I seem to be slipping into a mode where I spit out a handful of blog posts and then subside for a week or more. C’est la vie. Since last blogging, we’ve made great strides on getting the apartment up and running. We have TV, Internet, and VOIP telephony. (And on the TV, mirabile dictu, we have SpeedHD! YES!!!) We have shared printing, albeit with a replacement printer: my HP All-In-One didn’t survive the move, so I went out and bought a Canon MX860. The idea of a WiFi-enabled device that does full-duplex printing and feeder-based scanning/copying for under $200 strikes me as vaguely amazing.
The car is almost sorted out. Some friends of mine decided to buy a new 2010 Prius, and offered me a great deal on their 2007 Prius Touring. It took a few days for everything to come together, but we’ve done the deal, I now have a California license, insurance is sorted out (which was more of a hassle than it should have been), and tomorrow I’ll go to the DMV to make it official by paying the sales tax and a gazillion other little fees. There’s not much point in me posting a picture (it looks like every other silver Prius you’ve ever seen), but it’s a true geek’s car. Now to pick out a personalized plate – maybe “CLOUD C” or “ESSEX U” or “AVEBURY”…
As we unpacked all of the boxes, I was all for crushing them and getting rid of them as fast as possible. Instead, Kate advertised them (for free) on Craig’s List, and we had grateful takers for all of them. Lesson to the impatient: recycling stuff is worth the small effort. We haven’t unpacked the books yet, so we’re going to have plenty more.
An on top of all this, I’m busy making plans for another trip to China! I’m flying out on Friday. This time, my plans are so fluid that for now I’ve simply booked a one-way ticket to Hong Kong; we’ll make up the rest of the itinerary over the next few days. There’s a nice urgency in all of this which I also found at Amazon (and didn’t experience during the last few years at Sun). But at Amazon, the urgency was of the short-term variety: small teams, short projects, quick pay-backs. Not here.
(Weird travel detail. I’m flying out on Cathay Pacific, and I thought that since I may wind up on quite a few CX flights over the next few years, it might make sense for me to join their Frequent Flier program, the Marco Polo Club. I went through the long online application form, right up to the point where they told me that it would cost $50 to join. I checked the out-of-the-box benefits: nothing special. So I think I’ll be accruing my CX miles on AA or BA.)