cww.blog!

First off, thank you, Andrew, for your comment. I am excited you have found something worth reading here.

As I am moving to Pittsburgh in August to work on a masters degree in computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, I have been looking for places to live on the Internet. As usual, craigslist has proven very helpful. As has about.com, which I normally find to be abysmal at best.

I've been looking for apartments near CMU and near downtown Pittsburgh; I believe either location would be suitable for me. However, locations near and in downtown Pittsburgh are typically rather expensive, and I have little confidence in the low noise levels some apartment managers and landlords advertise for their housing near CMU.

I now have a stack of papers about a quarter inch high of apartment advertisements, and I plan to pore over them and select the best, say, seven or eight on my flight to Pittsburgh on Thursday. I'll be visiting for the weekend, touring the CMU campus and looking for somewhere to live, and should remain nominally out of communication with the rest of the world for the duration of my stay.

As I know I will be in Pittsburgh at least 18 months (apparently, the M.S. computer engineering requires at least that long), I'm looking for housing I can lease for a relatively long time. Which is weird. First, I've never before been able to definitively say yes, I'll be here for another year... or even six months. I enjoy moving and its subsequent change of scenery, so that's usually what happens. Second, I'm trusting my future landlord, etc., to keep everything in good shape until I arrive in Pittsburgh in August. I'm also trusting myself to make a decision this weekend which I won't regret a few months down the road.

I also need to get my current employer on to my resume and post a part-time employment advertisement for Pittsburgh on monster.com or something like that.

In other news, I sat at Starbucks a couple days ago and designed a layout for this site that promises to be much more pleasing to the eye than Movable Type's default. It will be at least another week (and probably longer than that) before it is fully implemented.

Adieu for now. I need to work out when my flight takes off and then get some sleep.