I Live in New Jersey

Well, I now live in New Jersey. The move went pretty well, except for the minor issue that our apartment's furniture manifest reads as: air bed, two chairs. Yeah, it's a wee bit barren as of yet, and I am thus far refusing to imagine the cost of equipping it with furniture.

My initial furniture goals are something like: work desk, table to eat at, bed, chairs for table. This seems completely inadequate, but then I remember I spent the last year with one chair, one desk, one sofa, and a kotatsu. And I used the sofa as a place to leave things, so I suppose my furniture situation is less dire than imagined.

The apartment is larger than I remembered, and is quite nice. Lots of windows everywhere, and quite pleasantly bright during the day. We made our first deposit at the nearby Whole Foods, and it wasn't terribly expensive (although, I can see how the cost of shopping there could escalate easily enough).

I inadvertently bricked my iPhone yesterday, which had been my sole source of information and connectivity, and proceeded to panic around town looking for an internet connection. It culminated with actually spending the $10/day fee to use a TMobile hotspot at a Starbucks, which didn't even work. If I had carefully read the EULA I'm sure that they had expressly cautioned that I was purchasing the right to use their network for a day, and there were not guarantees it would actually work. Consequently less enthused about the concept of renting short periods of wireless than before.

Eventually I found an unlocked wireless connection I could connect to in my bedroom and was able to reactivate the phone on iTunes. Deepest apologies new neighbor, it was an emergency (speaking of which, I am deeply curious what happens if you slide the "Slide in the case of emergency." slider when your iPhone isn't properly unlocked). Final iPhone thought is that, as I suspected, the 3G network out here has pretty poor coverage, and its easier to just use Edge. However, I get four or five bar AT&T service, which is a handy improvement from driving 20 minutes until I got any reception at all.

All in all, it's a pretty nice situation, and will improve as we get an internet connection and furniture.

To all the Django'ers and anyone else in the northern NJ / NYC area, it'd be great to get to meet you all in person. I'm near Montclair, and you can reach me at (if you have a national phone plan, which I think is the norm these days?) 828-275-9714, at lethain@gmail.com or at Lethain on Twitter.

Time to go search for furniture.