Time for another diary entry, I think.
The move to Menlo Park was a disaster. On the recommendation of no fewer than three Google colleagues, we hired a local firm to take care of the two mile move from Palo Alto to Menlo Park.
Well, what a bloody disaster. They damaged furniture, dirtied upholstery, lost screws and bolts in the bushes, brought a truck that was too small, brought no tools (not even a screwdriver), brought no shrink-wrap to wrap upholstery and dresser drawers, and to top it all, they ran late because of all of these mistakes and have now charged my credit card for twice what they quoted us for.
Bastards. Needless to say, I’m disputing the charge with the credit card company.
On the plus side, we now have an apartment with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. It’s nice and roomy and feels like a real home. There’s a balcony here and swimming pool, but we’ve had to forego the pool table that we had at the old place.
The wedding is now just over fifty days away and the implications of this are finally starting to dawn on me. There’s still so much to do: a cake to be chosen and ordered, suits to be ordered, music to be chosen, people to be instructed on what to wear, where to be, what to do, etc.
There’s just no time left for anything any more. The move has consumed the last few weeks of our lives, but we’ve settled into the new place now and got most of our stuff unpacked.
The move from PacBell DSL to Speakeasy went like clockwork with just a couple of hours of downtime as the servers were moved. Trying to get the Speakeasy circuit up at the new place before losing connectivity at the old place was no easy task, with Speakeasy, Covad and PacBell all involved in a unholy love triangle of inefficiency.
I noticed tonight that bash-completion is now a part of Gentoo Linux, so there are probably even more distributions out there that have incorporated it.
I’ve been buying a lot of crap on eBay lately. Most of it has been CDs and old video cartridges for an Atari Lynx that I picked up. I also managed to get hold of a good inflatable mattress for when we get visitors in the new place, as we don’t have a lot of furniture.
I was offered a job last week for a higher salary than I’ve ever earned; in fact, a higher salary than anyone I know has ever earned. The only problem is that the job would be with a financial institution in London.
I have no desire to live in London again. It’s a great city, but I don’t think I’ll ever want to live in the UK again. It’s too damn repressed.
What’s that you say? Yes, the USA is even more repressed than the UK, but then I don’t have any intention of settling here either. I’ll continue to hang out in Silicon Valley for the time being, enjoying the Californian sun and vesting in my Google stock, and then when the time is right, it’ll be back to Amsterdam to buy a nice canal house, preferably on the Brouwersgracht. Amsterdam is the only place I’ve ever really felt at home and I still miss it terribly.
Another distraction in the new apartment is the DirecTV satellite TV that we’ve invested in. Now I can watch umpteen church channels, Hispanic minority channels, the game show channel, the love channel and innumerable other stations broadcasting mind-numbing anaesthetic drivel designed to pacify me and turn me into a drooling conformist couch-potato.
Great. I only wanted BBC America, anyway, but it’s nice to have OLN for the Tour de France, the HBO channels and things like Discovery, National Geographic and Animal Planet. The rest is absolute bollocks, not fit for the TV room in a hospice full of dementia patients.
Oh well. Time for bed.