Kindling some interest in reading again...

Yep, the awful pun should indicate to you that my Kindle arrived on time yesterday. It was a real impulse purchase, kinda predicated on the unproven hope that I can somehow transfer Seattle Central Library PDF files onto it for portable reading, rather than relying on many hard-earned dollars and the Amazon Kindle store entirely. So far I'm not blown away with the device but I will give it time for the love to grow.

Of course I'll never be able to Kindle-ify my entire print collection but at least I can stop buying more dead trees...

i Haz Pwned!

Finally manged to jailbreak/unlock my damn iPhone, but not before I'd bought a new USB hub (cheers Ed for the tip) and abandoned Quickpwn in favor of the more hands-on Pwnage... 'Course I had to wipe my device in the process so I'm in the process of getting back all my trusty apps and data... but at least AT&T ain't getting their 500 bucks!

I have strings!

6 of them, in fact - our air shipment arrived this morning, including one of my guitars, which was almost in tune, even. So that's one major itch scratched and Seattle feels immediately more like home!

Ironically my Amazon Kindle 2 was supposed to arrive today but I got a mail saying the shipment might be delayed due to adverse weather... Fingers crossed.

Happy Birthday to me!

It's my first ever birthday in the USA.

Not my first ever abroad though. I once had a birthday in Fiji, and we flew out the next day. During the flight we crossed the international date line so of course it rolled over back to my birthday again... I didn't get any extra presents, but it did feel like I'd aged an extra year by the time we landed in LA.

Update: Got a huge birthday cake from The Cheesecake Factory - still more than half of it left...

500 Bucks!

As you may know, the iPhone is everything I ever wanted in a phone/PDA, and so I was happy to continue the relationship over here. Currently I'm still using my 1st gen iPhone, but the roaming charges are extortionate and I obviously don't want to continue the O2 UK contract. However, I suspect Apple might have something better around the corner so I'm reluctant to upgrade from the 1st gen device for now.

The ideal solution, I surmised, was to jailbreak my current phone for the interim and survive on a PAYG sim card. AT&T sold me a sim card for next to nothing. I have so far utterly failed to jailbreak...

On the macbook, in order to use Quickpwn or Pwnage to jailbreak the phone, since they rely on DFU mode, you have to install an older, developer version of the OS X USB kernel driver (cos Apple have disabled DFU mode in the current Leopard version). I've read that this can have some pretty adverse effects on the mac so I decided not to risk it. Unfortunately, the Windoze version of Quickpwn simply refuses to run on my Dell laptop... so I'm stuck. It a company laptop, and I have to jump through a couple of hoops in order to run things with administrator rights, but that's my only fallback left.

In a moment of weakness I headed back to the AT&T store to buy a spanking new 16Gb iPhone, but they wanted a $500 'deposit' since I haven't got a credit rating yet. 500 bucks!

They're here!

We're now firmly esconced in our temporary Seattle accommodation - which is very nice... Unfortunately for The Boy, we don't have a view of the Space Needle but we can see it from almost everywhere around here...

The journey, I must say, was one of the least unpleasant I've ever experienced. Even the initial departure delay was made up by a fast flight time, and The Boy slept most of the way. I'd say we were in the rental car driving north within a 1/2 hour of the 747 touching tarmac, and in our apartment not much more than an hour. Not bad. (we brought our own sat nav this time!).

I mentioned we had lots of luggage and the car rental clerk 'upgraded' us to a SUV... she told me don't worry, it's not one of the big ones... so I accepted - and the feckin' thing is HUGE! I just about managed to get it into one of the apartment lot spaces (with a bit of lube to assist) and now I'm scared to try getting it out again!

Just back from spending a small fortune on groceries, now lunch beckons...

Seattle Bound!

I'm typing this in our cold, empty kitchen in our cold, empty house. A lorry has just taken away the skip full of junk that was sitting on our drive. Our goods departed in a 40' container truck yesterday and I have only a soon-to-be-returned laptop and soon-to-be-disconnected broadband connection here. Our passports just arrived - yay! so we are good to go. More good news is that we accepted an offer on this house yesterday too, so another loose end is tied. The best news is that we can finally stop concentrating on the details of getting out of here, and start looking to the future.

In other words, Adios UK, Hello America!

A month managed to slip by...

... in the quiet desperation of trying to get everything done and ready for our departure.

Included in that month was a fair amount of work on the house, showing potential buyers around the house, opening of a US bank account, filling in another series of forms for US customs and our goods shipment, liquidating our meager financial assets ready to transfer over (and being freshly depressed at the deplorable exchange rate), much stripping down of family goods on ebay and freecycle.org, hiring a skip and cramming it with all the junk we decided not to bring, or couldn't sell/give away (Mr Probert I'm looking at you...), heading to the US Embassy for our visas TWICE and having the UK's worst snow in years on both occasions, getting rid of our cars and hiring another to tide us over til we fly out, researching the Seattle neighborhoods and rental market in advance, trying to keep on top of the (admittedly minimal) work requirements I currently have - and three stressed out people.

But we're getting there.