My wife and I found a place in Mountain View. We packed, moved, and unpacked all of our possessions. She started at Google. I've driven from Virginia to California, twice:
Yellow 20' Penske truck towing a Civic (fun)
Red '97 Ford Probe GT (real fun)
In the course of the two trips, I stayed in Kentucky, Nebraska, Wyoming, Northern Nevada, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Minneapolis, Kadoka South Dakota, Colorado, Vegas, and L.A. I have many stories from the trips, but won't bore you with them now. Heck, I still haven't finished the London travelogue I threatened you with back in December. Anyway, thanks to all the people who put me up (and put up with me) on my cross-country adventure. Y'all are the best.
We're now settled in California, after no small amount of wrangling with various bureaucracies, including: AT&T Mobile, AT&T Broadband Video, AT&T Broadband Internet (sensing a trend?), PacBell/SBC, the California DMV. Some were better than others, and your mileage may vary considerably depending on which particular service rep you draw that day. Some are actually nice and helpful, but more often that's just a trick before they tell you how little service they can actually offer. Some are just downright surly. In any case, it's behind me now and we have all of the wired comforts to which we've grown accustomed.
Those comforts include a spanky new DSL connection. Speeds are pretty comparable to what we got in Virginia with a cable modem (~750 kbps). If anything, they're a bit faster. That's lucky because I had to endure a LOT hoo-ha to find a provider who could actually give me service in the room where I wanted it. (AT&T Broadband in particular had a whole host of excuses for why they couldn't do anything for me.) In the process, I also learned how to wire telephones (like I'm going to pay PacBell $45 just to ring my doorbell then pay them more to get a dial tone in our house). Now I'm back in the saddle again and will surely be tormenting delighting you with new and (possibly) exciting entries in the days and weeks to come.
'Till we meet again -- happy trails to ya.
:: Keith 19:45 [link] :: ::