The last few days have been very busy.
Basically all kinds of fun items have come to the fore

Went to the bank as they rang to ask for a photocopy of my passport/entry visa which they forgot to get when I was applying for credit cards. They need this for to do an international credit check. Oddly, my own bank in the UK pushed up my credit rating again without me asking, moving my credit from 1500 UKP to 2500 UKP which equates to ~$4000. I'm rather hoping the Wachovia pick up a good report as a credit rating of zero in the US, while substantially better than a BAD credit rating, makes getting finance a bit harder.

Having been warded off living in Durham by just about everyone in Redhat and a number of external people.. (though no one gives a full account of why, but guns were mentioned by a few) I've found a place reasonably close about 6 miles away. I would have prefered Innsbrook though as it was all of 2 miles away from the RH offices. Given that everyone seems to believe Durham is a pit, I can't help wondering why RH chose to set up it's offices there as the current offices are rented and is the 3rd building redhat have moved to.
I kinda liked the temporary accomodation I had out at Cary, however, traveling 26 miles round trip a day would be a pain and the I40 isn't known for free flowing traffic.

I've rented the apartment at Bradford place for $790 a month which seems to be about the normal price in the area for 6 months. Paid a fee, deposit ($250) and the remainder of the month rent ($260). I want to see how things pan out over the next few months and decide if I should buy a house or continue renting.

Needed to get furniture. Went looking around for furniture rental places, though I had a 25% off first months rent for Cort which was only 4 miles away. So I went and got the manager special at $85 a month though I upgraded the bed size and the dresser table. So for $110 a month (ouch) I get

• A sofa
• a matching chair
• 2 table lamps
• a cocktail table
• an end table
• dresser
• a mirror
• a nightstand
• a headboard
• a frame (hey, it was part of the 'special')
• a queen box
• a queen box mattress
• a dining table
• and 4 dining chairs

I got a hold of the local electric company (Duke Power) and got the electric to the apartment sortted out. Minor fee of $160 to pay.

Phone,.. I had the apartment management people sort out the phone application, however, I have to go pay a deposit at the phone office, which is a pain, because I have no idea where that office is and the person I spoke to at BellSouth just said 'bring it to the office but just couldn't get it through her head that I needed the address of the office... <mutter, stupid woman>.. as a result the phone line connection is an unresolved issue.

I need to get rid of the hire car ASAP, so I poped off to Capital Ford to see about my prospects of buying a car. I've gone against the idea of getting a 2nd hand car as they were not that much cheaper than a new car and don't come with what I would call decent warrenties. Although the NC state have a rulling that car damage >$1000 has to be reported and placed online there are a lot of nasty gotcha's that can slip under $1000.

Finally found Capitol Ford after making a wrong turn. Had a look around, but really the only two cars of intrest were the Ford Contour (known as a Mondeo in Europe) which is similar to my last car or a Ford Focus, which is being pushed hard by Ford as it's next product to gain market share with. I'm thinking of spending around $16,000 on a car which is about 10,200 UKP, so the bank advised me that I should probably get financing from the car company as they could probably do a better financing package. So I've applied for $16,000 credit through the ford credit scheme.
Because I'm new to the country ford then wanted a load of details abou my UK bank and credit which was all fine and good,.. up until they found out there was a 5 hour timezone differance. They'll be in touch.

Decided to skip on TV in the apartment for a while. From what I can see, most of TV in the US is advertizing. If I do get a TV, it'll only be for to watch VD's or video's

Back at base (RH) things are going okish, lots and lots of fun trying to get website space sorted out, documentation written, designs made and scoping out the piranha enhancements. Fortunately Keith has shouldered the brunt of the work while I try and get myself sorted out with apartments and the like. Theres a new features list that runs several pages in length now. At some point that list will stop growing and some serious design/coding will get going under the hammer.

Ah, easter break (good friday),... turns out the aparment office complex will be closed. This is annoying because the furniture people will be turning up and there will be no one around to let them in to deliver the furniture. Called up Cot's to discuss this, and they seem happy to simply call me when they get there for me to go out and open up the apartment for to let them in. Unfortunately this means I can't go to the DC LUG, which I would have has a logistical problem with anyway. See I also needed to return the hire car to hertz on saturday which opened up even more problems.

Ford ran to confirm that they were prepared to finance the buying of a car. Good. I'll have to find a warm body to come out with me (I can't drive two cars at once). Though I have yet to select the car and options, however, I have a very good idea of what I want. I need to sort out car insurance as well. That'll be expensive,.. somewhere around the $900 mark even if I am 30 and never caused an accident.

New Items to aquire,.. bedding, pots/pans, plates, cutlrey. Is there no end to this buying spree? At this rate I'll be single handidly be pushing up the intrest rates in the US (ok huge exageration).

Consumer gripe of the day:
The US hasn't caught onto the idea of direct debit.
A lot of companies won't accept credit details over a phone.
This means that the aparment, and furniture, has to be paid for by cheque, Power can be paid for by credit card over the phone but don't have a direct debit facility. The phone company will accept credit card payment but deposits have to be in person with a cheque. I have as yet to find out what ford will do. I'm really hoping they'll do direct debit. I'll be annoyed if they don't.
Conclusion: The US financial structure is arcane and badly needs a kick on the shins to get it's act together.

I bought a USB PC webcam from Staples Office supplies. In theory it's one supported under linux. In deferance to my common sense, it's the IBM PC Camera Pro. I have checked that it works, and works fairly well under windows. Under linux however, the story takes a different shape. It turns out that the linux ibmcam driver is for the model 1 or model 2 cameras. Im my case I have a model 2 revision 3.01 and not 3.0a as the ibmcam driver expected. I got in touch with the Xirlink maintainer, Dmitri to ask for advise (The IBM PC Camera is a rebadged Xirlink camera) So we've been modifying the kernel driver and testing away. We seem to be at the point that a data stream is coming in from the camera so it's possible to read the dataflow, just that xawtv which I'm using is brain dead and buggy. Need to find a better tool to read the images with. This one looks like it's going to be a battle to fix.

I notice that NC seems to have one outstanding natural feature.
Trees.
Now I may be a bit cynical about this, however, when I was driving around, I did notice that there seem to be quite a few new apartment complexes being built in the area in the forested areas. There seems to be quite a number of slash and burn operations in the forested areas. I wonder if they ever follow the idea of replanting trees somewhere else. I watched some local council TV the previous night and noticed that planning permission seems to be very strictly controlled. Though some of the proposals for various schemes seemed quite dubious to me. I'm sure they know what they are doing...

Went off in the afternoon to Capitol ford as they rang to tell me the financing went through (Hurragh!). Got there and proceeded to go browsing the various models kicking around. I didn't go overboard with the options and althought there were none that had sunroofs, I was assured that one could be added later. I'm not fond of the US brear indication grouping. I prefer the clear/amber/red indicators, I dislike an indicator being a brake light as well. I might be possible to have that changed. We'll see. After taxes etc the whole deal costs $16,075. Insurance... well liability insurance cost me $214 for 6 months unfortunately, as the car is financed, I have to get full insurance... catch 22, you need a NC drivers licence and a car serial number for to get full insurance,... DOH!... someone shoot the stupid moron's in goverment.

Well, the long and short is that need to get the NC drivers licence ASAP. In the meantime, the dealership is going to provide me with dealer tags while that gets sortted out. Now I need to learn the DMC driving laws. Someone need to thump them for silly things like making statistics a part of the driving test. WHO CARES??? The should be emphisising safe (defensive) driving rather than litigation and statistics,.. Oh well, I can't change that beyond lobbying later on, so I've printed out the online DMC guides. Looks like I'll be revising this weekend. From what I can gather they don't even bother with a practical driving test here eaither except when they feel it might be waranted. I feel so safe knowing that the driving population of NC has never actually physically proven they can drive sensibly to a goverment official standard.

I need to call up Hertz in the morning and let them know I'll have to extend the hire car lease till monday.... Damn,...