TV Culture

A lot of aspects of TV culture are quite different here... it takes some getting used to. In the UK, I was used to (and expected) short-run series (6 episodes) and mini dramas. Every week I looked through the TV magazine (TV and Satellite Week was our choice) to see what was new coming up that week. There was always something noteworthy starting (or occurring) on any given week. TV over here seems very different in the way series are structured. Here, there are very few network TV series starting or finishing on any given week. Most of the network TV schedules are taken up with long-running "safe" TV shows which have proven their worth (ratings) over the last few seasons. Nobody is taking any risks. This leads to a very stale, very consistent week-by-week TV schedule. One of the consequences is that for newcomers like us, it is difficult to engage with new TV shows... because there aren't many. The other consequence (for newcomers and long term Americans alike) is that the incumbent shows find it more and more difficult to retain viewers, because the shows naturally run out of plot (most TV shows obviously have a natural life in terms of plot development, and American TV seems to keep shows alive waaay beyond this). For example, Desperate Housewives would appear to now be embroiled in some kind of hostage situation. This is a show which is about housewives in American suburbia (the clue is in the name). It is not an action series. They are clearly running out of plot lines. Whoever is responsible for this show should have been focusing their energies on something new by now. We were lucky enough to arrive just as "Heroes" was starting on NBC. This is a fantastic series that you really should watch. It clearly has a single season plot (much like "24", I suppose), but it wouldn't surprise me if they manufactured something beyond that (much like "24", I suppose). Also "Hammered" that I previously blogged about I think would do enormously well on British TV (like Discovery Real Time). But other than those, there is little of the week-by-week diversity that I'm used to on BBC, ITV and channels 4 and 5. This is a real shame. Whatever happened here to create this situation, I really hope doesn't occur in the UK. Grrr...

Radio Gaga

Well, I admit that there is a certain inevitability to the frequency of blog entries dropping off. I think this is a natural consequence of us feeling more settled here, so I don't feel too guilty about it. What I do realise, though, is that anyone who is manually checking the blog for new entries will have probably become somewhat bored by now. Those people who are making use of the RSS feed (you know who you are) will now either feel slightly smug, or slightly patronised. So anyway... What do we miss? Well, I'm still feeling pretty nostalgic for the BBC. I've tried to find a radio station that makes me laugh like Chris Moyles did in the morning. Radio Alice is almost there with Sarah and No Name in the morning, but the main problem is that they're coming from a "Shock Jock" culture where being shouty and offensive is funny (and gets ratings). It's a real shame, because Sarah sounds like she's intelligent and hits some genuinely funny ironic/sarcastic/observation humor right on the button. No Name, on the other hand, seems to derive his humor from being loud and offensive. It's neither funny nor clever. On the up side, I've installed Alien BBC on our Squeezebox streaming music system in the house, which means we can listen to live BBC radio, and all of their archived recordings through our hi-fi. This makes things a lot more tolerable, and had Becky listening to Gardeners' Question Time earlier in the week. I still need a solution for listening to time-shifted Chris Moyles on my way to work, but I'm tempted to install Replay A/V which can schedule recordings of streaming media, so I can whack the mp3's on a CD and listen to them in the car on the way to work. Sirius Satellite Radio actually carries BBC Radio 1 (and hence Chris Moyles), but is only time-shifted by 5 hours (for the East Coast... and being a satellite radio system, there's not a lot they can do about that)... which is a shame. Missing Chris Moyles... who'd have thought it.

The Ocean

We had a bit of a seaside weekend. On Saturday we went to Monterey, which is about an hour and a quarter's drive away down the Pacific coast. We thought it would be nice to do some shopping and have something to eat at Cannery Row (made famous by John Steinbeck's 1945 novel of the same name... apparently). Cannery Row is in the middle of being redeveloped, so it turned out to be a bit of a mix of old industrial buildings, new boutique style shops and construction work. Although a lot of the shops were selling pleasingly cheap but tasteful souvenirs (I believe the official term is 'tat'). Feeling both hungry and adventurous, we had a look around all the places to eat - and there were quite a lot of nice looking seafood places - but succumbing to safety in the familiar, and a new-found fondnest for Forrest Gump, we ended up at the Monterey's branch of what appears to be a chain of Bubba Gump restaurants. Not so much film trivia this time, but an excellent view over the ocean, good food (shrimp, obviously) and fun for Lucy. We watched the movie on Saturday night. I think we've got it out of our system now. After lunch we went to the excellent Monterey Bay Aquarium. There was a 45 minute queue to get in, but the handy (but expensive) trick of buying an annual membership got us immediately into the members side door, and lets us get in for free all year, complete with two transferrable guest passes (which actually turns out to be quite a bargain, given the price of the regular tickets, and the likelyhood of us going again several times). It's a large aquarium with some fantastic tanks. They filmed the aquarium scenes for the movie "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" here in 1986, with some special effects to make the rock pools outside the back of the aquarium look like an enclosure large enough to house a couple of whales. Lucy loved it all, and joyfully pointed out all the big fish... and there were some very big fish. The highlight for me was a Sun Fish - Fascinating. On Sunday we went to Half Moon Bay which is only about 40 minutes away on the Pacific coast up the Peninsula. It's quite small with an old-town feel to the town center, and it was nice to walk around and stop for a coffee and a cake. Afterwards we went to the beach, where the waves were just spectacular. This was the first time Lucy had been on a beach, too. She was a little wary of the sea at first, but she quickly started to get excited by the big breakers. This is somewhere we're definitely going to go more often.

Grrrowl...

Becky got out a box of face-paints and a face-painting instruction book today. Getting this picture sent to me on my mobile phone when I was in the middle of an extended and frustrating technical discussion at work really made my day. Marvelous.

At The Source

Yesterday I went to the WebGuild 2006 Conference. This involved me dipping my feet in the water of Industry Conferences - it was a relatively inexpensive one-day conference about the current state and future direction of the World Wide Web. I enjoyed it immensely, despite one or two of the presentations being a bit dull. It really struck me what I was involved in while I was sat amongst about 200 Silicon Valley web professionals listening to Marissa Mayer talk about the history and design philosophy behind the Google homepage. Not some wannabe Internet company, but Google! She has been personally involved in setting the standard for web searching for most of the planet for the last 7 years. This was followed by a panel discussion which included a founder member of OddPost, who now power the excellent new AJAX-based Yahoo mail client (currently in Beta). You simply don't get these people anywhere else. I appreciate that for many of the people reading this, I just said "blah blah blah Google! blah blah blah blah"... but it's seriously inspiring to be continuously coming across people and companies that I'd only previously read about. Next week there is a free seminar at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View celebrating 30 years of Public Key Cryptography (calm down now). This is all very well and good, but two of the speakers are Dr. Whitfield Diffie and Dr. Martin Hellman! (I can see you're getting over-excited... take a few deep relaxing breaths before continuing...). These are the guys who discovered (invented?) one of the most fundamental algorithms in modern cryptrographic communication protocols - it's the stuff that keeps your credit card details safe over the Internet. (we'll gloss over the fact that it was actually developed at GCHQ in the UK... Hollywood will probably soon produce a movie that sets the record straight). OK, so this is deeply nerdy stuff. But it's the kind of nerdy stuff that I keep tripping over. It's fantastic.

Plastic Fantastic

I finally got my California Drivers License. It's surprising how much difference this makes to how I feel. I now feel like I have a legitimacy here that I didn't feel before. I'm no longer carrying around anything from Britain - credit cards, ATM card, ID... It's very odd. I think this is the last piece of bureaucratic "plugging in" to be done here. It's a bit of a milestone.

8/7c WTF?

Maybe I'm mathematically challenged, but I can't make head or tail of the timezone information given in US TV schedules. The one we see the most involves times like 8/7c, pronounced "Eight, Seven Central", which I think means that a TV show is on at 8pm unless you're in the Central timezone, in which case it will be on at 7pm. This is definitely weird, because North America (let's exclude Alaska for now) has four timezones: Pacific (PST) = GMT-8 Mountain (MST) = GMT-7 Central (CST) = GMT-6 Eastern (EST) = GMT-5 ...and they all have their equivalent 'Daylight Savings Time' versions, one hour ahead of those with a 'D' in the acronym rather than an 'S'. So a timing of 8/7c would make sense to be advertised in the Eastern timezone, because 8pm Eastern is the same as 7pm Central. This would surely mean that a programme was being shown at the same physical time - which happened to be 8pm Eastern and 7pm Central. So why do we get these same times specified in California where we're on Pacific time? When they say 8/7c, do they mean that the whole country gets the TV show at 8pm local time unless you're in the Central timezone, in which case they show it at 7pm local time? This is just bizarre. It would be like the UK having TV times of 8/7(Rutland) where you'd see an episode of The Bill at 8pm unless you live in Thorpe By Water, in which case you'd see it at 7pm. This is probably a boon to people in the Alabama, though, because they get everything an hour before the rest of the country. Maybe they need the extra time to digest the content - perhaps it's a social service. And living in California, why do I care what time they'll be seeing the show in the Central timezone? Just to add confusion, there's also "E/P", which appears to mean "Eastern/Pacific", which I can only assume means it's shown at the same time (local time) throughout the country. Fox has examples of this in their 2006/2007 schedule, along with the more understandable "7:30pm ET/4:30pm PT" which clearly means that something is being shown at the same physical time across the whole country (live sports events, for instance). Be thankful if you live in a country with only one timezone (you know who you are).

Best Foot Forward

On Saturday we joined the Walk For Hope in San Francisco, which is a 5km walk to raise funds for Breast Cancer as part of the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (also in the UK). Becky's mom and brother had joined us, and it was to be an early start, so we drove to the The Embarcadero Center for 8am. There were various tents and stalls set up for people who wanted to register on the day, and to pick up t-shirts... and all the sponsors were there. The atmosphere was excellent.We persuaded a passing stranger to take our photo, for which we unwittingly stood in height order. The walk took us down the waterfront to AT&T Park, around the stadium and back again - it was great to see that part of San Francisco by foot, which is something we might not otherwise have done. Lucy was happy to watch the world go by (although you wouldn't believe it from the photo above). There was a fantastic atmosphere back at the Embarcadero Center as everyone was arriving from finishing the walk. After a 5km walk, we all felt like we'd earnt a beer and something deep-fried, so we went to Pier 39 for an early lunch - because there are lots of family-friendly mid-priced restaurants there (OK, so they're probably not the best restaurants in San Francisco, but we're still enjoying hanging around the touristy areas, and Lucy loves the Carousel). We ended up at Bubba Gump - which is a restaurant chain that somehow managed to get the rights to have a Forrest Gump theme. I've never been in a restaurant where an incredibly enthusiastic waitress asks film trivia questions while taking my order. It sounds slightly tacky (and probably was), but it was a lot of fun. And they had Anchor Steam on tap, and the food was actually very good. And there was a Tom Hanks look-alike in full Forrest Gump atire sat on a bench outside the restaurant as we left. You can't make this stuff up. It was a day of contrasts.

Make The Grade

We had our driving tests on Friday. As it happens, our next door neighbor is a driving instructor, and he very kindly offered to take us both out for a quick refresher on Wednesday - it was really useful, because Becky and I both picked up a few good pointers on things to look out for. The visit to the DMV office to take the tests involved more waiting than driving, and it was 2½ hours before we'd both taken our 10 minute tests. We both passed. Becky came away with a completely clean slate, but I managed to get three minor marks against me (you're allowed 15 minor marks before you fail)... which I put down to nerves and trying too hard not to mess up (for instance, one of my minor marks was for driving 5mph below the speed limit on El Camino Real... go figure). A second explanation could be that Becky is simply a better driver than I am. The third theory is that Becky got a lenient examiner, and I got a more pernickety examiner. I favor the third theory. In fact, our neighbor just came round to talk about how things went, and he confirmed that the examiner I had was the most stringent examiner at that DMV office. I'm not bothered. No, really.

Hammered

If you're at all interested in DIY (even from a wanabe amateur-but-useless standpoint like me), then you have to watch Hammered, with John and Jimmy DiResta (doesn't look like it's actually on UK TV yet, though). My all-time favourite DIY TV Show (and consequently, DIY personality) was the New Yankee Workshop with Norm Abram (on Discovery Real Time in the UK) - who can build anything, effortlessly, with a workshop bigger than our house, containing tools that a DIY enthusiast could only dream of. Hammered is the same thing, only with less conservative projects (that is, more fun), and an East-Coast humour and attitude that's laugh-out-loud funny. The two hosts are brothers: Jimmy DiResta is a ludicrously talented craftsman, and John DiResta is a professional stand-up comedian. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to put these two together on TV was a genius.

Left Hand, Right Hand

We spent this weekend up at Tahoe. It's something we want to be doing more regularly, but we haven't quite got into a weekly/monthly routine yet (too much change and disruption on a week-by-week basis so far to be able to get into a routine). But at least we managed to get up there this weekend, and we had a really nice visit with Becky's immediate family. Becky's mom is being incredibly generous by letting us borrow her car during the winter months. It's a two-wheel drive car, and is consequently unsuitable for driving around Tahoe when it is freezing/snowing (you really need a genuine 4x4), so usually sits out the winter in the comfort of Becky's mom's garage. The snows could come any day now, so we came back in a mini-convoy of the Montero (built and bought to cope with a Tahoe winter) and Becky's mom's VW Beetle (built to be stylish - and successfully so). I was the happy driver who got to drive the Beetle back to the Bay Area - a 4 hour drive, which is a nice long time to get to know and love the car. On the trip, we made a stop at Davis where we saw a man being restrained by police from 4 separate patrol cars in the car park outside the Burger King where we stopped. According to a passer-by that Becky spoke to, he was a homeless man who was on drugs. It was sobering to see my burger-buying safety being ensured by this man's face coming into contact with the tarmac. So anyway... Driving a manual (stick shift) car after a couple of months with an automatic was a complete revelation. For the first time since we've been here, I actually felt like I was fully in control of the car. It was great. I'm convinced now that if we buy another car (when Spring comes and the snow melts, and the Beetle can once again grace the roads of South Lake Tahoe), it has to be manual. I know that this will make it more difficult to sell on, but it'll be worth it. The only problem, really, is that I was changing gear with the wrong hand. My left hand constantly wanted a piece of the gear-changing action. It's odd that it's so easy to drive on the opposite side of the road, but more difficult to be changing gear with my right hand. It'll learn, though... and it's a small price to pay.

Tickover

It occurred to me that it's been a while since I wrote a blog entry. The superficial reason for this is that nothing 'blogworthy' has really happened. That's not strictly true, though... what has actually happened is that we're beginning to settle into a comfortable routine where fewer things are in any way exceptional. A lot of small stuff has happened, though, which all forms part of the comforting humdrum of everyday life. My subscription to TV Guide has finally kicked in, and so when I've finished writing this I'm going to read through the current issue and highlight things I think we might be interested in watching next week, and set them up to record on the DVR - this is what I used to do with the TV Magazine back in the UK to set up Sky+. The licence plates for our car finally arrived (it had Illinois plates when we bought it, and had to be registered in California). Now we've got all the official documentation for the car, and we're just waiting for our appointments for the driving tests (coming up on 13th October) before we're fully signed-up with the DMV. We managed to successfully apply for another credit card, so now we have one each (spreads the administrative load in keeping track of them). That particular application was a bit hairy for a while, though - Citibank Mastercard U.S. want a banking reference before they'll set up an account, which is fair enough. For some reason Citibank UK charge £20 for the privilege of sending a banking reference, even if it is to somewhere else in the Citibank organisation. But I swallowed this because I wanted something that they had. To complete the picture of a joined-up institution, Citibank Mastercard U.S. then refused to take the Citibank UK reference, saying that it had insufficient information, and the information was in the wrong form (not converted to U.S. Dollars, for example). My sense of humor remained intact, and I was actually quite impressed by this level of ineptitude. Anyway, the application all got sorted out quite quickly when I e-mailed my Citibank relocation consultant (they have people employed to deal with trouble-makers like me) and compared Citibank to HSBC - whose card I'd been happily using for the previous two weeks. The cards arrived a few days later by overnight courier. That's more like it. I've set up the computers that we need (using 'need' in one of its looser senses), and also taken the opportunity to buy some more kit on various lame excuses. I was happily surprised to find that the only thing that wasn't already compatible with the 110v power here was one of the PC power supplies. That was fixed easily enough with a quick trip to Fry's (as so much in life is). Unfortunately, the hard drive in one of the computers died catastrophically a short while after I turned it on (weakened by sea-sickness, presumably). The main down side of this is that I've lost the save-game from 'Half-Life' that I'd been working on for the last few months. My feeble progress through an outdated (but good) game is now history, and it's time for me to drag my game-playing into the 21st Century and start playing the (now 3-year old) Half Life 2. We've also splashed out on some technology that will hopefully pay off in the long term, and bought a cordless Skype handset (the LinkSys CIT200, for those interested), so we can use Skype without having to be surgically connected to a PC. You'd be surprised how much more we used Skype now that it feels like using a normal phone. As well as the savings on international calls, Skype calls to U.S. landlines are free until the end of the year, so hopefully that $100 will pay for itself quite quickly. The continuing unpacking of our boxes is suffering from the 80-20 rule. The remaining 20% of unpacking is progressing at the expected slow rate. To prevent us coming to a complete halt and living amongst a handful of boxes and small piles of random belongings for the rest of our stay here, the rule is that every day must contain a small but distinct amount of 'unpacking'. The study/office now has more than 50% of the carpet visible. This is definite progress. I also managed to unpack a lot of the garage boxes in a hunt for the 12v air-pump that I wanted to use to inflate my bike tires. As fate would have it, it turned up at the bottom fo the last box that I looked in. And why are the sizes for screw-in light-bulb fittings different over here? We have a standing lamp that we rather like, and we want to simply put 110v bulbs in it (nothing complex about the electrics - this should just work). But bulbs here come in two fitting sizes: too large, and too small. Luckily, ebay came up trumps with some adapters which turn the 'too small' bulbs to 'just right'. Good old ebay. We're beginning to get tuned in to the prices of everyday things. Petrol is strange in the amount that it varies from place to place. In the UK we were used to a few pence per litre variation, but here there can be up to 50¢/gallon difference between two gas stations on the same street. Well worth shopping around. Bread is very expensive, too. Between $4 and $5 for a small loaf of half-decent bread. Odd, that. So not much to say, really.

It Says Watt?

Some of the electrical things we brought with us from the UK will work here. Others won't. Quite why we brought things that we knew wouldn't work is a complex question. The answer mostly revolves around the amount of effort that would have been required to identify and dispose of things that won't work here, compared to the amount of effort required to ignore the problem and have the shipping company pack everything regardless. A lot of small electronic items run off separate power adaptors, and cheap replacements can be bought here (our ADSL modem/router is running like that right now, for instance). Other items already have dual 110/240 volt power supplies and can be used with just a plug adaptor or a new power cable (the portable disk drive that we brought all our personal data across on is working like that). Other low-power items can use a small, cheap voltage converter (like my electric toothbrush charger). Other things are too much bother to get working, and cheap to replace (hairdryers, for instance). There are a small number of major electrical items that need more care and forethought. Our TV, for instance, can take an NTSC signal (as used in the USA) from a DVD player or set-top box (like our new cable TV box). However, it only runs on the UK's 240V power, so can't be easily plugged in over here. The answer is a big transformer which can be bought at Fry's (is there anything they don't sell?!) which converts between 110v and 240v and can handle enough power for something as significant as a TV (compared to a toothbrush). The secret is to know how much power you need... which is handily printed on the back of most appliances and electrical equipment. The TV said it was 150W (Watts, like a lightbulb), so I thought the 500W transformer should do the job admirably. Quite why the fuse often blew in the transformer when I turned the TV on or off is a mystery (answers on a postcard, please). However, with a "bigger is better" frame of mind, the 1000W version seems to do the job. And it makes a satisfying 'clunk' noise when you turn it on, followed by a faint humming... as if there was some kind of big electromagnet inside or something. Funny, that. So now we get to watch 11-year old episodes of 'Whose Line Is It Anyway' (still funny after all this time) on BBC America with our UK TV.

The Storm Before The Calm

Our stuff arrived on Monday. At 9:00am a 40' sea container, which we'd last seen on the back of a lorry outside our house in the UK on 2nd August, arrived outside our rental house here. It was slightly odd to think that the same container had been floating across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal, up the Pacific coast, and into the Port of Oakland. We watched as they broke the seal which had been installed in the UK. For the next half hour, I marked numbers off a tick-list as the 246 individually numbered and itemised cardboard boxes and other oddly shaped items were unloaded from the container onto our driveway (it's a good job it wasn't raining... but then, this is California). Then there was 3 hours of hard work, as the 6 people in the unpacking crew started unwrapping the furniture, bringing it into the house and (where necessary) rebuilding it. Before we knew it, legs were back on tables, feet were back on sofas, and two beds and a cot had been rebuilt from their temporary 'flat pack' existence. Becky and I pitched in where we could, but a lot of our effort was taken up looking after Lucy, and directing boxes and pieces of furniture into appropriate rooms. More than once, a question of 'Where shall I put this?' from the unpacking crew was greeted with a shrug and 'Wherever looks good to you.' from one of us. They thought this was funny. After a lunch break, boxes of what can only be described as 'stuff' started coming in, and the relative calm of a mostly empty house became a mini maze of a few clear walkways through piles of half organised collections of familiar things. By the end of Monday, everything had been unpacked - although almost nothing had been put away - and all the major pieces of furniture were in the right rooms, and mostly in their final positions. It's good to see a lot of our stuff again. Becky's mum and brother arrived later on Monday to help out. Throughout Tuesday, they've been hard at work making sense of the explosion of random belongings that had been cluttering every flat surface. When I got home from work this afternoon the house was unrecognisable from the mess that I'd left in the morning, but much more recognisable as our home. There's something very comforting in being surrounded by familiar things. It's amazing how much progress they made in so little time. Fantastic. So, in two days we've been rapidly transported from a feeling of temporary accommodation, to a genuine sense of being at home. It's quite a relief.

Wibble Wobble Side To Side

We've put on weight since we've been here, but that's not what this is about. Lucy is starting to categorize things as belonging to various people. It's a muddy set of concepts for her at the moment, but she is laying claim to some of our more major items. It started innocently enough when we first bought the new car and didn't know whether to refer to it as "Mummy's car" or "Daddy's car", which were concepts she was used to in the UK when we had two cars which a particular one of us generally tended to drive. So the 4x4 is "Lucy's Car". And a lot of what we listen to when we're in it is "Lucy's Music". The latter is actually only partially inaccurate. She has a limited but eclectic music taste. What she sometimes means by "Lucy's Music" is the CD-Single of "Monster" by "The Automatic" (I'm not quite sure how that became a favourite). This is not entirely appropriate for a 2-year old (I think the song has a relatively grown-up theme), but she seems to enjoy the repetitive chorus... and indearingly pronounces it "Ma'ha" rather than "Monster". She's not quite mastered T's yet - she refers to water as "wa'ha", too. What she usually means by "Lucy's Music" is a CD of Children's Songs, which includes gems like "She'll Be Coming Round The Mountain" and "One Man Went To Mow". One of my favourites is sung to the tune of Glory Glory Hallelujah, and contains some philosophical verses including:

Shakey, shakey, shakey shakey up and down. Shakey, shakey, shakey shakey up and down. Shakey, shakey, shakey shakey up and down. Clap your hands together, 1, 2, 3. Wibble, wobble, wibble wobble side to side. Wibble, wobble, wibble wobble side to side. Wibble, wobble, wibble wobble side to side. Clap your hands together, 1, 2, 3.

Deep stuff. Catchy, though.

Wide Open Spaces

Our household belongings have been picked up from the Port of Oakland. We had word from the shipping company that they picked up our container on Thursday. Their first slot for delivery is Monday, so we prepared ourselves for two days of camping and left our furnished apartment yesterday (Saturday). One of the aspects of apartment living that we really wouldn't get along with in the long term is the distance between the front door of the apartment and the car. The apartment was set in some quite lush surroundings with heavy planting, and the main living areas faced onto courtyards and walkways with trees and shrubs. Very nice... except when you have to carry a car-load of shopping from the allocated parking space behind the building. After six weeks, Becky was getting annoyed by this. So, the three full carloads that it took to get all of our stuff from the apartment to the house was a labor of love. We're getting less tolerant of inconvenience and difficulty... which I think is because we can see the end of it on the horizon. Still, by the end of Saturday, we'd moved everything from the apartment to the house, and drove away from the apartment complex for the last time. The immediate emotions on leaving the apartment were neither sadness nor relief. Of course, it's a step along the way, but the immediate concerns of moving ourselves from one place to another were the focus. We're sleeping on an airbed that Becky's mum bought for when she visited the apartment; Lucy has her travel cot - which she's always been very happy in; we've got a 13" portable TV which we bought for $80 so the Comcast engineer would have something to plug the cable TV equipment into, and Becky borrowed some kitchen equipment, cutlery and crockery from her grandma. So, we're all set. Today we did a bit of shopping for bits and bobs that we're going to need (like some two-pin to three-pin grounding adapters so that we can plug grounded equipment into some of the sockets. eek!), but other than that, we're just waiting for the container to arrive at 9:00am tomorrow. The main thing we're missing at the moment is a set of remote-control cars to race around the wide-open spaces that will soon fill with our furniture and clutter. Vroom!

When The Boat Comes In

The things that have tripped us up have been unexpected. For instance, the medical insurance fiasco was a surprise. The latest surprise is the delay between our household belongings clearing customs, and having them actually delivered to our house. We're currently waiting to hear when the delivery company has a slot in their schedule. Presumably our 40' container is sitting in a storage facility somewhere right now. In contrast, it was surprisingly easy to set up services at the new house. One phone call to the City of Sunnyvale had the billing for water supply and garbage collection sorted out. It took a trip down to the local PG&E office to get our gas and electric billing sorted out (they needed to confirm my identity before they could bill me, it seems). AT&T had our telephone service connected within a day, and our ADSL should be connected tomorrow. And Comcast installed our digital cable (complete with a DVR, just like Sky+) the day after we phoned them. We get to the end of the corporate housing on Sunday, so we have to leave the apartment. It would be possible to extend this, but it needs approval from several levels of management, and we might not be able to stay in the same apartment. By contrast, living in an unfurnished house with an airbed, a travel cot, a portable TV and some borrowed crockery and cutlery sounds appealing. At least it'll be our own place. The optimist in me thinks that we'll hear from the shipping company tomorrow that they can deliver on Friday. Realistically, it looks like we'll be enjoying a bit of a camping vibe for a few days (albeit with cable TV). Still, it makes for a more interesting story.

Lucy's New House

Lucy picked the keys up for her new house this morning. As you can see, it's well kept and has lovely Magnolia tree in the front garden. It's near the end of a small cul-de-sac, so she likes how it is quite safe to play out the front. There are two separate living areas at the back of the house, separated by a small kitchen. And there are four bedrooms down the left hand side towards the front. The two windows at the front are Lucy's bedroom and the master bedroom. Lucy also likes the back yard, which is quiet and not at all overlooked. There's a nice patio area, some planting and a small lawn. She's looking forward to moving in once our household belongings have cleared customs, which should be some time this week. In the meantime, the toaster and coffee maker, at least, have been installed. Lucy's quite happy about that.

Sacred Heart and a Toaster

Working with people in multiple timezones means that I'm often working from home on conference calls at 6:00am or in the evening. This goes with the territory, but it does mean that the 40+ hours in a normal work week can be made up in a variety of ways other than being in the office for eight hours a day. So on Friday afternoon the five of us (the whole team) left the office for something a little different. We had lunch at the Palace BBQ Buffet in Sunnyvale, which is a Korean barbeque. What this means is that once you've been seated, you go to a buffet counter and pick up some starters, vegetables, and a big pile of marinated raw meat, and take them back to your table. The center of the table is a mini gas barbeque, so someone takes 'Chef' duties and the meat gets cooked at the table. As with most barbeques, I ate a lot more meat than I should have. Very tasty, though. Then we went to the Sacred Heart community service to do some volunteer work, which is something that Mel had organized for us. I spent the first part of the afternoon sorting through food donations and shifting boxes around. Then most of my afternoon (along with two other adult volunteers and a couple of girls from a local high school) was spent sorting eggs. They get donations of boxes of eggs which supermarkets can't sell because one or more eggs has broken. We were taking all the good eggs and sorting them into half-dozen sets... although the boxes themselves didn't come in half-dozen sizes, so we were making half-dozen boxes out of the good parts of larger boxes, in a Blue Peter stylee. Much more enjoyable than I'd expected. The people - both volunteers and staff - were all really friendly and a lot of fun. In other news... we received our medical cards for the proper company medical scheme, so we can now come off the temporary cover we've been on for the last month. Also, I finally got paid. So five weeks of living on the money we transferred over from the UK has come to an end. This is fortunate, because we're only in the corporate housing (which is funded by the company) until the end of next week. So we'll be paying rent and utility bills soon. We pick up the keys to our rental house later this morning. In preparation for that, we went out yesterday to buy some things that have been provided in the corporate housing that we won't have in the rental - like a toaster and a coffee machine. The coffee machine is made by "Mr. Coffee" which just makes me smile. It seems like the response from a slightly indignant coffee machine if you didn't give it the respect it deserves. We can't be without toast and coffee.

Aitch Ess Bee See

The credit cards arrived. Hooray! I never thought I'd be quite so happy at something as mundane as a credit card arriving. But it's surprising how many things are made easier by having one. It's very common in the US to require the ZIP code of the credit card billing address for automated transactions (like paying for petrol at the pump), so having a UK credit card is quite limiting. Also, although online banking is a real boon (and you don't get to say 'boon' much these days), it's still a bit of a pain to remotely deal with UK banking. We'll start to build up a US credit history, too, which will make it easier for us to get access to (and a better choice of) financial services in a year or so. Onwards and upwards. By the way... HGTV rules! We're hooked on Design Star.

21 MPG (But The Gallons Are Smaller)

For some reason, long journeys always seem to take us significantly more time than friends and relatives tell us they take. This is saying nothing about the accuracy or good intentions of the people giving us travel advice. I think it is just because we are some kind of magnet for traffic delays. As we discovered on Friday, it was obviously a mistake to drive around the Bay Area on the Friday evening of Labor Day Weekend when the Eastbound Bay Bridge was closed (a well advertised source of snarl-ups for the holiday weekend). But the plan to drive home from Tahoe on Sunday afternoon, missing all the returning Monday traffic, was a good one. However, we weren't counting on a man threatening to throw himself off a bridge on in Sacramento on Sunday afternoon (sorry, link needs free registration). This ended up closing I-50 for about 4 hours... and we caught the last half hour of that. The news story of the incident also reports:

The hours-long traffic blockage possibly caused smaller crowds Sunday evening at large regional events such as the California State Fair.

"It's certainly very possible that it affected attendance," said Amber Bagwell, Cal Expo spokeswoman, noting that official attendance figures were to be calculated at midnight but that the crowd was noticeably thinner.

...so it's nice to see that people have kept a focus on the important issues. Today we drove over to Santa Cruz, which is our local coastal resort town. We have very pleasant memories of visiting with Becky's grandparents a few years ago, and we thought Lucy might like the beach. I think we must have previously visited slightly out of season, because this weekend it was very crowded, and the beach was full of beautiful people playing volleyball. Far too intimidating. So, instead we had a walk around downtown Santa Cruz, which really is very nice. They've managed to retain a cosy, old town feel but with a vibrant and friendly atmosphere. A definite addition to the list of "things to do without spending money on a Sunday afternoon"... and the little pizza place we found was excellent. Santa Cruz isn't very far to drive (it took us well under an hour, and Google Maps says it is about 40 miles), but it did underline the need to fill up with petrol quite regularly. This time we bit the bullet and calculated our fuel economy ("gas mileage"). It worked out to be 21mpg, but this is with US gallons, which are 4/5 the size of UK gallons (the difference coming from a US pint being 16 fluid ounces, and a UK pint being 20 fluid ounces). So, that's just over 26mpg in England. I don't suppose this is bad (compared to what we could/should be getting), especially considering we're driving a bit of a tank. Still, if we're going to get another car to drive around the Bay Area, it would be a good idea to get something a little smaller. Whether or not we get another car hinges around my daily commute. Hopefully I can cycle to work from our new house, but the jury is going to be out on that until we're living there... and my bike arrives off the boat. Come in London Express... Your time is up.

In Labor

Things are fitting slowly in to place. The owner of the house that we liked has signed the rental agreement, so now we just have to arrange to pick up the keys. According to a ship tracking site we found, our household belongings were a little off the west coast of Mexico and heading North a couple of days ago. They're due to arrive at Oakland today, and clear customs in around 10 days. Also, we both passed our driving test written exams and have temporary California driving licenses. So now we just need to arrange for a road test. We applied for a couple of US-based credit cards a little while ago (the more the merrier... and there were a couple of organisations involved in our relocation that have relationships with credit card companies to help recent immigrants). I heard late last week that HSBC had accepted our application, and we should have the cards in a few days. It's Labor Day weekend, so we've come up to Tahoe for a couple of days. It should have been a 3.5-4 hour drive, but the extra holiday traffic made it into a 5 hour drive. Still, it's straight-forward driving, and Lucy was (eventually) asleep in the back of the car for some of the journey. From driving licenses to credit cards, to getting stuck on holiday traffic, we're slowly getting more and more plugged in to various parts of normal day-to-day American society.

10 Days?!

One of the more ridiculous regulations in California is that you have to get a California driving license within 10 days of becoming a resident. However, you need a Social Security Number to apply for a driving license. And... immigrants on work visas can't realistically apply for a Social Security Number until immigration information works its way from the INS computers into the Social Security computers... which takes about 10 days. And then you have to get an appointment with the DMV for a written test, after which (if you pass) you can make an appointment for a driving test (which might take another week or so). Can you see where I'm going here? It's a good job I haven't had any run-ins with the California Highway Patrol or anything, then, isn't it? So 26 days after entering California, we've now got appointments for our written tests with the DMV tomorrow. We've been studying the California Drivers Handbook, and taking various practice tests by way of preparation. Wish us luck. On a happier note, the delightful and ever-helpful Sherri has turned up a rental house that we really like, and we signed the rental agreement tonight. Tomorrow should see the agreement counter-signed by the owner, and we'll be set to move into somewhere more permanent than this corporate housing. More details when everything is signed and settled.

Check!?... Ker-ching!

I just found out that my bank charged me $40 for the checks they sent me recently. My precise words to them, when I called to find out what the unexpected $40 charge was, were "that's outrageous!"... but it didn't seem to have any impact. On a good note, though, I got home tonight to find my Social Security Number card had arrived. That's some kind of speed record. I only applied on Friday, which means they processed my application and printed and mailed out my SSN card in 2 business days. Respect! (well, more respect than I would normally bestow on a government department). They told us it would take up to 10 business days. This means, though, that the stink I created over medical cover was only for 2 and a half weeks of coverage... rather than the 4-6 weeks that we originally believed it would take to get an SSN. Although, where medical cover is involved, that really isn't the point. Now I've got my SSN, I'm in a position to get my driving licence... and much sooner than I was expecting, too. Better start reading my California Driver's Handbook.

Fall Came Early

The view from my desk is currently an uninterrupted view of the hills that separate most of the San Francisco Peninsula from the Pacific ocean. This is all going to change in a few months, as they build an office complex pretty-much directly in my line of view. They've only just started on the construction, and (oddly) one of the first things they've done is replant a number of mature trees into a kind of sanitised commercial-scale copse... on steroids. I only saw them physically move one of the trees, and unfortunately I didn't have a camera on me at the time (or, at least, it didn't occur to me that my cellphone has a camera built in). However, they used a tree spade larger than I have ever seen before - and larger than the tree spades that I've linked to in this article. This tree spade had 8 blades, and was pulled by a bulldozer. It can't be good for the trees, though. Over the next few months we're going to be keeping a close eye on them. This is the view from my desk (nice, huh?) The trees in the centre (center?) of this picture were all relocated over the weekend. They are looking distinctly brown. It looks like Autumn (fall?) came early.

A Frisco Morning

The Pilots on BA flights often talk about 'San Fran' when we're coming in to land at San Francisco. I've always wondered whether that's like talking about 'London Town', or whether it is something the locals also say. On Friday one of my colleagues (who's lived here for at least 3 years now) referred to it as 'San Fran', so I think the pilots are probably alright with that. The jury is still out on 'Frisco', though. And talking of the city, we popped in for a quick visit this morning. We were debating whether to go on Caltrain or whether to drive in. It would take about an hour and 20 minutes on Caltrain, and then we'd still end up in a corner of the city we didn't want to be, and have to get a bus (or one of the Streetcars) to where we wanted to be. So, given that it was Sunday morning and traffic should be quite light, we decided to drive. It was a really easy journey, and only took us 40 minutes to get to Fisherman's Wharf. Not bad, really. Yes, yes... I know Fisherman's Wharf and Pier 39 are the most horribly touristy areas of San Francisco, but we wanted somewhere familiar and easy - and there are a lot of things for Lucy to see and do. We'll work our way through to the more worthy sights and attractions as time goes on. We took Lucy on a merry-go-round on Pier 39. We weren't quite sure whether she would like it, but she seemed to think it was fantastic... so much so that there were a few minutes of grumpiness when we got off (mostly from Lucy) before we went to the end of the pier to see the sealions. There's actually a webcam on the Pier 39 website which shows pretty-much exactly where we were standing. And a passing stranger was kind enough to take our picture. Also, we now know that Lucy does an uncanny impression of a sealion.

Fry's Delight

There are some definite advantages to living here. One of them is the price and availability of electronics. Not only did we get a ludicrously cheap laptop the weekend we arrived here (we only paid $400 in the store... what you see on that linked web page might be different), but now that we've realised that the 256MB of memory it came with really isn't enough for Windows XP to run comfortably, we popped out shopping this afternoon to one of the three local Fry's stores (geek super-stores of enormouse proportions), and bought a 512MB laptop memory module no more than we could have found it on the Internet. ...and the laptop really appreciates it, too. Fry's is one of a (probably) small number of places on the planet where you can buy a fridge, a gas barbeque, a PC motherboard, a cordless telephone, a few DVDs and CDs, a plasma TV, a few electronics components (capacitors, resistors, etc) and a pack of goldfish crackers (the cheesey flavor), all at the same place. It's a nerdy shopping wonderland.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ..., 148, 149, 150... Check!

Almost every day something happens to connect us closer to day-to-day American life. On Thursday the checkbooks (check/cheque?) for my bank account arrived. As appears to be standard, they're perforated at the top rather than the left hand edge, and they have a 'memo' line near the bottom where you can make a note of what the check is for (I'm assuming that this will then appear on your bank statement... otherwise I don't see the point). I have a feeling that they don't like mailing them out too often (they arrived by UPS, which wouldn't have been the cheapest way to ship them)... so they sent me 5 checkbooks - a total of 150 checks. That should see me OK for a while. On Friday morning we'd waited the required 10 days for my immigration information to get into the Social Security system, so I went down to the Social Security office first thing in the morning (with the ever-helpful Sherri, our relocation consultant), to put in my application. Fortunately, my immigration information was all available, and the application went OK. I should have a Social Security number within a fortnight. It's going to take some time to get used to guns being a part of American life. Along with the 'Please Turn Off Your Cellphones' sign, and the 'No Smoking' sign, there was a 'No Firearms' sign... complete with stylised diagram for those without the ability or inclination to read. The security guard, though, was carrying a gun. He was a nice looking man in his late 50's or early 60's. His main contribution for the half-hour or so we were there was to wander around talking to people, and to tell someone to turn off their cellphone. The fact that he was carrying a gun can mean only one thing: that part of his job duties are, at some point and under certain circumstances, to kill someone. It'll take a long time to get used to this.

Fun, Fun, Fun... On The 101.

Well, I had my first brush with the law today. I was supposed to man the company booth at Linux World today. I needed to get there by 9:30am, so I was on the road by 8:00am. For 20 minutes, everything was fine. Then, while I was sat stationary in heavy traffic on 101, there was a loud bang as I suddenly became the front car in a 4-car pile-up. I called 911 (although they told me that someone else had already reported the accident), and the California Highway Patrol (CHP) arrived in about 10 minutes - which is impressive. Mine was the only drivable car, so they dealt with me first and sent me on my way. Things could have been worse. Nobody was injured. Also, it's the hire car so it will be relatively easy to sort out, and the damage really seems quite minor - just some damage to the rear bumper ("fender" if I'm going to start getting my vocabulary right). Surprisingly little damage for the noise it made. The CHP ('CHiPs', anyone?) were very good - they got there quickly, and they were helpful, friendly and efficient. Two of the cars were stuck blocking the middle lane of the 5-lane highway for about 10 minutes, though, so we may well have made it into the morning's traffic reports. Apparently this is some kind of rite of passage. People at work seem to think that it's all part of becoming a local. I've been initiated.

Medical Schmedical.

What's the one thing you don't want to be living and working in the U.S. without? That's right. Medical cover. Guess what hasn't been sorted out properly for our relocation? Right again. I'm currently some kind of non-person, not having a Social Security Number (SSN). I can't apply for an SSN until my immigration information has filtered its way through the system to the Social Security department. The wisdom on this (from people who are paid to know these things) is that it takes up to 10 working days... so on Friday (10 working days since we arrived) I'm off to the Social Security office to apply for an SSN. Then it will take another couple of weeks before I get mailed my Social Security card, and consequently know my number. Until then, I'm in some kind of limbo. The SSN is key to taxation, so I knew I wouldn't be able to go onto the company payroll until I had one - I'd been warned of that. However, what everybody seems to have missed is that I'm also not on the system for Medical cover either. We only found out about this a few days ago, and the immediate advice from the medical system administrators was to pay for any medical treatment up front, and it would be reimbursed once I'm on the system. It's handy, then, that I brought a few hundred thousand dollars with me to cover medical care during this period in the event of something serious happening to one of us. Oh, that's right... I didn't. It's genuinely surprising to me that something as totally unacceptable as this could happen, especially when the company handles so many international transfers that there's a whole department dedicated to the logistics. However, after a lot of negotiation on my behalf by my direct boss and the local staffing representative, it has finally been sorted out. I'm still not actually covered by the US system - it is, apparently, too difficult to do that. I'm now covered by the 'international' version of the UK coverage that I was on before I left the UK. So now we're free to get sick.

Car Dealers of the World Unite!

It seems that car dealers in America all went to the same training school. Friday afternoon and Saturday morning we spent at Stevens Creek, which is where all the local car dealers seem to have congregated. We've only got the rental car for a couple of weeks, so we needed to quickly get a car - and we need to get something that can take us safely up to Lake Tahoe during the snow (which is several months every year). We had two criteria: 4 wheel drive (for the snow), and less than $10,000. We'd looked on sites like cars.com and SF Chronicle to find out what we should expect. So why did every car dealer try to sell us something for more than $15,000? They even said things like "this is around your price range"... No... It ISN'T. We'd spent quite a time in the Mitsubishi dealer, because they seemed to have a few that might meet our criteria. In the end - and after a non-starter where they tried to sell us a car with a $18,000 ticket price but didn't tell us the price until after we'd test driven it - we bought a cheaper (and smaller) Montero Sport. We still ended up spending a little more than our budget. My, but it's big. Still, we'll feel safe driving in the snow. After we'd signed the paperwork to buy the car, we had to arrange insurance and get a cashier's check (bankers draft) before we could drive it away. We got insurance sorted out and had proof faxed to the dealer, but we didn't get to the bank until 1:15pm, only to find that all CitiBank branches close at 1:00pm. Surprisingly, when we went back to the dealer to tell them that we wouldn't have the money until Monday morning, they let us drive it away anyway, on the promise that we'd come back on Monday morning with the check. That's very trusting of them.

Moving Money Around

Fortunately, I have two colleagues in the UK who have both lived in California for within the last few years (both British colleagues... they'd both moved to California and come back again after a couple of years). They had a variety of advice before we left, and some of that was to do with banking. The key is knowing that Citibank in the UK will open foreign currency accounts, and will maintain them without charges so long as you keep a total of at least £2000 (or currency equivalent) in your accounts with them. As far as I can tell, they're the only bank that will give you a foreign currency account without monthly charges. So, back in May I opened both Sterling and Dollar accounts with them in preparation for moving out here. Using the magic of online banking, it's possible to move money between the Sterling and Dollar accounts without commission or charges (which is pretty good in itself). Then, the real bonus in terms of utility is that you can transfer money from the Dollar account into any US based Citibank account free of charge. I managed to open a Citibank checking account in the US before we moved out here (that's another story, though), so I was all set. The surprising thing about moving money between the UK and US Citibank accounts is that it's instantaneous. Seconds after doing the transfer from the UK Citibank online system, the money showed up in the US Citibank online system. It's a modern banking miracle.

It Begins...

Like all blogs, this starts with good intentions. The intention is to keep this up to date with how we're getting on now that we're in California. This is a public blog, so there'll be some things that are deliberately omitted. Anyway, let's see how it turns out... ARRIVAL British Airways Club World has to be experienced. Specifically, it has to be experienced on an 11 hour flight with a toddler. The ludicrous amount of floor-space and the lie-flat beds meant that the journey wasn't too painful. Thankfully, Lucy was able to sleep for quite a lot of the journey. Strangely, Merlot was checked in at the normal check-in desk along with our luggage. He was taken away and we didn't see him again until we got to the baggage hall at San Francisco, where he was already waiting quietly in his box by the time we got through immigration. We had fun trying to fit all of our luggage into the car that had been booked to take us from the airport to the apartment. Some Tetris skills were put to use, and eventually everything (alive or luggage) was loaded - Becky and I were under a small pile of belongings, but at least we were on our way. APARTMENT The apartment is in a gated community. It's slightly odd to have to use a remote opener (like a car central locking remote) to open the gates to drive in and out of the apartment complex. The complex is very pleasant, with a lot of trees, and with well maintained garden areas. There are also a couple of swimming pools and a gym. The apartment itself is a spacious 2 bedroom apartment - plenty big enough for us for a few weeks while our household belongings bob their way across the Atlantic. JET LAG Saturday morning was an early one, with Lucy waking up at 2:30am, and Becky and I doing shifts throughout the early hours. Sunday morning was more normal. By Monday we were all getting into the swing of the new timezone. SETTLING IN We've got a 'Settling In' service, which is like having a Personal Assistant for various necessary tasks: the very helpful Sherri. Our first meeting with Sherri was on Saturday morning, where she brought a pile of paperwork which explained everything from where the shops were, to who the sports teams were and how to apply for a driving licence. Then we went on an area tour with her to try to orient us a little. She ultimately dropped us off at the car hire location, and we were on our own. It gave us what we needed to do the first set of necessary shopping... which included a visit to Best Buy, where we got the bargain-tastic laptop that I'm now using to type this. ROUTINE Now we're trying to settle into a normal routine. It's Tuesday, and it's now beginning to feel like we've got all of the mundane provisions that you take for granted but miss when you haven't got. Issues like exactly what time to set the alarm, and how long it takes to drive to work now have to settle down and become second nature. NEXT STEPS Things still to be done include getting a Social Security Number (for me); getting driving licences; getting credit cards and mobile phones; buying a car or two; finding a house or flat to rent, and probably a whole lot more. Still, it'll take a very long time before the novelty of driving to work in the California sunshine wears off...