Sarah's doing her phlebotomy externship at San Francisco General Hospital on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and needs to leave home fairly early to get there by 9am. As a result, I've been walking to work those mornings.

I remembered to record a track this morning:

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It's certainly an improvement on the old commute. It's a shame there's a slight back-track involved.

I'll have to try rollerblading in another time.

The kitchen renovations are slooowly progressing. Running away to New York for a week certainly helped.

The cabinets arrived on Monday, and our contractor started installation on Wednesday. Templating for the counter tops is supposed to happen on Monday, and then it apparently takes a couple of weeks for the stone to get cut to size. So much for this whole thing only taking a couple of weeks :-(

I expect the overhead cabinets can be installed once the templating is done (that's something I need to check with the contractor today).

It's very exciting to see the kitchen start to take shape. I'm dying to be able to actually use it.

Photos of the progress so far are here

Sarah got a call from the contractor on the weekend, saying he wanted to make a start on the kitchen demolition on Wednesday. So we've moved everything from the kitchen into the living room (fridge and stove included), and they started work today.

Boy, did they start!

It's all gone already. All of the cabinets, and the existing lighting, and the fan.

Here's how it looked last night:

Unfortunately there's no working lights any more, so I couldn't take photos of how things look tonight. I'll have to try and get some in the morning before the contractor gets here.

It's sounding like it's going to take longer than one and a half weeks, so we're going to be eating out for a while (or cooking with the microwave in the living room). Conveniently (depending on how you want to look at it given the temperature there) I have a work trip to New York next week, and Sarah's going to come along for a few days as well, so that'll help kill some time.

I think our next immediate need is to decide on what colour to paint the walls. Some light shade of green is a current contender.

I was rather shocked and dismayed to discover via Facebook this morning that there'd been a fatal stabbing at my former school, Saint Patrick's College at Shorncliffe.

The details are a bit sketchy still, so I can't say who the instigator of the attack was, but a Year 8 student is dead, and a Year 9 student was injured and is charged with murder.

There was a problem with bullying when I was a student there, and also when my little brother was there, so it wouldn't surprise me if there was still a problem today.

Very sad. This kind of thing doesn't usually happen in Australia.

Sarah got a piece of mail today from USQ, with a very ominous "Do Not Bend" on it.

It turns out because she averaged a 6.5 GPA in semester 2, she'd qualified for a special Dean's Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement, and will get a mention on the University's website and in a bunch of newspapers.

I'm really proud of her.

Unfortunately, she had to withdraw from semester 3 (the Summer semester) study because all of the baby's brain stuff came up right towards the end of semester, and that on top of moving and trying to renovate was just too much for her.

She's intending to take Semester 1 off, because the baby's due right around exam time, and then resuming study in Semester 2.

In buying a place and moving, we've left the home we've been in for just over 4 years. Central Park Apartments was a wonderful community for us, and we made many wonderful friends there. At the peak of awesome, we knew really well the occupants of 4 out of the 7 other apartments in our building, as well as numerous others throughout the complex.

The company running the place ran it really well. Everything was well maintained. I wouldn't recommend one of the single-level apartments, as the inter-floor sound insulation was pretty terrible, but the townhomes were great (albeit the kitchens were a bit small). We were in a Greenwich floorplan.

The other big plus for me was that it had data cabling.

We'll miss all of our friends there, but thankfully they're not very far away.

We finished off moving everything from the old place last weekend. Our new home number can be determined by adding 59115 to the old one (or calling the old one in the next 60 days).

The great unpacking is continuing. We're reluctant to unpack much in the kitchen because it's all going to have to come back out again in a couple of weeks.

The cats have settled in well. Lily is still spending most of her time under the bed, but she comes out to explore from time to time.

We had a bunch of fun with various bits of cable. I had some CAT-6 cabling installed throughout, and also some new RG-6 cabling was installed at the same time. The contractor ran a new line into our place and also a line to the patch panel he installed for the phone.

When Comcast came out to activate our cable TV service, the poor guy had all sorts of problems, until I realised there was an air gap between the line coming into the condo and the cables outside. Then the next problem was my contractor had run the new line out to the wrong location. The bunch of cables where he ran the line to was some old out of commission stuff. The Comcast guy was really great. We located where the current cable came in (via the attic) and he spliced that into the new internal cabling, and the net outcome was close to what was supposed to have happened in the first place. The funniest thing was the Comcast cable guy left in such a rush because he ran over time on the job, that he left the cable cabinet wide open, including the box with all of the building's cable connections. If I new how to crimp RG-6, and was feeling lucky, I could remove the filter that's restricting the channels we receive.

The next fun was getting the phone line sorted out. Again, my contractor had run a new CAT-6 line to the patch panel for the purposes of giving me a few jacks in the one place, so I could plug in my DSL modem, and a line into my Asterisk box. The only problem was he wasn't sure which pair was the phone line (and the phone wasn't active at the time) so there was an air gap between the end of the CAT-6 and the phone line. AT&T came out and sorted that out. I suspect the AT&T guy also left in a hurry, because he left a tone generator jumpered into the phone line.

Once the phone was working we had to wait a couple of days for the DSL service to get moved to the new number. It turns out that I got new static IP addresses with the move, so it wasn't just a case of plugging everything back in and it working, unfortunately.

But that's all behind us now. We're fully here, online again, and settling in. I think this weekend we'll bang in some picture hooks and hang up our paintings, and try to unpack a few more boxes.

Moving today went as about as well as you could possibly ask for. The movers arrived at a few minutes to 9, had most of the place packed up within 30 minutes, and I think we headed to the new place in a little over an hour.

Mad props to Handle With Care Moving. The guys were really great.

The rain also held off for the duration, thankfully.

There's just dregs left at the old place, oh and the entire kitchen. I think we're both subconsciously dreading (and therefore avoiding) moving the kitchen stuff, because we really don't want to unpack at the new place, because the kitchen is going to get totally destroyed in hopefully a couple of weeks time.

I'm finding wall space to be a bit of a premium at the new place. We're trying to keep the second bedroom as usable as a bedroom as possible, while primarily using it as a study, so that when we have house guests, we can throw some sort of bed down in that room and not have it all become ridiculously cluttered. When you've got desks all against one wall, a built-in wardrobe against another wall, and a full length sliding door on the other wall, that doesn't leave too many options for a bookshelf and retaining space for a bed. I think we might have to avail ourselves of some more elfa shelving and ditch the Ikea bookshelf we currently have.

On the other hand, our bedroom is looking pretty good. For the first time in ages, it's just going to be a bedroom. No desks, no filing, no storage. The wardrobe has less space than our old place, so we're having to be pretty ruthless with clothing. Oh, and the bathroom storage: way less. Not sure how we're going to sort that one out at the moment.

The phone and cable TV should get hooked up tomorrow, and then I'll get the DSL moved over, so hopefully by Wednesday, we'll have Internet connectivity.

We brought the cats over this afternoon. They're still confined to our bedroom at the moment until they calm down a bit.

We have until next Sunday to officially be out of the old place.

Yesterday we went back to Stanford for another ultrasound and a fetal MRI.

We had pretty much the same gang doing the ultrasound as two weeks ago, so that was a nice bit of continuity. A paediatric radiologist came in at the end to take a look. She was the most confident of anyone that everything was going to be okay. She thought she could see something resembling the cavum septum pellucidum on the ultrasound. I think the ultrasound report said it was an "unusual shape" or something like that.

After that, we got packed off for the fetal MRI. There was a bit of a wait, as there's only one MRI machine for the children's hospital, and the studies tend to take 30 to 45 minutes, but we eventually got in.

I got to sit in the room with Sarah while they did the MRI. I was hoping to be able to sit in the control room instead, so I could look over their shoulder and see how it was all done. We both got earplugs because the machine is pretty noisy. It's not the hammering sound that they seem to go for on TV, it's more various different pitches of a horn.

The radiologist told us she'd probably read the MRI later that night, as there'd be a bit of a backlog with the long weekend, and that we'd get a call today.

Sarah got impatient this afternoon and called her obstetrician, and he called her back shortly afterwards saying he'd spoken to the radiologist and everything was fine. Exact specifics are not known at this time, but we'll be quizzing the obstetrician at our next appointment in a couple of weeks.

Needless to say, we're both extremely relieved that everything is okay, and can scrub one thing off the list of things to have to worry about at the moment. Now we can just concentrate on trying to move house this weekend.

We've got a walk-in wardrobe in the master bedroom of our new place, and the existing fittings were pretty crappy, so as part of the repaint, I ripped out the old stuff, and we bought some new elfa stuff from The Container Store.

We did the initial design a couple of weekends ago, and went back today to actually buy the stuff.

The whole process is pretty slick. You rock up with your measurements of the space, and a designer fiddles around with some special CAD software and does up a design for you, and that spits out a pick list of all of the bits you need, as well as what needs to be cut to custom lengths. A couple of hours later, you come back, and they wheel out a cart load of bits and pieces, you put it in your car and head home to put it all together.

I was initially a bit worried about the assembly, but it's even easier than IKEA. You get tailored instructions for your design, and the only point at which it anchors to the wall is at the top, and then everything hangs from there, so it's pretty hard to screw it up, and it's all adjustable. Added bonus: in an earthquake, it moves with the tremors instead of toppling over or ripping itself out of the wall.

I'm very impressed by the product, and absolutely love the result. It only took us a couple of hours tonight to slap everything together.

We listen pretty much exclusively to NPR in the car these days, and often when we're pottering around on the weekend, we catch A Prairie Home Companion. It's a light-hearted radio show, which makes us laugh.

When we learned that it was coming to town, we lashed out on some tickets. We went to the recording of today's episode at the War Memorial Opera House.

We had seats towards the back of the balcony on the fourth floor. The opera house is a beautiful building. The seating is incredibly steep. The stage was miles away, I wish I'd brought binoculars. The opera house normally holds 3200, but because there was no orchestra they could put in some extra seats. It was a full house.

It was cool to get to see how the show is put together, and we had an entertaining time.

We're not huge users of Caltrain, because frankly, it sucks. It's way slower than driving to San Francisco, and by the time you've paid for two return tickets, you might as well have driven and paid for parking.

That said, we do use it from time to time. One of the things I noticed when we first moved over here was this intriguing box on a pole, to the side of the normal ticket vending machine. It looked all battered and faded, kind of like a deprecated form of ticketing that had been phased out years ago. Except it looked too high-tech to be phased out.

Fast forward to four years later, and we're using Caltrain to get back from SFO after returning from Atlanta for Christmas, and there's this "Don't forget to tag off" TransLink poster inside the carriage. I'm now officially intrigued.

I did some browsing of their website on the journey home. How could this be? Hong Kong's MTR has the Octopus Card. London's Tube has the Oyster Card, and the Bay Area has TransLink? Why the hell isn't this thing being pimped out more? It's awesome! I mentioned it to a co-worker the other day, who's been in the Bay Area for 7 years, and he'd never heard of it.

So I signed up for it for myself and Sarah, and two cards promptly arrived. If you sign up with an autoload of $20 or more, there's no cost for cards at all.

So from now on, whenever we need to ride Caltrain (or BART or Muni, which are the public transport networks we're ever likely to use) we can just wave these cards at something and never have to worry about a ticket ever again. It's awesome. Apparently VTA is coming on board with it later this year, so that'll round things out nicely.

It sounds like it's been an epic implementation, starting back in 1999, and still rolling out ten years later. Better late than never.

The added bonus will be for our visitors. When they come, we can just give them these cards, and they won't have to deal with BART's utterly confusing (for casual riders) fare system.

One of my favourite things about Hong Kong was the MTR and the Octopus Card. Now we just need awesome mass transit for the Bay Area. Somehow, I think that's going to take even longer than TransLink.

I was driving home from a late night at work recently, and I was almost home, when the car behind me lit up like a Christmas tree.

My immediate reaction was, "Oh crap, I'm tired and I wasn't paying attention to my speed". So I pulled over.

To my relief, it wasn't my speed that was the problem, my left-hand tail light was out. The officer was very nice about the whole thing, but he gave me a fix-it ticket.

He told me I had until I think some time in February to fix the problem, then I had to get a police officer to sign off that it had been fixed. I thought that was the end of it, and continued on my way home.

The other day, I got this official looking letter in the mail the Superior Court of California, County of Santa Clara. My initial thought was, "ha, the fools have issued me a jury summons like they did for Sarah. Can't they tell I'm an alien? Nanoo Nanoo."

So I open the letter and start scanning it. It's a courtesy notice. The first actual sentences I run into start with "Failure to respond to this notice by the due date may result in your bail being increased...". Huh? Bail? What?

It turns out that there's a bit more to the fix-it ticket story. Not only do I have to get a police officer to sign off that I've had the tail light fixed, to avoid going to court, I have to pay a $25 "dismissal fee" (also known as California is broke and needs every dollar it can get).

Today was the first day that either of us have had any time to scratch ourselves, so we trekked off to Toyota. The guy yanked off the cover inside the boot, and was poking around to show us where to change the bulb, when lo and behold, it started working again. So it was just a loose connector. Dammit.

So now I have to track down a police officer. Preferably under the cover of darkness, as we've tinted the front windows of the Prius, which is apparently cause for another fix-it ticket. Although I'm struggling to find the wording that specifically says that.

renovate

v 1: restore to a previous or better condition
  2: make brighter and prettier

remodel

v 1: do over, as of (part of) a house
  2: cast or model anew

I much prefer the term renovate to remodel. Remodelling to me feels more like tearing down internal walls and changing the actual layout of the place. But we're in America, so remodelling it is.

We've had a bit of (mostly self-inflicted) scope creep. It started with just wanting to get some Ethernet cabling installed, then we decided to get recessed canned lighting (the whole lamp thing over here drives us nuts), and then we discovered that acoustic ("popcorn") ceilings are a haven for dust mites (we're both allergic) so it made sense to get the ceilings redone while they were putting the lights in. We're also getting the light switches replaced, and new childproof power outlets. We also got the electrical panel upgraded.

Removing popcorn ceilings is somewhat hilarious. They put down plastic everywhere, then have at it with a garden hose, and then it just scrapes off. The ceilings they've completely finished already look a million bucks, so we're very happy with the decision to do that. The Ethernet cabling installation caused a lot of wall carnage, so we're going to get the walls repainted as well.

Then we can get the carpets cleaned and stain proofed, and then we can start thinking about trying to move some non-essential stuff in. Hopefully it'll all be done by next weekend.

The kitchen cabinets have a six week lead time, so the kitchen remodelling will have to be done while we're living there.

Unfortunately some unexpectedly time demanding stuff has come up at work, right in the middle of this, so Sarah's had to do the bulk of the running around to sort out contractors for all of the work, and I've been stuck at work until all hours, 7 days a week. To cap it off, I've managed to come down with a cold, and feel quite crappy. NyQuil consumption is ensuing.

Sarah hit the 20 week mark on Monday, and so we had the big anatomical ultrasound. We also found out that it looks like we're having a girl. We're now trying to come up with a name.

There was also a worrying piece of news: they couldn't see the cavum septum pellucidum, while they were checking out her brain.

Apparently the cavum septum pellucidum is a particular marker they look for when they're checking everything out.

Now what the absence of the cavum septum pellucidum actually means isn't terribly clear. Apparently normally this is found along with other abnormalities, but the rest of her brain structures look fine. The nuchal translucency we had earlier in the pregnancy came back fine also.

So we got bustled off to have a chat with the genetic counsellor (during which the 4.1 earthquake happened). We got booked in for an amniocentesis for later that afternoon, as well as a fetal MRI at 22 weeks, and trundled off home.

To cap things off, when we were trying to park back at the hospital for the 2pm appointment, I managed to scrape the car up against one of the poles in the car park. (The lower level parking is notoriously tight). Note to self: always use the free valet parking service from now on.

Sarah had some second thoughts about the amniocentesis, as it does carry with it some risk of miscarriage, and after chatting with with a couple of the obstetricians, we elected not to do it. The fetal MRI should definitively determine if the cavum septum pellucidum is absent, and then we can talk to a paediatric neurologist about what the ramifications of that might be.

One of the reasons they wanted to do an amniocentesis now, rather than after the fetal MRI, is the amniocentesis itself takes a couple of weeks for the results to come back, and that would bring us up to the 24 week mark. Apparently if we wanted to terminate the pregnancy, once it was at 24 weeks, we'd have to go to LA to do it.

Whilst I consider myself an atheist these days, I was raised a Catholic, and although I like to think of myself as pro-choice, I still have a lot of problems with abortion, so I don't think I'd be comfortable terminating unless it could be shown with reasonable certainty that our baby was going to be in a really bad way. Based on how the rest of the brain looked, and the nuchal translucency results, and the fact that the amniocentesis would only identify chromosomal and not genetic neurological disorders, I don't think we'll be aborting.

From my limited research, it sounds like the cavum septum pellucidum disappears at about 3 months after birth anyway, so looking at it one way, you could say our baby's brain is developing faster. Other research has indicated a correlation with optic nerve development issues, so I don't know if that means she might be blind. We really need to chat with a paediatric neurologist. But hopefully the fetal MRI will find it, and this will turn out to be nothing.

An anxious two weeks will now follow.

There was a minor hiccup yesterday. Our mortgage broker called me up towards the end of the day in a flap because something had gone wrong on the seller's side of things, and their bank hadn't accepted the transaction or something. I still don't know the full story. Something about them missing a mortgage payment possibly.

Anyway, she was able to arrange for funding and closing today, instead of funding yesterday and closing today, so the outcome was still the same.

Now the real fun starts.

The first thing I did tonight was program the garage door opener into the Prius' HomeLink thingy built into the rear vision mirror. It's always nice to be able to use a feature, even if it's taken 4 years.

Yesterday morning we went to the title company to do all of the paperwork for the condo purchase. I'm still not entirely clear on the whole process, but basically we signed a ton of disclosures and the loan documents, and the whole lot got notarised.

I found the thumbprint requirement rather amusing.

So the loan should fund today, and the title change will register with the county on Wednesday, and by tomorrow afternoon, we should have the keys.

We then had to do a walk through to sign off that the property hadn't turned into a pumpkin since we put the offer in. It was only the second time I've been able to see the place, so it was good to take another look. Sarah's been doing lots of running around to organise quotes for the kitchen renovation and measure the windows for curtains, so she's seen it many more times.

There's going to be a few little odd jobs that need doing around the place. There's a few lights that aren't working (presumably just bulb replacements. There's an outside cupboard that's falling apart. There's a little water feature that I think we'll just get rid of, as the pump is a waste of electricity and it'll just breed mosquitoes otherwise. It's going to be home.

Well that all happened rather quickly.

This morning, we met with our agent to go through all of the offer paperwork, at the bright and early time of 7:30am after (for me at least) a bad night's sleep staring at the ceiling.

It wasn't that bad. A lot of disclosures, a lot of initialling and signing. Here's what the stack of paperwork looked like:

The existing building reports didn't come back with any red flags. There's a little bit (around $1,000) of termite damage. We put in the contract that the sellers have to fix that. The hot water tank needs to be strapped to the wall to be in earthquake compliance. We put that in the contract too.

A couple of hours later, we'd got all of the paperwork out of the way, and Nick said he'd present the offer to the seller's agent at 3pm.

I got a phone call at about 5pm from Nick saying that they'd accepted the offer, with all of our conditions, so we're all ready to go for closing on the 23rd.

Apparently the reason the sellers are so motivated is because they borrowed against the equity in this condo to buy a house, so they're eager to close the deal. We managed to negotiate the price down slightly to $519,000 (anything lower would have been a short sale for them, and we already know all about what that can entail). Even for that price, they've made a tidy profit on the $180,000 they paid 14 years ago.

So this is working out really well, timing-wise. We'll close on the 23rd, go visit Chris, Bri and Clara in Atlanta for Christmas, and then have all of January to do any work on the place before our current lease expires.

Just got to wait for the finance approvals and an international money transfer now. I'm slightly miffed that I booked it yesterday at 0.90 cents, and the AUD has risen to 0.92 cents today.

So we pretty much gave up on the condemned house. The more we hear about it, the worse it looks. Our agent got some paperwork on the red-tagging today. Apparently the large room out the front used to be a car port, and enclosing that was done without a permit. There's also a standalone room out the back that has had a bathroom added without a permit. Apparently the owner is getting fined $2,500 a day by the city until it's either brought into compliance or reverted. No idea if that's actually being paid, or who's responsibility it would become in the event of a sale, so we'll just quietly back away from that whole mess and pretend it never happened.

Sarah was poking around Redfin again last night and found this property, for less than what the condemned house was going for (granted, this is a condo, not a house).

We got our agent to show it to us today, and we really liked the look of it, so we're going to put an offer in on it and see what comes of it.

We have to spend about three hours with our agent tomorrow morning going through paperwork. Wee.

It certainly seems like a good time to be buying. Interest rates are low, the AUD is high against the USD, and prices are down.

Yesterday, we managed to inspect the property that was for sale that we'd discovered.

I think you could best describe it as a renovator's delight that's had a bit of work done on it. The kitchen is pretty new. The bathrooms are pretty good. There's some cracking around the place, and the floating floor looks like it's a bit of a dodgy job.

That said, it definitely had potential, and for the asking price, assuming it wasn't structurally unsound, was something we could see ourselves doing up and flipping when we finally move back to Australia.

So our agent told us we needed to get pre-approved for finance as the next step, and hooked us up with a mortgage broker, who was able to see us today.

She said that pre-approval would be no problem, and we got what seemed to be a ridiculously good rate for a 5 year adjustable rate mortgage.

Our agent called us back tonight and told us that there was another offer on the table for less than the asking price, and that the property had been red-tagged. It would appear that none of the modifications had permits.

He's going to check with the city tomorrow to find out exactly what the nature of the red-tagging is all about, and what would be involved to get the property un-red-tagged, but I've got that feeling that it's going to be better to just walk away from it at this stage.

So that's how we've spent our weekend. Speculating on real estate.

Our lease runs out at the end of January, and we're thinking about moving to a bigger place.

In the four years we've been here (yeah, we just crossed the four year mark the other day) we've often thought about trying to buy as well. We go through these phases where we really feel like buying, then we run the numbers and run screaming back to the warm bosom of renting.

A couple of months ago we had the most serious foray into buying. We'd just checked out the models for Mondrian and we really liked the floorplan for Bleu, and found the price to be the least breathtaking of anything we'd looked at in the Bay Area.

I got as far as talking to mortgage brokers and running the numbers, and the things that killed it for us were the property taxes and homeowners association fees. The monthly repayments would have been doable, but it'd have really been a ball and chain. We're over here to see the country as much as anything else, and if the mortgage is going to be a significant impedance on our ability to travel, then there isn't really any point in doing it.

So we sadly passed up on Mondrian.

The three bedroom townhouses in our current complex are going for around the $2500 a month mark, which is a pretty serious jump on what we're paying now for our two bedroom one, so Sarah's been scouring Craigslist for anything better.

She found a 2 bedroom plus loft condo being rented privately in Mountain View, which we took at look at on Wednesday. The immediately downsides are it's older (the kitchen and bathroom are really a bit dated) and has no data cabling (this is something I've really loved about our current place) and no microwave oven included. The upsides are it's significantly bigger (about 500 square feet larger), the kitchen has heaps of cupboards, it has a washer and dryer, a lock-up garage, a small, fairly private yard (the rent includes a gardener), and it has what looks like a communal garden bed (the thing that really caught my eye were the compost bins).

So I think overall, as long as we can live with the kitchen and bathroom, it's going to be an improvement on where we are now. The windows are all double glazed, so it should be fairly well insulated. It's got a gas furnace and gas hot water, and I think the landlord pays for the water, so I think the utilities would at best come out the same as what we're paying here.

We've decided to put an application in for it and see what happens. The landlord is living overseas, so we're dealing with a real estate agent for the letting. Apparently we'd be paying the rent via PayPal or something. He's got a home warranty arrangement for maintenance, which sounds like it'll be pretty good.

Meanwhile, Sarah was scouring Redfin and found a house nearby that is for sale (a short sale), which is pretty reasonably priced. We've called up a real estate agent, and we're taking a look at it tomorrow, just because we can.

It's looking all good, so we're game to tell the world: Sarah is 13 weeks pregnant!

She had the nuchal translucency ultrasound today (which, due to the tight timing required for it, I was totally bummed to be unable to attend). The scan came back all clear, which is an enormous relief.

In the nausea department, poor Sarah has had a much worse time than with the first pregnancy. Particularly on the flights to and from Australia. This makes me think it's going to be a girl (just because the nausea characteristics are totally different from the first time around).

It's amazing how fast they grow in just a few weeks.

Here's the ultrasound from 10 weeks:

And here's the ultrasound from 13 weeks:

Well, here I am, sitting in a chair at 10,000 feet (or whatever the altitude currently is), using WiFi. Writing a blog post. And we still don't have flying cars.

I'm on my way to Dallas for the Ubuntu Developer Summit for the 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) release. Being an LTS release, this is of particular interest for what I do at work.

Sarah's still in Australia (well she's actually on a flight to LAX as I write), so I took the VTA light rail + shuttle to the airport. I must say, aside from not being particularly speedy, it was a pleasant experience. I've finally cracked open The Audacity of Hope, which I received for Christmas or my birthday last year.

I'm really loving the renovated San Jose airport. Now that all of the check-in counters have moved downstairs, they've about quadrupled the space the TSA has, which makes getting through security a much more pleasant experience.

Add to that, the nice lady in the Admiral's Club kindly reseating me in an exit row, all by myself, and this is a pretty sweet trip so far.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk

Well, she didn't make it. The diuretic the vet put her on to reduce the fluid around her heart and lungs was also causing kidney failure, so her condition wasn't treatable. She was euthanised some time today. Our neighbour Carol was able to be there with her.

It really sucks that we weren't able to be there. It's still a real shock how she was a perfectly healthy cat last Friday, and now she's dead.

Sarah's going to really miss her, as she was exceptionally got at being attuned to her (Sarah's) moods. Whenever Sarah was sick or just down, Stumpy would curl up with her.

I'd had bad feelings about this trip, mainly because it was so short. I didn't expect this to happen though...

Back story:

Smudge has always been fairly wary of Stumpy, for some unknown reason (perhaps her boisterousness?) It came to a head when we did our road trip to Atlanta. We got back home, and Smudge had pooped in all the wrong places, and was hissing and growling at Stumpy whenever Stumpy looked at her the wrong way.

The cat sitter plead ignorance, but something must have happened while we were away. Smudge has been pretty hopeless around Stumpy ever since.

One theory was that maybe Stumpy (or Smudge) had some health problem, so we had them both checked out and no red flags were raised. The other option was to put Smudge on Prozac for a while to see if she settled down. I didn't like the idea of drugging her, so we've opted to separate them for a while. Smudge is in our bedroom and Stumpy and Lily have the rest of the house. Smudge and Stumpy only have supervised time together. We've tried a bit of play therapy as time permits, but it hasn't made much of a difference.

So fast forwarding to now, and we didn't want to leave Smudge in our bedroom all by herself for the week, so we thought we'd put Stumpy in a cat boarding place, since we figured she could handle it, and let Smudge and Lily have the run of the house. Our neighbour Carol was going to check in on Smudge and Lily. All good.

I think it was yesterday (my brain is not dealing with the various timezones plus jet lag) Sarah got an email from Carol saying that the cat boarding place had called her because Stumpy hadn't been eating, and was all lethargic. Carol went and brought her home, and she didn't do much better at home, she was just lying around, so she took her to our vet.

She was having breathing problems, and generally showing symptoms of congestive heart failure! Her blood work was otherwise okay. The vet said they couldn't do much and needed to send her to a specialist vet at Campbell, where they could do an ultrasound on her heart. This is where she currently is, in an oxygen tent on diuretics for fluid around the heart/lungs.

The prognosis isn't very good at all. She managed to make it through the night, but I don't know if she's going to make it until I can get home. I've moved my flight a day earlier to Friday night, so I can get out to the vet's on Saturday. The vet was saying that even if she does make it through this, her long-term prospects aren't good. Maybe a year.

This is only a four year old cat! The vet said she has an enlarged heart, so it's some sort of congenital condition she's always had, but was probably triggered by the stress of being in the boarding place.

It's just come as a total shock to us as she's always been really healthy, and the most hyperactive of the three cats.

Sarah, being the cat lover that she is, is particularly upset, because this is "her" cat, and she feels terrible because Stumpy is all by herself. I'm really hoping Stumpy can at least hang in there until I get there. I don't want her to die alone, despite how frustrating she can be.

We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to our neighbour Carol for doing a lot of running around for us. I don't doubt for a moment that Stumpy would be dead by now if it weren't for her.

Sarah's Mum is flying her back for the scattering of her grandmother's ashes, and I figured that as this will be her third trip back this year, and she's seen my family more than I have in the last 12 months, I should come as well.

So I'm getting my first opportunity to sample V Australia's service. I must say that flying Virgin America to LAX and then transferring to V Australia to fly direct to Brisbane seems like a fairly civilised way to do it. Anything that involves Virgin America is always a delight. My only complaints so far are that the SFO-LAX flight left late, and the check in line for V Australia in LAX was ridiculously slow given it was so short.

The time of the flight is pretty good - it leaves LAX at 10:30pm, so hopefully we'll get a semi-decent amount of sleep. It gets into Brisbane at 6:30am on Sunday, so we'll have to try and imitate the living dead for the day.

I'm heading back again on Saturday, as I have to be in Dallas next week for the Ubuntu Developer Summit.

The first episode of Trauma that Sarah was an extra in aired on Monday night.

I'd seen a news story about how they were looking for extras for it with medical experience, and Sarah had just completed her Certified Nurse Assistant course. I mentioned the news story to her, and she signed up.

Ironically, for the three episodes they've called her up for so far, the closest to using her medical experience is being a patient, and if you're lucky, you'll see her ankle.

Marc was kind enough to rip out some stills from his recording of the episode.

Sarah told me a while ago that she was planning an early birthday present for me, but it was going to be a surprise.

Last night, I found out what it was: tickets to see Kylie Minogue in concert at the Fox Theatre in Oakland.

I had no idea that Kylie hadn't done a US tour before. Last night's concert was her second one ever, and was only put on by popular demand (the night before was her first ever).

I've never seen Kylie live before and it was a great show. There was a DJ on stage for about 45 minutes prior to her starting. There were awesome lasers and lights, a live band, and excellent choreography. My only complaint was that the music tended to drown out her vocals a bit, but other than that, an excellent and totally unexpected night out.

We nearly saw her when we were in Prague last year and she happened to be performing at the same time we were there, but I think this was a much better deal: a smaller venue and cheaper tickets. The general admission area was all of the standing areas on three levels. We could have elbowed our way right to the edge of the stage if we'd wanted to.

The San Francisco Chronicle has a good review of her opening night.

It feels totally surreal that 2 years ago today, we lost our baby.

The point is really driven home when we see friends kids who are of a similar age to what Joshua would be, and they're these walking (running), talking toddlers. It's hard to imagine that we too could be running around after a boy of that size by now.

Two years feels like an absolute eternity.

We're going to make a little getaway to the B&B we retreated to for Joshua's due date and just spend some quiet time together.

September used to be my favourite month of the year. Every September school holidays we'd go to a beach house that we had in the family at Palm Beach, and I'd always associate September with two weeks of sun and sand.

Now September is littered with painful memories of days when things that shouldn't have ever happened did, and days where things that should have happened didn't.

We're attempting to do a bit of a clean up and cull of accumulated crap around the house at the moment. So far we've got our bedroom looking more like a bedroom and not a junk storage room of last resort. Unfortunately we achieved that by moving all of the extraneous junk to the spare room, which now looks like a bomb hit it.

So this weekend, I've been slowly picking through the rubble, trying to decide what to keep, what to get rid of, and where to put everything.

I stumbled upon some tapes I made when I was in high school in the early '90's, when I used to tape songs off the radio. Since I don't have a cassette player any more, I spent a lot of time this afternoon making a record of the songs so I can throw the tapes out. (You could also call this procrastinating). It was a great trip down memory lane.

YouTube is great for this kind of thing.

• Don't Cry - Guns N' Roses
• Live your life be free - Belinda Carlisle
• Give it away - Red Hot Chilli Peppers
• The Fly - U2
• Cream - Prince
• International Bright Young Thing - Jesus Jones
• You Could be Mine - Guns N' Roses
• Winds of Change - Scorpions
• Toy Soldiers - Martika
• Communication - John Farnham with Danielle (Minogue)
• Dr Feelgood - Motley Crue
• Here we go - C & C Music Factory
• Something only attributed as "Megabass". I have no idea what it is without listening to it
• Sadeness Part I - Enigma
• The Last Train to Trancentral - The KLF
• Move This - Technotronic
• The Globe - Big Audio Dynamite II
• Can't stop this thing we started - Bryan Adams
• Rush - Big Audio Dynamite II
• Word of mouth - Mike and the Mechanics
• I'm too sexy - Right Said Fred
• Marvellous - The Twelfth Man
• Get ready for this - 2 Unlimited
• I think I love you - The Voice of the Beehive
• Stay with me - Shakespeare's Sister
• Let's talk about sex - Salt n Pepa
• Under Pressure - Queen
• Let's Get Rocked - Def Leppard
• One in a million - Euphoria
• Not a day goes by - Rick Price
• Coloured kisses - Martika
• Way out west - James Blundell and James Reyne
• That Word (L.O.V.E.) - The Rockmelons
• Just Kiss Me - Indecent Obsession
• To be with you - Mr Big
• Kickin' to the Undersound - Sound Unlimited Posse
• Smells like Nirvana - Weird Al Yankovic
• Pride (In the name of love) - Clivilles and Cole
• Now you're in heaven - Julian Lennon
• Nothing compares to you - Sinead O'Connor
• Spin that Wheel - Hi Tek 3
• She's got that vibe - R Kelly and the Public Announcement
• James Brown is Dead - LA Style
• Mistadobalina - Del Tha Funky Homosapien
• Twilight Zone - 2 Unlimited
• Cry - Lisa Edwards
• Jump - Kris Kross
• Skin to skin - Melissa
• Damn, I wish I was your lover - Sophie B Hawkins
• I can feel it - Radio Freedom
• Please don't go - K.W.S.
• Take a chance on me - Erasure
• My Lovin (You're Never Going to Get It) - En Vogue
• I don't care - Shakespeare's Sister
• This used to be my playground - Madonna
• Hazard - Richard Marx
• Life is a highway - Tom Cochrane
• How do you do! - Roxette
• Take This Heart - Richard Marx
• Jam - Michael Jackson
• Humpin' Around - Bobby Brown
• Magic Friend - 2 Unlimited
• Something Good - Utah Saints (special mention for the '08 version that has awesome choreography)
• My Name is Prince - Prince
• Baker Street - Undercover
• White Men Can't Jump - RIFF
• Ain't No Doubt - Jimmy Nail
• Ain't gonna eat out my heart any more - Divinyls
• Keep the Faith - Bon Jovi
• Rhythm is a a dancer - Snap
• In your room - Toni Pearen Deeper and deeper - Madonna
• 7 - Prince
• Getaway - Bobby Brown
• I will never leave you - Euphoria

We wanted to go see the latest Harry Potter movie tonight, but we got there right on screening time, and the lady in the box office was good enough to point out that it was already 80% sold, which made the odds that we'd be stuck right down the front better than we'd like (we hate sitting down the front) so we saw Funny People instead.

I'm not a huge fan of Adam Sandler movies. I think the last movie of his that I really cared for was The Wedding Singer, but I really enjoyed this movie. Maybe it was because of the strong supporting cast. Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill are very up and coming. Eric Bana must have had a ball being able to play an Australian, and he was very funny. I have to wonder how many of his Australianisms were lost on a US audience though, if my conduct at work is anything to go by.

It was good for a giggle, even if it was a bit overloaded with male genitalia jokes. It's always fun seeing movies set in California and in particular the Bay Area.

The problem with driving 4,175 kilometres in 4.5 days is everything blurs together. I need to get this written down while I can still remember anything. (Incidentally, this about the distance driving Brisbane to Perth, which is not something we'd ever have considering doing in Australia)

Mountain View, CA - Barstow, CA (Saturday night)

We got away a bit later than planned, around 5pm. As a result, we didn't quite make it to Needles as planned by the time we were ready to call it a night. We stopped in Barstow instead. This ended up for the best, as Needles isn't really anything much to phone home about. We didn't cover any territory we hadn't already covered before on previous road trips, so it was no big deal that we were driving in the dark.

Due to a miscommunication, none of Sarah's unmentionables got packed, so we had to make an emergency stop in Gilroy to go to Target. The Gilroy Garlic Festival was happening that day. I don't know where it was, relative to Target, but the smell of garlic from the Target car park was amazing.

We passed countless truckloads of garlic and apples heading in the opposite direction once we got past Gilroy.

Barstow, CA - Roswell, NM (Sunday night)

The next day, we managed to make up for lost time (partly by driving until really late) and made it to Roswell (we made the right turn at Albuquerque). We drove through a phenomenal electrical storm in New Mexico. It was right on top of us. I miss decent storms. At one point it was raining so hard, we had only a few metres visibility.

The part of Arizona we drove through was at too high an altitude for cacti, which was a shame. I love the cacti in Arizona. The mountains reminded me of Road Runner & Coyote cartoons, though. We stopped for lunch at the Roadkill Cafe in Seligman, Arizona. There was a definite cultural change here. The cafe had some hunting cable channel on the TV (I didn't even know such things existed) that was busy showing people shooting grizzly bears for sport. It was quite disturbing.

We flirted with Historic Route 66 for about as long as it took for us to get straight back onto the I-40 again. The road surface was terrible.

Roswell, NM - Oklahoma City, OK (Monday night)

We were rudely awakened the next morning at about 6:30am by someone's car alarm going off for an extended period of time. Not the way you want to start your day after a long day's driving and only a few hours of sleep.

Roswell was fun, but they weren't capitalising on the alien/UFO thing anywhere near as much as I'd have expected. We went to the International UFO Museum and Research Center. It was cool (the library was particularly comprehensive). I have to say, based on the photos they had there, that the thing that crashed really did look like a weather balloon...

Roswell had a frozen custard place, but it wasn't the same as Goodberrys/Rubees.

We left Roswell in the early afternoon, after changing plans and heading for Memphis instead of Dallas. We got as far as Oklahoma City, after dining in Amarillo, Texas (great BBQ ribs at the Texas Roadhouse).

Oklahoma City, OK - Memphis, TN (Tuesday night)

Tuesday morning we went to check out the Oklahoma City bombing memorial. We just toured the outside parts. It's a nice memorial that they have made from the site. We then walked a few blocks to check out Henry Overholser Mansion, but they'd just changed their days of operation, and weren't open unfortunately.

Memphis, TN - Atlanta, GA (Wednesday night)

We made it into Memphis by early evening. It wasn't very exciting at all, and was decidedly run down. Derelict buildings abounded. Beale Street wasn't that exciting. Not being Elvis fans, we didn't see the point in parting with $30 each to visit Graceland. Sarah was very disappointed, so we left straight away the next morning, and made it to Atlanta by 8pm that night. We stopped for lunch in Birmingham, Alabama, at Chick-Fil-A, the In-N-Out Burger of the South.

We spent Thursday and Friday in Atlanta, in the Marriott Towneplace Suites in Atlanta Northlake, where Chris and Briana were staying, along with Chris' mum, until they closed on their new house.

On Thursday we went to check out Stone Mountain, which was a conveniently short drive from where we were staying. Prior to embarking on this road trip, we'd had no idea there was another carved mountain in the US. We thought Mount Rushmore was it. The whole Stone Mountain Park was really nice. There was a glassblowing place there, and we watched a couple of glassblowing demonstrations. I've always found glassblowing to be fascinating. It was great to get an opportunity to see it being done.

There was a bit of a downpour while we were there, but after it passed, we took the cable car to the summit. It was still a bit hazy from the rain, which made the view not as good, but you could make out the skyscrapers of Atlanta to the south west.

On Friday, we went with Clara and her grandmother to the Georgia Aquarium while Chris and Bri sorted out the belated closing of the house purchase. The aquarium was absolutely awesome. It's the biggest one in the world. Clara had an absolute ball.

On Saturday morning we flew out to Sacramento via Phoenix, for our next engagement, the first birthday party of Zack Harvett with some of our other former neighbours from Building 4.

On Sunday we took the Capitol Corridor train back to the Bay Area, followed by the VTA Light Rail back to Mountain View. The train ride was pretty good. All it needs is WiFi. The route around the bottom of the bay is interesting. There's the train track, and there's marshlands on either side. You do get to go right alongside the salt evaporation ponds that you see from the air and on satellite imagery of the bay.

This was a good trip. We'd never planned on doing a west-east road trip, so it was good to get a few more states under our belt. I've now visited 15 states in some form more than just passing through the airport.

For most of the time we tuned into various NPR stations where we could find one. On one occasion (I think it was when we were driving through Alabama) we happened onto some FOX Radio channel, with some guy called Glenn Beck ranting about stuff. Apparently days earlier he'd created a bit of controversy by calling President Obama a racist. His sensationalist ranting was good for a giggle for a bit, but it got a bit much after a while.

We stayed in Days Inn motels every night except in Memphis, where Google Maps failed us a bit and didn't seem to be up to date with what was a Days Inn and what wasn't. Days Inn offered free WiFi and gave a AAA discount. We stayed in a Quality Inn in Memphis, and it wasn't as good.

Photos from the trip are here

Thursday was our fourth wedding anniversary. To mark the occasion, we had dinner and a show in San Francisco.

We had dinner at Farallon, which is an absolutely gorgeous restaurant. They've really gone to some trouble with the decor. It's very well themed.

We then high-tailed it a few blocks to the Orpheum Theatre and we just got to our seats when they turned down the lights to start Wicked.

Now I am most certainly not a fan of musicals. I can't remember the last time I saw a live play or musical, but I absolutely loved this show. It was very well done. I loved the sets, and it was full of one-liners that made me chuckle, and the storyline itself was very good. We had a thoroughly enjoyable evening.

It's been a while since we've done a road trip, so we're making up for that for having a bit of an epic one...

Our neighbours from a few doors down, who we're really good friends with, are sadly moving to Atlanta. Chris got a job at Georgia Tech as an associate professor.

He was intending to do an insane drive with his mother to get their two cars from here to there, which didn't strike us as being particularly safe. I could do with some time off, and we want to see more of the US while we're here, so we offered to drive one of the cars for them, so him and his mum can alternate driving the one car.

So tomorrow afternoon we're heading out. We're looking at doing it in about 5 days, spending a few days in Atlanta, and then flying back.

We're hoping to drive to Needles, California, the first night, then Roswell, New Mexico (via Albuquerque) the next day, then Dallas, Texas, the next day, then Jackson, Mississippi the next day, and wind up in Atlanta, Georgia.

The following Saturday we're supposed to be going to the 1st birthday party of our former next-door neighbours' second son, in Sacramento, so rather than flying back to San Francisco on Friday and then driving to Sacramento on Saturday, we're just going to fly back to Sacramento from Atlanta on Saturday. We'll spend the night with them and then catch the train back to Mountain View on Sunday.

I'm then going to fly down to LA that night to spend the week in Santa Monica for work, which was what I was originally going to be doing next week, but I pushed it back a week for this trip.

So it's going to be a travel-heavy couple of weeks, but it should be fun. We're looking forward to the road trip and seeing a bit more of the country. This will be as far east as we've gone by car.

The Mountain View Public Library is a really fantastic public library. A little while ago, they redid the check out system and switched to using RFID for everything. I can walk in check out books and walk out again without having to interact with anyone.

I put a hold request for a book recently via the library's website, and it came in a few days ago, and just popped down to pick it up. All of the books on hold for people are on a set of shelves in the "holds" section, with a bit of paper sticking out of them with your name on it.

I was ferreting around these shelves, trying to find the P's, when I overheard a woman remarking semi-shocked to her husband about the privacy implications. She commented to a librarian stocking shelves nearby about how she worked in library in Fort Lauderdale, and weren't they concerned about privacy and everyone seeing what these people were reading? The librarian said that she guessed not.

I must have low privacy standards (or I guess everyone else who puts holds on books in the library does as well) because I really can't see a problem with the way the holds are done.

It would be horribly inefficient to have to ask at the counter for my book (the holds section would have had easily a hundred books on the shelves). The bit of paper has my name on it. Granted, it has a fraction of my middle name, so it's a little more personally identifying than it perhaps needs to be, but either way, I don't consider it a terrible invasion of my privacy.

As it was, I was able to walk in, find my book, use a self-checkout machine and walk out again. For that convenience, I'm prepared to lose a little bit of privacy if someone wants to spend all day, every day, casing the holds section of the library just to try and figure out that I'm reading Good calories, bad calories

I was just booking a flight and hotel accommodation for an upcoming work trip, and it occurred to me: why does everyone ask for the state and the ZIP code, when the state can be derived from the ZIP code?

For example, 94043. The first three digits fall within 900 to 961, so it's obviously in California.

It seems like such an annoying extra step to have to drop down a list and find your state. At least I'm in one close to the top.

I guess I could ask the same question about Australia. The state is similarly encoded in the post code.

Any system I ever have anything to do with in the future is not going to ask for the state.

I just learned via this article, that the Gold Coast Medical Association president's name is Philip Morris.

At some point in the past I read a plot summary for Moon and it immediately tickled my fancy. I added it to our Netflix queue and promptly forgot about it until Nigel was raving about it at work on Friday.

I watched the trailer and was immediately sold on it.

I caught it today with Matt. Absolutely fantastic. I don't want to try and describe it very much because I'll just give too much away. A definite must see if you like Sci Fi of the Kubrick variety. I have no idea why this film is having such a limited release.

I've always prided myself in the fact that I didn't have any fillings. That's about to change, sadly.

One of the teeth at the back, top right of my mouth has a deep valley, which makes it hard to get at with a toothbrush, and there's a small cavity at the bottom of that.

Dentist trips for me have always just involved the cleaning and scaling and an exam. Aside from having my wisdom teeth out (which I had done under general anaesthesia) I've never had a dental procedure before. Eeek.

I've already had one enquiry, so I guess I'd better get writing.

Despite the lawyers being really down on using this Consulate, I have to say that from my experience, it's been the easiest so far. Or I'm just getting used to the rigmarole.

The one screw up was I didn't read the instructions thoroughly enough, and we rocked up to the Scotia Bank branch to deposit the visa application fee in their bank account, and I thought the fee was quoted in Canadian dollars. Turns out, it was quoted in US dollars. It wasn't the end of the world that we didn't have cash, they could sell us US dollars on a credit card, except the bank would only accept Visa card, not Mastercard. I haven't had to deal with such bullshit since the great Cabcharge/Visa card war in Australia in the late 90's.

Moral of that story: read the instructions multiple times. Carry one of each flavour of credit card when traveling internationally, just in case.

That minor transactional hiccup aside, everything went fine. The Consulate itself does all of the pre-interview shenanigans on one floor (the bulk of the waiting around, the fingerprinting and photographing) and then they shoot you up to another floor for the "interview". Annoyingly, they run you through the metal detectors again on the higher floor.

The interview was basically "So you work for Google? How about the food?" and then he told us to come back the next day to pick up the passports. I think we were in and out in about three, three and a half hours.

I have to say, the ability to collect the passports from the Consulate later is a real boon. When you're in a foreign country, the last thing you want to deal with is any glitches in the postal system, or trying to get mail delivered to a hotel. This alone makes me like the Vancouver Consulate the best.

We went back at the 2:15pm allotted "passport pick up time", and they came down to the security checkpoint on the ground floor and you show your receipt and they give you your passports back. They tell you to step outside and check it, and come back if there's any problems, so I presume you can at least talk to a human at that point if there are any problems.

This is my third E-3 visa. They did not ask to see any of my supporting paperwork showing ties with Australia or anything else that I had in my giant wad of paperwork, just the approved Labor Condition Application, which they kept and returned with the passport the next day.