apparently I'm a dinosaur

Last week it was one year since I moved to New York. The city is pretty amazing, I've barely scratched the surface of what you can do here. I've spent a lot of it working and not taking advantage of it. I've done almost none of the touristy things you're supposed to do in this city, I haven't been to the Statue of Liberty, I haven't been up the Empire State Building and I haven't been in a single museum. It's a bit sad really. Not that I haven't done fun stuff, but I've definitely focused too much on work. Hopefully I can restore a little balance in the new year.

In other news, I'm going to spend Christmas in Ottawa where my parents have moved to recently. It's fairly crappy not to be going back to Montréal. Ottawa always sort of struck me as a boring town, so any suggestions on fun things to do there would be most appreciated.

I'm a simple guy. I don't necessarily need the latest technology, especially if it's more annoying than the previous tech. I also don't need a lot of TV channels. In Montréal I just had basic, analog cable. That was just fine, and I have a TV tuner card in my box and I could watch TV from the comfort of my chair.

Now I move to Brooklyn and my only choice for cable is Time Warner. Fine. So I'll just get Internet and super basic analog cable. But they don't offer analog cable anymore. In fact they're completely turning it off come January 15. The replacement is digital cable, which requires some sort of a set top box, which is just another large piece of hardware taking up space and I wouldn't be able to change channels using the computer, let alone PVR type applications. There seems to be a standard called CableCARD to allow you to not have a cable box, but there doesn't seem to be tuner cards out there that work under Linux and take these cards. I find this all really annoying. No wonder people turn to Bittorrent for their TV.

So it's been a while since I have actually posted something. The last few weeks has just been full of new stuff and changes. Google is a challenging but very enjoyable place to work. I found a pretty nice place to live in Brooklyn that only costs an arm every month, rather than an arm and a leg. I'll be moving this week, but I'm still trying to find a good gym with squash courts and an active squash ladder (and hopefully not ridiculously expensive) and a good place to continue my 日本語 classes.

I was in Montréal for the holidays, which was nice, but so brief. Nice to see the family and the cats though. I also briefly saw my friends, and also Olivier who I haven't seen for a year. I'm hoping they will come visit me. Wish I could hang with them for New Year's Eve, they're renting a cottage and the whole deal. I'll pretty much need to be in New York, hopefully I will find a fun place to go.

My Debian work has been suffering a fair amount the last month. I sent a good deal of my time off getting Iceweasel into better shape and I've uploaded the result, but I need someone (hopefully Mike) to sign it and get it in the archive, since I'm away from my key.

So I begin work tomorrow. It's been an interesting few days so far. Border officers are not really pleasant people (from my sample size of one). I've been put up in a beautiful corporate apartment basically in Times Square. It's just going to make it worse when I have to find an expensive and worse apartment elsewhere. Times Square is full of tourists and is quite loud, flashy and expensive. But luckily I found a cheap Japanese place around the corned called Sapporo that's relatively cheap, so I've eaten there three times already. I've seen my brother a couple of times already and he's shown me a couple of good eateries. I've also seen a few apartments in Brooklyn that are frighteningly expensive for where they are. I guess that's just normal around here.

Wish me luck!

This is my last full week here before moving to New York. What should I do with myself?

So since mricon already spilled the beans, I'm moving to New York City at the end of November. Having never really been to NYC (I drove through it once), this is more than a little crazy. But it's a great opportunity and I've never lived anywhere but Montréal, so it should be a bit of an adventure. Pretty scary too.

I'm hoping my new job won't completely kill my free time and my ability to work on Debian, but I'm guessing it will for a couple of months. Apologies to everyone for not having gotten Iceweasel packages together yet, but between wisdom teeth being pulled and "real life" and my co-maintainer taking a sabbatical, it's been tough to make progress.

I'm also looking for replacements for me here in Montréal, both at work and at home. If you're in the city and have some good Linux SysAdmin experience or want to share a nice apartment with a couple of LJers drop me a line.