Keeping These Tickets
I'm sure 98% of the bloggers who care about the Red Sox have posted something about Saturday night's game, so I'll just say it was a heck of a night, I've never seen the fans at Fenway park cheer quite so loudly for quite so long, and I'm glad Justin decided to overpay for a ticket so he could be there.
Oh, and it's a good thing Joanna and I still have the tickets, so we'll have some proof that we were there to see an actual no hitter.
No Really, This Time For Sure!
After the roller coaster ride we went through with the last house we made an offer on Joanna and I were a bit more careful this time. She started bringing a flashlight to houses we were looking at, and we spent a lot of time looking at the deep dark corners of the basement and other similar locations that our home inspector had seemed to enjoy pointing out problems. Fortunately, this payed off, and the house we decided on had far less trouble with the inspection than the first one did. I'm not saying it was perfect, but lets just say Mike was orders of magnitude more positive in his report with this house than he was with the other.
So yes, this means we've found a house and we're through the inspection process completely. Paperwork has been signed and we'll be moving in on November 1st.
We decided on a lease to own agreement, which means that we put a small percentage of the purchase price down as a deposit, and then lease the house for a year with a percentage of our monthly rent going towards the eventual down payment. At the end of the year we decide if we want to buy or not. If we do buy we get the house at the price we agreed on now, and we've got the added bonus of having already lived there so we know what we're getting into. If we don't buy then we only walk away from a few thousand dollars worth of down payment, which is a nice option to have in the event that the housing market nose dives or we end up hating the place for one reason or another.
Some details on the house. It's in Dedham near the West Roxbury line. That means we're close to Joanna's office, near commuter rail lines to get into Boston if either of us ever needs to do that for work, about half an hour from Joanna's parents and about an hour from mine. The house itself is a 3 bedroom 2.5 bath colonial that was almost totally rebuilt 9 years ago (meaning it was torn down and a new second floor and a completely remodeled first floor was put on top of an existing foundation). The kitchen is awesome, the living room and dining room have these great cathedral ceilings, there's a wrap around farmer's porch in the front and a nice deck off the back overlooking a reasonably large back yard. Upstairs there's a master suite with a loft overlooking it (a spiral staircase provides access) and an office off of the loft.
I'll post some more pictures once we're there. There are some more from the listing, but honestly they don't give you a good idea of what the place is really like, as most of them are designed to show off individual features, not the whole place.
Anyway, we're extremely excited about the whole thing and just can't wait to move in. The house seems perfect for us, and now we're counting the days until November 1st...
Let the Procrastination Planning Begin!
So, I've already told a few people, and it's not like it should be a really huge surprise to anyone (come on people, we've spent the past few months looking at houses, you do the math), but for the benefit of those of you I haven't actually spoken to over the past few days, this weekend Joanna and I decided to get married.
Well, that's really not entirely accurate. We decided we were eventually going to get married a while back. This weekend we actually started buckling down and start the mechanics of the whole thing, setting dates, talking about venues, ranking our friends and family in order of who's the most likely to give us the best gifts, allowing Joanna's elderly relatives to breathe a little easier about the fact that we're moving in together, etc.
Anyway, the event itself will be sometime in late March or early April, somewhere in the Boston area. We're thinking a reasonably small guest list (which starts to sound way less small once you take into account that just the bare minimum required family members already brings you to 30 people, and that doesn't even count our friends), and we're going to make a concerted effort to NOT turn into one of those couples whose life becomes completely and totally centered around planning what is in the end after all just a fairly large party.
Now I just have to get used to the idea of referring to Joanna as my fiance instead of my girlfriend. I suppose I'll get used to that just in time to start getting used to the idea of referring to her as my wife ;-)
Yeah, They Really Have No Clue.
Ever wonder why the story about what kinds of food you're supposed to eat in order to have a healthy diet changes all the time? Why the stuff that you were supposed to eat 5 years ago turns out to be bad and the stuff you were supposed to avoid last year turns out to actually reduce the chances of some new disease? It's because the kind of studies that determine that sort of thing are pretty much always fatally flawed.
Want to know why? Here's a fantastic article in the New York Times that explains the problems. It uses hormone-replacement therapy as its core example, but it's really the same thing, as the studies used to tell you that eating more of food X causes disease Y are subject to all the same sorts of problems as the one that tells you that HRT is a good idea.
The article's really long, but it's worth reading all the way through. Just think of it as a condensed version of the kind of conversation I have with Joanna whenever one of these studies comes across her desk at work ;-)
Sounds Familiar...
Great article in today's Globe about what happens when really dedicated fans watch a Red Sox game:
Yeah, that's pretty much what it's like at our house. At least when the channel hasn't been preemptively changed because of impending doom. Check out the rest of the article, it's pretty damn amusing.Sometimes, when she's watching the Red Sox, Elena Tate said, she feels "like I'm going to die." She'll get dizzy. Her palms will sweat. She'll hold her breath. "It's a lot of physiological and psychological stress," she said. "Sometimes, I feel like I can't stand it."
Brief Period Of Unemployment
A lot of you probably already heard this one way or another, but I figure I should blog about it for the people who I haven't seen in person over the last couple of weeks.
Yesterday was my last day working for Joost. Tomorrow I'm flying out to California and Monday morning I'll start my new job at Google. Don't worry, I'll only be in California for two weeks, then I'll be working from the Google office in Cambridge.
Just to be clear, I left Joost on the best of terms. I fully enjoyed my time with the company, I met some great people, learned a lot, and got to work on some awesome things, a number of which have not yet seen the light of day but trust me, they're very cool. I expect nothing but great things from the company going forward, and I wish my former coworkers nothing but the best of luck.
If things were so peachy why did I jump ship for Google? Well, the primary reason was simply one of work environment. I've been working from home for a while now, and largely because of the way my living situation has changed over the past year it had become clear that I wasn't going to be able to do it forever. Working from home when you are living with a couple of roommates who are in and out fairly regularly is one thing. Doing it when you're living with a fiancee who's gone all day is rather different. Human interaction (on a face-to-face basis, not just online) is important, and I could see that sooner or later the need to actually hang out with other engineers on a daily basis was going to be a problem.
Yes, it turns out that actually having an office to go to can be a big benefit. I never thought I'd say it, but I'm actually looking forward to having a commute again. We'll see how well that holds up after I've actually had my first week or two riding the commuter rail in to South Station, followed up by a short T ride out to Kendall Square...
So, that's the position I was in when I heard from a Google recruiter, and I figured I might as well investigate the possibility. If I was going to be in a position where sometime in the next 6-12 months I'd be looking for a job with a company that had a local office I might as well take advantage of the fact that a really great company with a local office was actually knocking on my door. A few months later everything has worked its way through the Google hiring process and here we are.
It was a very difficult decision to make, and I suspect I won't know for at least a year or so if it was the right one, but with all the options in front of me taking the job at Google seemed like the best choice for me right now.
And yes, for the thousandth time, I'm sure a picture of me in the Noogler beanie will be making the rounds sooner or later, as Joanna says I'm not allowed to spend two weeks out in Mountain View unless she gets to see one.
Long Time, No Blog
So, it's been about a month since my last post here, and man has it been busy. The first month at any new job is a big adjustment, and Google, if anything, has been even more so than other companies I've worked at.
In addition to working at a new company I'm also making the transition from a job where I worked from home to one where I work in an office, one which brings with it a non-trivial commute. This is, needless to say, a bit of a change. The commute is taking some getting used to, but so far so good. I'm actually enjoying taking the train in to Cambridge every day, I mean sure it sucks to have to get out of bed way earlier than I used to, but it also means I've got a chunk of time at the beginning and end of every day to sit there, zone out, read a book, etc. I'm working my way through the Baroque Cycle again at the moment, and it's nice to get a chance to read other than when I end up sitting on a plane for a few hours.
On top of all of this there's the holidays. This is the first December that Joanna and I are really spending as a couple (well, technically there was last year, but we'd only been dating for a month or so at the time, so it's not really the same thing). This means spending a bunch of time driving back and forth between our house, her parents house and my parents house, but in the end it was worth it. Spending the holidays with both of our families was a lot of fun, even if it did leave us pretty exhausted.
Anyway, the holidays are coming to a close today and tomorrow, and then we'll be back into full fledged wedding planning. We decided to take the holidays off, which was great but now there's the ever present feeling of being behind schedule. I mean we're not, but that doesn't mean it doesn't feel that way ;-)
Ok, now we should be up to date. Hopefully I'll get into the habit of keeping things a little more up to date in the future, but who knows how well that's going to work...
A Furry Visitor
Joanna's parents are out of town this week, so we're dogsitting.
It has become somewhat clear that our house is not well equipped for a dog. There are far too many things at mouth level, so Sierra keeps ending up chewing on things that really shouldn't be chewed on. It's not her fault though, I mean she is a dog, and she at least makes up for it by being really cute.
Particularly amusing is when she stands over the vents in the floor looking down into the heating system. She seems convinced that there's something interesting down there, and if she looks hard enough she'll find a way in. Similarly she is very very interested in finding a way up into the loft above our bedroom that doesn't involve the not-available-to-dogs spiral staircase. There isn't actually another way up, but that hasn't kept her from devoting some serious time to the problem, when she hasn't been occupied with sniffing every square inch of the house.
Well, That Was Different...
So, I just bought tickets to a San Diego Padres game, since Joanna and I are going to be out in San Diego in April for our honeymoon, and it turns out the team will be in town.
As a Red Sox fan who's been frantically trying to buy whatever tickets were available over the past few years, can I just say that this was a totally different experience. I mean, tickets went on sale today, and I was actually able to buy them! Field box seats, third base line, right up close, and actually paying face value, this is a bit of a change of pace for me. I know in theory that there are places where it's actually possible to buy tickets for a baseball game without having to take out a second mortgage or sell your first born child, but every time I actually encounter it I'm completely blown away.
Anyway, since we're saving for the down payment on the house it's looking like we won't be getting many chances to see the Red Sox this year, so at least we'll be getting some in person baseball in, even if it's the Padres versus the Rockies.
Email Migration
I'm in the process of switching my main email setup over to Google Apps for Domains, which means there are currently some DNS changes making their way through the internet. So if you have trouble getting in touch with me via email over the next day or so that's probably why.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
