What's Garrett Up To?

So most of my recent posts have been about the whole "moving across the country and starting a new job" thing... But that's obviously not all I've been doing, I've got the standard collection of geeky shit jumping around in my head.

In summary:

• I'm playing with bridging the gap between C++ and Java via GCJ, for use in Lucene4c. I've recently come to the conclusion that actually reimplementing the Lucene libraries in C, while fun, is not the best way to go about making Lucene's functionality available to C programmers. My new GCJ based version is available in the ASF Subversion repository, specifically in Lucene4c's gcj-backend branch.
• In an effort to bring my HTML/CSS/JavaScript skills kicking and screaming into the 21st century I've been reading up on Web Standards Solutions (great book by the way) and trying to wrap my brain around all the recent AJAX stuff that's been going around. So far, I think it's all very neat. The HTML/CSS stuff is a clear win, and I'm looking forward
  to applying it going forward. The JavaScript magic is also cool, but I think we need to be careful to apply it where it's needed, not just where it's fun.
  

Anyway, those are the main "Geek" topics that have been rolling around inside my head lately, at least the outside of work topics anyway ;-)

Eye Opening

I'm really not sure what to say about Bill Moyers' speech about the state of journalism in America, other than that you should go read it. Now.

Moved In

Well, after far too much unpacking, I'm mostly settled in my new apartment.

The moving guys showed up right on time yesterday morning, and with only a little trouble getting the box spring for my bed into the bedroom (it turns out there was one way to make it fit, but it took us about 5 tries to find it) the move went well. The appartment looks quite a bit better with stuff in it, and actually seems a bit larger than I'd expected, which is always a nice surprise.

I spent most of the rest of the day unpacking (18 bags of packing paper and about a 3 foot tall pile of flatened cardboard boxes at last count), with a brief pause in the afternoon to allow the cable guy to hook up my cable and network connection.

Anyway, so far the apartment is great, and it's nice to actually be moved in. There wasn't anything wrong with the temp apartment mind you, it's just that the whole "temporary" feeling gets kind of old after a while.

I've still got about a million and one things to do to get settled here, but at least the process has started, and that's the important thing.

A Productive Weekend

I appear to have fallen out of the habit of updating my blog regularly. Lets try to summarize recent events...

• O'Reilly put up the website for OSCON 2005, including the description of my talk about Backwards Compatibility in Open Source Projects. There are a ton of other cool talks scheduled as well, so if you can make it out to Portland for the conference you absolutely
  should.
• I signed the lease on my new apartment. It's a 1 Bedroom on the second floor of a building at the Mansion Court complex in Santa Clara, just a few blocks from my temporary corporate housing. Tomorrow morning I'll call to schedule a time for the movers to show up with all my stuff, since right now the place is looking pretty empty.
• In an effort to do something about the "this place looks pretty empty" problem I made a trip to IKEA today. I'd never actually been before, but it certainly lived up to expectations. I ended up picking up a bookcase, and I'll probably order another one via their website
  soon, since I'll need more space for books, and the size I really need won't fit in my car.
• Since Chris recommended it, I picked up a copy of Mercury for the PSP, and it's been sucking down all my free time. Cool game though, if you've got a PSP you should absolutely pick it up.

Anyway, back to Mercury...

Another Milestone

As of this afternoon I am now licensed to drive in the state of California.

Apparently my "getting things right on multiple choice tests even if you aren't sure of the right answer" skills have held up rather well since high school, because I only got one question out of thirty six wrong.

Of course, next week I have to go back again and register my car. You need to get a CA license within 10 days of starting a job here, but you're given 20 days to register your car. I still can't figure out why there are two different deadlines for that sort of thing, but whatever...

Now all I have to do is finish this whole "Getting an Apartment" thing and this week will be a total success...