The mission is finally over. I now have the last of the furniture for my apartment. This weekend I picked up the chairs from Sphere Designs in San Francisco and some nice B&W speaker stands from Century Stereo
It’s been enjoyable picking out all the little extra things for my place but now I’m growing tired of it. What I have now is nice and sufficient for my new little place.

Having been out for dinner with Shaw, Jess and Nikki we planned to head onto a movie. With the choice of films that we all hadn’t seen shrinking the only option was Babel. Now this film stars Brad Pitt so you might think it would be a big hit but it appears to have past a lot of people by. Now….do not go and see this movie if you intend going out afterwards, not because its bad, but because its long, slow and can be quite depressing. Having said all that, its actually a very good movie which will probably do far better on DVD than at the Cinema.

This weeks trip to Tahoe was originally intended to be an opening ski season affair. However, nature decided that wasn’t a good idea and Heavenly didn’t open. It was just nice to get away for a few days anyway. We did try to go to Boreal which claimed to have one lift open. Unfortunately their definition of “base snow” wasn’t what I expected and we gave it a miss.

Betty and Forrest chose to throw a Pre-holiday dinner, sort of a before everyone gets busy with Thanksgiving. Nikki always does the prep work for dinners and stuff so I decided I’d do it this time. I chose to cook “Lamb in Spinach” and “Chinese Chicken Balls” *snigger*. It took so much longer than expected to prepare the Lamb. Thanks to Nikki for her help with the meat and most of all for rescuing it at the last minute. Anyway – we drove up to San Francisco with the food to Forrest’s apartment. He’d got the activity room in his tower block. The room has a galley kitchen, dining area then a nice lounge like area with big screen TV.

Betty & Forrest
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On Friday we went down to Santa Clara for Sarah’s birthday starting at their house and moving to a local bar. The bar was interesting, a biker bar as I call it, with a live band. This evening Sarah’s (and Jessica’s) dad was playing the drums in the band. As usual I forgot to take my camera with me, ah well. Anyway we had a good night but kept it short as we knew we’d be out again this weekend.

When you’re new to America then there’s not much chance of getting credit of any kind. So getting a loan for a car is hard work. Given that I want to build a credit score, getting a car loan is a must. Thankfully working for Apple appears to carry some weight with financial organisations (I don’t think this is though any formal relationship just that I work for a big successful company).

Having had several arrangements with different companies verbally agreed my social security number came through. At this point all the companies went away and started to sort out their rates. Suddenly the rates increased, some even refused. Amazing really, since they said “you have no credit rating”. That’s funny, I told them I didn’t have a social security number yet, was new to the country so how did they expect my new social security number to have credit? At this point I was advised to give them everything and any document. Even if they only asked for a few things I sent everything.
It all turned out fine in the end, there are a few ways to reduce the rate once you’ve got a figure from the financial company:

• Tell them you’ve got a better offer and who it’s from
• Pay by direct payment from a checking/savings account
• Put 20% or even 40% down for a deposit on the car
• Have your salary deposited with the same financial institution

Last night I went to a presentation by David Patterson on the future of computing in the new age of multi-core CPUs. The presentation was given at Xerox Parc, Palo Alto, which has always been somewhere I’ve wanted to visit.

I was by far the youngest person in the room and obviously lacking a beard. There were people from way back in the “good old” processor design days and lots of researches from Stanford. While it was interesting there was little to take away that could be applied on todays multi-core processors.
Links:

• http://view.eecs.berkeley.edu/wiki/Main_Page
• http://ramp.eecs.berkeley.edu/

I’ve finally ordered the car on my wishlist. The Scion tC. Getting the loan in place, and the actual car has been a bit of an ordeal. I want the option side-airbags, a factory fitted option, so the car has to be sourced from the dealer network or come from Japan.
By next week I should be driving around in a nice manual car again, really do dislike automatics.

Halloween is party weekend in America. We were invited to a huge party up in the Los Gatos hills. Getting there was a challenge in itself being down small winding roads. The decorations at this place were amazing, like nothing I’d seen before…they’d definitely had some experience of doing it before. This year Nikki and I decided to go as Cowboy and Indian. I was trying to blend in with the locals 😉



On the Sunday there was another party for Nikki’s old bar friends in San Jose. This was a more mellow affair with BBQ food and some cool music….it was a school night after all
Before I get any more emails, I’ve heard all the “brokeback” and “woody” comments 😉