I’m writing this from a ferry dock on Darling Harbor while waiting for my new commute home. I feel like this is one of the first times in weeks that I have not been running around dealing with move logistics or work or anything else. There has been a bit of social time, but no real downtime.

Hopefully, now that we have acquired some basic furniture, not to mention a place of our own in which to enjoy it,I can have some time to get my head a bit more clear.

We’re moving to Australia.

Yep — sometime this month we’re going to be packing up all that we own and either shipping it to Sydney or having it stored here in the bay area.  I’m going to the “Site Test Lead” for the office down under.

The part most interesting to me:

Mr. Roberts was originally charged with seven felonies in February 2007 including allegations that he altered the stock options prices for the company’s former chief executive. But prosecutors whittled the case down to three counts by the time trial started Sept. 18 and focused solely on the single transaction in 2000.

This is something that they didn’t tell us (probably because it would’ve been totally irrelevant) but it makes me wonder if they had more evidence that we didn’t see.  As you can guess from the verdict, they were pretty thin on what it takes to convince a jury of the charges they eventually had.  I’m not sure what else they could’ve tried to pin on him.

(Via Urban Prankster)

Deep, syrupy and rich heady smooth body. Strong & bold, earthy & sweet with buttery oomph! An intense and powerful tongue hugger. A blend of five beans from four continents and five different roast levels: Sumatra roasted two different ways, Guatemala, Ethiopian and Papua New Guinea.

This is the description given by Barefoot Coffee Roasters for their element 114 espresso. It is, quite simply, totally awesome.

I discovered back in Corvallis that I really shouldn’t get carried away with drinking too much coffee. Having a three block walk to campus, with a Beanery halfway there was just too much. Starting with a cup in the morning, I would skip to a cup in the afternoon and from there I would eventually stop sleeping, and then stop eating, and eventually crash.

So I try to moderate to one cup of caffinated per day.

I’ve altered this off and on, sometimes going for a half-decaf latte, or using a thermos of half-decaf every day back in law school (because when you’re spending $300/day on tuition, it’s terribly important that you save $.45/day on coffee!).

Anyway, to bring this back to the title of the post, my current course is a double shot of Element 114 espresso every morning, with a packet of sugar. As I said, it is totally awesome.

As they say about halfway through, it’s a bit useful to have some CS background to understand the details.  While I currently work on software pretty much entirely not datacenter-related, I’ve used some of these powertools before, and they’re slick.  I also used to give public presentations at recruiting events on the basic details of MapReduce and BigTable.

I think I mentioned a while back that Linda and I have been looking to purchase a house, off and on.  We recently decided that we’d stick with our two-bedroom apartment for at least the time being, despite the fact that we’re going to have to do some serious rearranging to make room for our incoming third member of the family.

Perhaps we’re making the right choice:

Prices of single-family homes plunged a record 14.1 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, marking a pace five times faster than the last housing recession, according to the Standard & Poor’s/Case Shiller national home price index reported on Tuesday.

We found some decent places for sale, although none of them really warranted their high prices, in our opinions, they were at the rates people were willing to sell.  Then we went and talked to the loan officer, and it was basically a choice between paying 5% down and needing to pay mortgage insurance, and having some emergency cash, or going “all in” for a 10% down loan.  Considering that even the happy estimates from our spreadsheets indicated that we would need to see 2-3% appreciation in order to break even on these loans, we didn’t want to risk everything

I always end up asking myself not just why we have so much stuff, but how we got it in the first place.  In line to be sold at our impending yard sale we have:

• A photographic enlarger and some darkroom supplies that have been following me around through three apartments.  This is left over from my “I’m going to be a photographer when I grow up” phase.
• Some plastic sailing pants that Linda bought about 10 years ago.
• Ski pants that I bought for a trip to Tahoe about 6 years ago and used once.
• A one-eyed leaping frog.
• About three office’s worth of office supplies.  Hanging folders, three-ring binders, resume paper.
• Two paper shredders
• At least 12 empty shoeboxes.  And we’re keeping at least three of them.  Because my wife is crazy.
• An eye, for a leaping frog.

We have enough miscellaneous small parts (key rings, carabiners, buttons, etc) that if you show up to the yard sale and make a purchase, you will be getting one of these items from our “free gift with purchase” bag.  And you will take it home with you, or at least off the premises.

It’s actually something I was muttering to Linda about the other day. I really need to cut back on my television watching — not so much on the first-run stuff (Hey, I gotta watch House, Scrubs, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Who, CSI, Good Eats, Dirty Jobs, and The Daily Show just like everyone else) but I find myself occasionally just re-watching stuff that came through on the Tivo. I should use this time to cure cancer or something.

Anyway, the article has some stats on how many hours are typically “used” in watching television — and they’re pretty large. 200 billion hours of television watched per year. That’s 22.8 million years of television watched per year. That’s 341,000 lifetimes spent watching television every year. That’s like killing off a medium-sized city every year in the name of television. And we’ve still not gotten around to curing cancer.