primary highlight color, 50% background", then people could pick their favourite highlight color. If an icon is meant to depict e.g. earth, you probably will want to use "green" and "blue", and not highlight colors however; these should not be mapped then, either. Such icons might need a "halo" to look good with certain color schemes however. I am not an icon designer, this is just my $.02, and I really appreciate the tango project. But maybe we could think of an icon designer application which makes such things easier to do. I havn't designed icons since my Atari ST time, but I can imagine there is a lot of special tools you might want for icon designing, such as "resolution grid snapping" points and lines, line widths which snap to pixels and such. Think of "hinting" in fonts, but applied to icons. (Or maybe not - if you want to scale icons very small, you likely need to simplify them anyway - i.e. make a separate icon for small sizes) Oh, and of course this might be utopic and overkill. My top (tango) icon wishlist: LyX (because the icon is ugly) and Enigma (because I maintain the Debian package, and the current icon is somewhat boring, just a black ball... looks okay, though, on white background)

I was at a client today when I remembered that David was due to arrive to Caracas circa 1430, so I called him to his brand-new-venezuelan-GSM-cellphone and I found out that he was in problems. In big, dark, awful problems. As I told in previous posts, he went to San Crist bal (near the border with Colombia) to visit his girl and know the city. He departed from Caracas in a bus on Friday night and arrived on Saturday morning. He spent the whole weekend there, and in Monday he was due to leave San Crist bal through the Mayor Buenaventura Vivas Military Airbase, in a civilian airplane. He arrived just on time for his flight, rushing to take the plane on time, and he was stopped by two so-called Inmigration Officials who demanded to see his passport. He recently got a new one from the Passport Office in Mexico City, so he had a brand new passport with the Venezuelan Entry Stamp (Mexicans don’t need a visa to enter Venezuela)
ONIDEX, the National Office for Inmigration. Praised for lots of people for fighting against Passport Corruption, kidnaps people in San Cristobal. The Officials told him that his passport was a fake, and they told him that, from this time on, he was under arrest. They made him leave the Airport quickly and took him in a civilian vehicle with no identifications. They started the trip to San Crist bal City (1 hour away from the Airport in a very scary road) and they kept telling him that his passport was fake (they claimed that the Passport didn’t have the watermarks, and stuff) Soon their position changed and a common practice in Venezuelan officials started: extorsion. They told him that there were “several ways to fix the problem”, and asked him what was in his backpack (which had a laptop, but he denied it): they were demanding money, and David wasn’t prone to do that.
National Guard. Doesn’t have a /proc/clue about anything. They drove David to the Inmigration Office in San Crist bal and told him that they “made” some tests to the passport and they determined that the passport was fake. They told David that their “Commander” told they that he should be deported into Colombia, since he was a “very important member of a Cartel that they were willing to capture”
DISIP: the Venezuelan Political Police. They were helpful in this episode, but they’re not angels. Finally, hours after that charade of Officials telling him funny laws, stupid suppositions and wanting him to give them money, they left David in the Bus Terminal in San Crist bal, where he was able to talk to Ana, from Debian Venezuela, which picked him up and went back to the Airport. The two “Officials” weren’t there anymore, and he had a last problem with the National Guard which had stupid suppositions about his trip, and stuff (this is common, but at least it’s not illegal) before he was able to get into the plane. Being in Caracas, I was really worried. Between Ana, my mother and me we were able to move several people to check David status in the Airport (my mother called four members of the Venezuelan FAA, I called the Venezuelan CIA and Ana called the Vicechancellor) and this probably saved David’s life and money, since the “Officials” might have been scared by the movement of people caring about David. He’s safe now, back in Caracas, in home. He has all his stuff and his health is OK (yet he was scared when he arrived, which I fully understand) Why am I writing this post? I’m really concerned about what happened to David, and I want to make a public statement on this. Somehow, we venezuelans got used to this kind of practices in our Country. Probably 40 years of pseudo-democracy with messy governors helped, maybe it’s a matter of education and culture. I don’t really care about this, but I do care about what they’re doing with the people in my Country. Today, President Chavez declared that a dance against corruption was going to start. I think it’s the fourth time he’s making something about corruption, and he’s failing. There’s a gang of people in San Cristobal, Mr. President, who tries to rob and scare the visitors. They should be in jail. They arrested somebody illegally. It’s forbidden in our Constitution to arrest somebody without having proofs to do it (we have one of the best Constitutions in the World, experts say, but we don’t have people who obey it). If you’re going to arrest an alien, you need to have a Public Prosecutor in place, writing down a legal document and guaranteeing the safety of the detained. This people should be in jail.
Stop Corruption! Though, as my mother later said to David, two awful Venezuelan people kidnapped David, but probably twenty Venezuelan people quickly acted to find out what was happening. We might be a Third World Country, but we use to be able to get out of our problems by our own. And, hell it’s rewarding. I want to apologize in the name of all venezuelans to David and to make a clear statement against corruption: we venezuelan won’t tolerate more corruption. We’ve grown between that, buying places in a line to get our National ID Card, paying one million bolivares to get a Passport appointment. We’re sick of this. This is not the great Venezuela we live in. Please, losers, shoot yourselves. Or eat rat poison, whichever makes less stains.

Mono 1.1.13.4 was uploaded to Debian and got swallowed by the dark depths of the NEW queue (the queue that eats all packages that doesn't exist in Debian yet). We decided to split some libraries of Mono into own packages, because of ABI breakage problems. Mono ships some third party libs which are installed in the GAC (Global Assembly Cache). The GAC allows multiple versions of the same library to be installed, and uses at runtime the right version which the application requested. This is about the same as SONAME versions (libfoo.so.X) and makes transistions between ABI incompatible libraries much easier, without breaking the whole system. But we couldn't use this versioning system as we always replace the current version (it was one binary package called: mono-classlib-1.0/2.0). Thus now we got some libmono-fooX.Y-cil packages. With this step we updated the CLI Policy to 0.3.0 which includes now a new section about packages that install libraries into the GAC. libgdiplus 1.1.13.4 and Gtk# 2.8.2 was also uploaded to Debian. If you can't wait till Mono is through the NEW queue, use the preview package repostory:

Although I'm not a "gamer", I enjoy playing computer games from time to time. First-person shooters are especially well-suited for relaxing after a long and exhausting day ;-) IMHO a very good choice, if you're looking for a fun Free Software first-person shooter running on Linux, is Nexuiz. Nexuiz

• is GPL'd (and not only the code, but also the data!)
• is based on the Darkplaces engine, which in turn is based on the Quake engine
• should be packaged for Debian sooner or later
• has an unpronouncable name, which is always a bonus ;-)

Nexuiz version 1.5 has recently been released, which features new maps, new characters, better AI and lots more. Check it out!

I never thought much of these flashmobs. But admittedly have never seen one in reality, so maybe they are a lot of fun. ;-) Still I'm fine that this hype has pretty much died. I havn't heard of them for years. I've just come across these pictures of a flashmob in japan in 2003 - where people dressed up as Agent Smith from Matrix. This one seems pretty cool, albeit many of the pictures are "group shots", and there are way to many people taking photographs on the photographs. The (staged) fights however add a nice note to it. And on overall it's much more of a "collective show", instead of just people doing random stupid things such as rushing all into one shop and going up and down the stairs. The idea is way cool. People wearing a dark tuxedo, then suddenly pulling out dark sunglasses and an earplug and run off to hunt someone at a special place... that must be so funny to see when you've seen the movie. I wish I were there to give some first-hand impressions.

Well, my DSL provider killed my connection for 10 days, and then I had some vacation ... Long time no see. Though, I've played with my dotfiles recently, and I set up some really nice things, picked from the web. Screen and zsh cooperation The one I find the best is the tight collaboration between screen and zsh to have nice labelled windows in the screen status line. You have to do this like that :

   # in your .zshrc, add the following code to you preexec :
   preexec ()  
       if [[ "$TERM" == "screen" ]]; then
           local CMD=$ 1[(wr)^(*=* sudo -*)] 
           echo -ne "\ek$CMD\e\\"
       fi
    

   # and this code in order to reset the title when zsh gets the hand back
   if [[ "$TERM" == "screen" ]]; then
       PROMPT="$ PROMPT % ^[kzsh^[\\% "
   fi

Then, you can have in your .screenrc some dark margic like :

   bind s select zsh

which make Ctrl-A s find your first available shell (really nice). Make Shift+PgUp/PgDown work in screen well, this is complete dark magic, but it works :

   # tell screen that you term can scroll
   termcapinfo xterm ti@:te@
   # bind Shift+PgUp/PgDn
   bindkey -m "^[[5;2~" stuff ^b
   bindkey -m "^[[6;2~" stuff ^f

And another great setting is altscreen :

   # Support alternate screens so that, for example, when you
   # quit out of vi, the display is redrawn as it was before vi
   # redrew the full screen.
   altscreen on

Though, now, Shift-Tab doesn't work anymore in screen, and since in vimrc I have things like :

   "   Tab Key magic ...
   vmap <tab> >gv
   vmap <bs> <gv

   function! CleverTab()
       if strpart( getline('.'), col('.')-2, 1 ) =~ '^\s*$'
           return "\<Tab>"
       else
           return "\<C-P>"
       endif
   endfunction
   inoremap <Tab> <C-R>=CleverTab()<CR>
   inoremap <S-Tab> <Tab>

   "  

it's quite important that Shift+Tab works ... zsh does not eat non "\n" terminated lines I don't like the option

   setopt no_prompt_cr

that tells zsh no to print a "\r" before each prompt : I have a rprompt, and if a command (e.g. echo -n "f*****g command") is performed just before a shell prompt display, then my rprompt is wrapped, it's ugly. but printing a "\r" each time eats the line if no "\n" was present, which happens sometime, and makes you think the command you launched failed. I found that jewel on the zsh-users MailList :

   precmd()  
       local escape colno lineno
       IFS='[;' read -s -d R escape\?$'\e[6n' lineno colno
       (( colno > 1 )) && echo ''
    

Basically, it checks before writing the prompt if the current column position is 0, and if not, it prints an "\n". I guess it may exists some races if you have a background job, but for alldays use, it's perfect.

My debian package repository now uses signed release files. If you’re using the repository for things such as my xen monitor, xen-tools, or other software then please import the signing key. It is about time I set this up, just took me a while to get round to creating a new key and seeing how the archive signing worked. In other news, Argo, the xen monitory thingy, has a semi-complete Perl + Tk client now. This means I can distribute a single .exe client for Windows users. It is ugly compared to the Gtk client, but it works

I’m neither into Gothic nor do I hate daylight. And even despite the title of my blog I’m definitely everything else than a pessimist. But I do like the night (e.g. for coding or travelling) and I sometimes hear ,,slightly” dark music like e.g. Skyclad. And so I can grin about Nikolai Lusan’s suggestion to introduce the Gothic Darkness Savings Time (GDST) in his blog Blogging is futile. :-)

Now playing: Bloodhound Gang — Bad Touch

I woke up on Friday morning and wondered what breakfast would be. Then I remembered that I was staying at the W and decided to forage for food elsewhere. I took a taxicab with spider88, enochsmiles, maradydd. It was a strange hybrid SUV cab that was painted all yellow, I would later learn that Yellow Cab drivers were scary and that I should avoid them. We got to StudioZ and discovered that we didn't know how to get inside. We figured that out eventually and took stock of the situation. I started moving tables about and setting up chairs, because I abhor standing about with my hands in my pockets. Then I helped hang banners from the rafters. After I did that, I tried to see if I could do anything else. Since CodeCon is run on the cheap so that anybody can attend, drinks like coffee are not included in the conference fee. And since the conference was being held in a night club, there was a convenient bar that would be a good place to setup a concessions stand. So I put things in order and stood behind the counter. I got to see people walk in the door and after registering with wealhtheow or Spider, they'd stand in bewilderment in front of my bar. It was a lot of fun to watch all sorts of people come through. And then I'd smile at them and offer to get them something to drink. We started Lance's talk a little late in order to let everyone settle in their seats. I met him the night before where he talked about his Apache module that has heuristics for detecting when a phisher is trying to clone your website. Or when your website has been cloned and the phisher is passing login requests through to you. This kind of thing is totally what financial institutions have to start doing. We got coffee from this place called Cafe Organica, which seems to have some mixed online reviews. Or rather, Jonathan did, in a big messenger bag filled with carafes. Since Jonathan doesn't actually drink coffee, it was left to me to decide whether it was any good. It seemed to be drip coffee that was thick, dark and strong. Very decent for something that was brewed hours ago. The customers didn't seem to mind, as we ran out of coffee every day. The next presentation was SiteAdvisor which takes an interesting tack on safely surfing the web. Instead of building security features into your browser, there's a central server that stores information about sites that you're visiting. But what was really interesting was how they got this information. They had an automated tool that went in pretending to be a real person, signed up for some e-mails, downloaded some programs, and examined what happened afterward. I missed the majority of the VidTorrent presentation, because I was busy chatting with people and offering them refreshments. Also, their demo didn't work because the wireless setup at the conference kept on going down. People were abusing the free Wireless network that Cliff was trying to keep up and running. Which is sad, because Cliff had basically volunteered to set that up on his own time. Tom came up after that to present Localhost, which is a unimaginatively named piece of software, but is interesting because it lets you browse a world-wide filesystem of torrents. What's interesting about his filesystem is that it uses a distributed hash table, so that even if there are files with the same name, you'll be able to distinguish the distinct copies. Which is useful if you want to tell whether you're downloading a legitimate and popular file, or some malicious file that someone's injected. The last talk of the day was Truman, which not only demonstrated an interesting piece of technology, but also quite educational. The tool itself is a specialised Linux distribution that can capture what happens inside itself and simulate a public connexion to the Internet. This is advantages, Joe tells us, because modern pieces of malware are smart enough to disable themselves when they detect sandboxed environments. After people filed out, we packed away everything into storage as StudioZ is a nightclub, so it was setting up for its nightclub crowd. Everyone else went next door to Loft11 where a party was being held, sponsored by bramcohen's awesome company I went inside and bumped into Graydon and we tried to go about finding fellow Canadians. This was not so successful on the crowded downstairs floor, so we went upstairs to chat and catch up. I met some people who were at the speaker's reception and successfully remembered their names. Then I met a guy who was at the night club just waiting for his buddy, and I explained CodeCon to him. He thought it was a great idea. Len Sassaman and Bram got up to give a little speech, which I tried to take photographs of. But failed. Instead, I noticed that they were on this awesome glass ceiling which made me want to dance. I didn't do that though, because my feet hurt from standing all day. I poked my head into a room upstairs that was all white, which was very cool. Some people were playing a game of Werewolf which finished with the villagers winning. I hung out with some people like Eric, Pete, and Kelsey who told the story of her pink Barbie backpack. I also met Chloe and her husband, whose name I have forgotten. But Chloe is awesome because she is now independently wealthy so that she can pursue her dream of studying the nitrogen cycle in soil using post-doc maths. Impressive! I also met akashayi who is not a professional computer programmer at all. She teaches martial arts by day, and slings code by night. She drove all the way from Los Angeles to attend CodeCon and was having the time of her life. I wistfully remember when I was that excited about computing, so just hanging out with her was awesome. She promised me a Kempo lesson if I ever made my way to L.A., which is an offer I intend to collect. I found Spider downstairs, sitting on a couch with Daniel. The night was getting long and we were totally exhausted, so we took a taxicab to the W. There, we went up to Enoch's room party where he treated us to $17 cheeseburgers. Now, I didn't think that cheeseburgers that expensive were worth it, but boy oh boy were those good. Spider and I took a cab to kineticphoenix and riseorbleed's place sometime past midnight and we dragged our luggage into their guest room. Which was really more of an awesome guest apartment. Hurray for knowing people in foreign cities! I don't remember much after that. I think I turned on a space heater before passing out.

My personal top 5 movies list:

1. Immortel (2004)
2. Fight Club (1999)
3. Donnie Darko (2001)
4. Kontroll (2003)
5. Sin City (2005)

To be continued...

Books in this series (all published by Baen):

1. An Oblique Approach (1998)
2. In the Heart of Darkness (1998)
3. Destiny’s Shield (1999)
4. Fortune’s Stroke (2000)
5. The Tide of Victory (2001)
6. The Dance of Time (2006)

The premise sounds a little silly: a cyborg and a crystalline artificial intelligence travel back through time from the far future into the Sixth Century. The cyborg’s mission: to create a totalitarian world government that will create the perfect future according to one branch of fanatics. The crystal’s mission: to aid the Byzantine general Belisarius to defeat the cyborg. Never mind that premise. Here is another. Gunpowder and associated technologies are introduced in the 6th Century, first in India and second in the (Eastern) Roman Empire. What happens next? Based on an outline for a trilogy by David Drake, Eric Flint has created a masterpiece in this six-volume story. It really is a united story, not a collection of six independent novels; the story starts in the first book and ends in the sixth. There will be no more books in this series (except, perhaps, as a “sequel” series, though the authors have not hinted about this). It is a masterpiece, all right. In an action-adventure story, plot is paramount, and the Belisarius hexalogy has an unusually tight plot for the word count. The characters are well drawn; evidence of this claim is that I wept, much like Belisarius himself, when one of the significant secondary characters died – in battle, yes, but by a fortune’s stroke and not by any enemy’s design. The characterization of the societies and countries involved is suberb in my admittedly history-challenged opinion; India is described vividly, although, as Flint has mentioned, it’s extremely anachronistic (Flint himself considers this appropriate under the circumstances, and describes his portrait of 6th Century India as “impressionistic”). After a slightly slow start – it takes several not so exciting chapters for the premise of the story to be revealed – the story starts climbing like an aeroplane after takeoff, and never stops. The mood in the beginning is downright depressing, with only a tiny bit of hope, but it steadily brightens, and the last book is pure payoff, immensely satisfying to this reader. It was so satisfying, that I haven’t suffered from story world withdrawal after finishing The Dance of Time. This is unusual. I have no other option but to rate this story 5/5.

I really don't know why Donnie Darko never made it into the german cinemas. This movie is one of the best I've seen in the last years. It's on #96 in the IMDB top 250 movies list currently, so it seems I'm not alone with my opinion about this movie.

I redecorated my (physical) desktop today. I still need some more posters, too much empty wall. But it's nice to lean back and have some colorful stuff to look at. But do you know what's best? My laptop is back from repair. I have backlight again! Though I think they used a too short light tube, it feels somewhat darker on the left and right. But the laptop is old anyway. And the old tubes used to have a reddish tint there... I love having my 15" 1600x1200 screen back. ;-)

Sometimes, coding for the web is like having a co-worker with a body odor problem. Everyone's far too polite to say anything, so you all put up with it and nobody tells the poor smelly soul. Meanwhile, they sense something's wrong but don't know what. Web browsers are so insanely great at making sense of tag soup, that if you code only for the end-result--a reasonable strategy, adopted by most when starting out--you can get into all sorts of tangles. Misery ensues: you're stuck with days of fiddling in the dark. You know something's up, but it's hard to see what's going wrong. In that sense, browsers are lousy at one half of Postel's law. They get the "liberal in what you accept" bit right, but they don't help the developer one bit in implementing "be conservative in what you do." Using three or four different validators for HTML, CSS, etc. often helps a lot, but the state of the browser as an integrated development platform leaves something to be desired. Firebug is a Firefox extension that goes a long way to providing integrated web application debugging. It is a full-featured error console that shows your errors in Javascript, CSS (a godsend!) and XML. Not only that, but it does full logging for XMLHttpRequest calls, so it's a powerful tool for debugging AJAX applications as well. Firebug also manages to bundle in a DOM inspector, and a command line for evaluating Javascript. With these features, Firebug should let me throw out about four separate extensions I already had installed that do a similar thing. The final star turn in Firebug's act is a Javascript call to log information to its console, the equivalent of the all important debugging printf() call in C. I hope this means this will make it easier to deploy things such as unit test frameworks for AJAX applications. Although its author Joe Hewitt cautions us to remember that Firebug is still an alpha release, I'd still recommend rushing to install it. If you're developing anything for the web browser this year, it's the most important tool you'll find. While it won't rid you of the problems of cross-browser compatibility, Firebug will speed you in uncovering the smelly bits of your web application.

It has happened. Today I had the impression that my display was a bit darker than it used to be; and later it started by slight changes in brightness, then real flickering - and then only darkness remained... I can still somewhat read the display, since I've started using black-on-white two years ago when I noticed the increased readability in pure sunlight. Now I've hooked up a TFT, but it's not yet running optimal, since my laptop had a 1600x1200 TFT, while the 17" display I've attached has a physical resolution of 1280x1024 I guess. I loved my IBM ThinkPad, especially because of it's display. Compared with much more recent displays, it had an excellent viewing angle, next to no reflections on it, and stunning sharpness with it's 135 dpi. I'll miss it. And I'll definitely miss the page-left and page-right keys next to the arrow keys I've gotten addicted to for desktop switching... The laptop is now 3.5 years old, so out of warranty. More stuff had started breaking; just before end of the warranty the harddisk died and I got it replaced, the main battery doesn't charge any more and my secondary battery holds for half an hour. Bluetooth never worked for me, and doesn't show up on USB like in all the Howtos. Heck, even of one of the two USB1 ports (no USB2) falls apart - the plastic part to keep the pins from touching is broken off... So it definitely doesn't pay off to have the display fixed. They would need to fix just about anything there. What sucks most is that I had intended to buy myself a new laptop in 10 months. I'd like to get one with a Core CPU then, but I don't trust the early models... and I'll have to decide which brand to buy. I loved my A31p display, but 15" and 3.5 kg is too large and heavy for my current taste. I'd go for an IBM ThinkPad X* (and I'd love the X50 I guess) if they weren't a bit expensive... maybe I'll get a Samsung now, but I definitely would want to test the display first... can't stand some of the displays I've recently seen on Dell (don't even think of watching a DVD on them unless you are at most 2 people, and they reflect like shit.) Does anyone know if there is a sponsorship program for Linux developers to get new laptops cheaper? ;-) Or at least without having to buy a useless Windows licence? Of course I'd help writing drivers and document the installation process...

One thing I love the Kingdom of Loathing for are the countless allusions to movies and songtexts. Today I found something, which can’t be anything else than an allusion to one of my favourite movies: When I only read the name of the item I was immediately reminded to a scene from Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs (IMDb entry, Wikipedia entry) when President Skroob drinks -eh- breaths a can of Perry Air. (Which itself is an allusion to “Perrier”. But I only found German written references to “Perry Air”, so it may be that the original version didn’t have this allusion, since the script directly refers to “Perrier Salt-Free Air”.) BTW: Nice typo in the English Wikiquote article about Spaceballs: “Dark Helmut” instead of “Dark Helmet”. :-)

Now Playing: Alphaville — Forever Young

I've been so busy, I haven't had time to blog. Rather than putting it off any longer, I'll just dump what I can remember. Last Wednesday, Sarah arrived after her holiday in Singapore, and from all accounts, had a great time. Photos as well. Sticking with the whirlwind theme, the next day, we had a "building warming" party at work for the new building we'd moved into the week before Michael and I started. The next night we had the work Christmas party, which blew the socks off any work Christmas party I'd ever been to before, and then on Saturday night we went to a party in San Francisco that we'd been invited to. On a life in general front, I'm still waiting for a Social Security number. The lack of one makes life a bit difficult for a lot of things. It also turns out that Sarah's work permit will take about 90 days to approve, so she's going to be a lady of leisure for the next few months. I've finally been issued with a work mobile phone (or "cell phone" as they call them), and so can stop roaming and paying through the nose for the privilege. We've found somewhere to live. We take possession of a 2 bedroom townhouse (split-level) in a complex in Mountain View that is 3 miles from work on the 18th. The rent is $1725 a month, which is a bit better than we were expecting. The complex we're renting in does have shared laundries, which we'd not too keen on before getting over here, but they're quite modern and secure, and there's a laundry block close to our townhouse, so hopefully it won't be too bad. The whole place had been renovated about 5 years ago, so it's all in good condition. We could have rented a 3 bedroom apartment (single level) in the same complex for about $125 a month more, but we're trying to actually make some money while we're over here... Driving on the other side of the road becomes fairly "normal" after about a week of doing it regularly. Sarah's adapted fine. Lane placement is the hardest thing, because your body's used to being in a certain spot on the road, and it's all different sitting on the other side of the car. We've managed to open a rudimentary bank account, even with my lack of Social Security number. Unfortunately I can't get paid until I have an SSN. Upside of that is that if it doesn't happen until next year, I presumably won't have to worry about income tax for this US financial year. Downside is kind of obvious... By far one of the stranger things of everyday life here is the lighting situation in the average residence. Lamps are all the rage, to the point that light switches don't exist in some rooms (notably bedrooms). Take where we're currently living for example. There's a light switch at the bottom of the stairs, there's one at the top. There's a bank of four in the living room, two of which control lights in the kitchen, and one the hallway. The last one controls a lamp in the corner of the living room, which is connected to a power socket (or power point as we'd call it). The bedroom with the attached bathroom (en suite) has two bedside lamps, and that is the sole source of light. The bathroom attached has light switches, and the walk-in robe has a light switch. It's so weird. So walking into a darkened bedroom involves walking all the way in, and fumbling around with a lamp. It's often easier to turn on the light in the wardrobe so you can see what you're doing first. I can't think of any reason for it, except tradition. It's not like they're avoiding wiring the walls or the ceiling, because it's done partially already. The bedroom has a ceiling fan, but where in Australia, there'd be a knob on the wall near the light switch to control it, it has a little chain you yank on. To add to the strangeness, there are two switches on the wall, one of which seems to allow you to turn off the ceiling fan if it's already been switched on by pulling the chain. The townhouse we're renting has a similar lamp dependency, so we're going to be making a trip to Ikea for some lamps it would seem. That's about everything I can recollect right now... Oh, I should point out that I'm really loving it over here.