Viraj's Weblog

Well it's been a year since I've been in Mountain View and at Google. I can hardly believe it. I have been renting an apartment, and occasionally did some real estate hunting. The prices here are absolutely ridiculous, but I gave in and bought a small condo in Mountain View. The price is correct on that page: 279k. I could've probably got a 3 BR townhouse in FL for that much. Zillow seems to think it's worth 352k, so I think I got a good deal. Honestly, it was the cheapest condo for sale in Mountain View , so I couldn't have done too bad.

I ended up getting an 80/10/10 mortgage. This is basically 10% down, 80% on a 1st mortgage, and 10% on a 2nd mortgage. What's the point of 2 mortgages? Well here in CA if your loan is 80% or less than the home price, you don't have to pay Private Mortgage Insurance (PMI). Many buyers do 80/10/10 here because everything is so damn expensive. I have a 5.8% fixed 30-year on the 80, and like a 9% on the 10. The latter I plan to pay off pretty quickly, so I'm not too concerned about the high rate.

I'm moving this week, which is always fun. As if this weren't enough, I've enrolled in a Compilers course at Stanford through their SCPD program. The plan is to get a Software Systems certificate, and if things go well, maybe transfer to a Masters program. I just have to maintain a B or higher. It will probably be hectic the first few weeks with my move, work, and school, but I think it's a good opportunity.

Ok today has been the hottest day since I've been in CA. We are over 100 °F in Mountain View and I have no AC. Luckily it is not very humid, but still hot as hell. I just hope it doesn't stay this way long or I need a new apartment soon.

I've always been an audiophile of sorts, and always want my home theatre sound to be perfect. I currently have a Panasonic home theatre in a box system. Since I moved to Mountain View, CA, I haven't bothered to connect the rear speakers. The main reason is I cannot find a good way to hide speaker wires other than tearing up carpet. As I spent an hour trying to figure out where I could possibly hide the wires, I said screw it I don't really need rear speakers anyway. I'd like to have them, but it's just not worth the trouble.

My next big investment will be replacing this Panasonic with Bose's 3-2-1 home theatre system. This uses special 'technology' to simulate surround sound. I know it won't be as great as a full surround system, but I've heard Bose systems, and they are truly amazing in other ways. My temporary apartment happened to have a seemingly innocuous Bose Wave Radio system. When I listened to it, I literally could not believe how good it sounded. The bass was so good that it sounded like a subwoofer was somewhere in the room, but it was all coming from that small radio. The clarity and 'presence' of the music is just amazing.

I could also get the newer wireless surround speaker systems, which seem pretty cool. Still undecided.

I did alot of unpacking today. I think I have more packing material than actual stuff. Slowly but surely my apartment is becoming a home. What sucked is they were doing some plumbing in my building and the water was off all day.

I have a plasma TV that was crated before being moved. A 3rd party had to come out to open the crate, and I also had Comcast coming out the same day. I was worried that I wouldn't have the TV ready before Comcast got here. Luckily the 'uncraters' came out to open the crate early. Then Comcast came out to hook up my cable TV and internet. The TV worked great, and I was given a cable modem self-install kit. After drueling over Discovery HD a bit, I ventured to get my internet access running.

Now I have a wireless router, but I couldn't hook that up to the modem because some software is required to run to setup the cable modem. I hate installing this crap on my system, so I tried just connecting my laptop to the modem and tried to browse. It redirected to a Comcast page requesting me to download the installation software. They had a Mac version, and it was like 64megs. What in the world is included in that setup?

After downloading the HQX file and running it, it starts up Internet Explorer for Mac and begins a setup process. My guess is the download included IE, because the setup was just a sequence of web pages. After putting in my account number it got to a screen and just hung. I killed IE and restarted the installation, which seemed to continue where it left off. Finally it told me to reboot. Hmm, I haven't rebooted my Mac since, well since I don't know when. This brought me horror flashbacks of Windows, but I complied.

The system comes up and I notice I have a different IP. However, I cannot access anything. DNS seems to work, but port 80 connections to anywhere fail. I tried running the setup again, but it just crashes with 'file not found'. Yay. Now I was about to call them and then thought to myself, what would they probably ask me to do? I remembered my past experiences with Adelphia, "Power down the modem...". Ok, I'll try power cycling the modem. Voila! It works.

Now I'm not going to work with my laptop connected to the modem, I need to setup my wireless router. Hm, they probably know my MAC address now and will prevent any other MAC from connecting. I don't know this for sure, but it's a safe assumption. So I went to my router setup and configured the MAC address cloning feature to be the same MAC as my Mac . Plugged the router into the modem, and voila, I instantly have wireless.

So in general it was a pretty good day. I'm even getting my car delivered tomorrow! I'm really impressed with how smoothly this whole move is going. Everything is being done earlier than I expected and things just seem to work out.

Here is the really beautiful temporary housing I'm staying at.

Here is the apartment I'm moving into. It's also pretty nice for the price.

Well for the past few days I've been doing my move from FL to CA. I flew through Chicago Ohare airport and there was really bad weather there. We had to stay on the runway for 3 hours in Miami before taking off. It was also the most turbulent flight I have ever been through. People were almost panicking, and of course I was praying the plane didn't crash . Luckily my connecting flight was also delayed, but I ended up running to catch the flight. All I had was a piece of toast for breakfast and ended up starving once I got to CA. Note to myself: never fly through Chicago again.

Everything else is going very smoothly. I've been staying at temporary housing in Santa Clara for the past few days to wait for my stuff to arrive. The temporary apartment is absolutely beautiful. The movers arrived with my stuff this morning. It took only 8 days to get from FL to CA! Incredible, I was expecting 3 weeks. I don't have a bed and will pick one up from a friend this weekend. My car is scheduled to arrive sometime next week.

Meanwhile I'm getting used to the area, and I'll also experiment with the public transportation. I need to take a written test for my CA driver's license. One thing also I found out is my Bank of America accounts can't be used at the Bank of America here. I can only do stuff online. So I basically need to open up local accounts at the BoA here. I found that quite strange. You would think that Bank of America is Bank of America everywhere, but that's not the case for CA at least.

I'll put up some pictures of my apartment soon.