It's been a busy week, and I unfortunately don't have time right now to provide many details. Suffice to say that I'm safely in San Jose after a harrowing drive through the rain in the mountains, and less-harrowing but still annoying rain all the way from Tacoma, WA to Concord, CA. I really don't like rain.
I've been spending all of my time this week trying to take care of the eight zillion things that have to be done ASAP when you move. I've managed to get new car insurance (and save 30% off of my Washington rates!); receive my stuff from the movers; do the initial bit of shopping for the apartment; schedule times for phone service, cable TV, and cable modem installation; transfer my AAA membership; and do a few other things, but there's still a lot more to be done. Meanwhile, I keep falling farther and farther behind on email and news...I'm now about a thousand messages behind in email, and I'm in far worse shape with weblogs, newsgroups, and web pages.
With luck, I'll be able to start catching up once the AT&T technician shows up on Saturday to set up our cable connection and plug in the cable modem. I decided to go with AT&T's cable Internet service after they offered us $21.95 a month for the first four months with no installation fee and no long-term contract if we had it installed at the same time as cable TV. I figure that if I don't like it, I can get DSL without worrying about canceling a contract, so there's no harm in trying it out.
The apartment's pretty nice so far. We can hear the people upstairs moving around from time to time, but it's not too bad. The neighborhood is incredibly quiet -- there's no traffic on the street by us, for example, so that's a plus. Our heating system is rather loud, but we hopefully won't have to use it very often. The only really annoying thing comes from an inset space in the hall where they built a thick shelf at desk height and put a little hole in it, calling it a "computer desk" with the hole for your monitor and keyboard cables. It sounded sort of useful until I put my Cinema Display on it and realized that the ADC cable doesn't fit through the hole. Great. It's really close, but the hole's just not wide enough. I'm wondering if Dr. Bott's ADC Extension Cable or DVIator might be slightly smaller. If so, I'll gladly buy either one to allow me to use the desk in the way it was intended.