I should point out that the new apartment is on the fifth floor of a very old pre-war walk-up building. You never realize that you've been taking elevators for granted until you suddenly don't have one.

In general, my new residence seems typical of apartments in the Upper East Side. It'll take me a while to get used to, and it appears that I've grown used to thinking of Harlem as home - despite having lived in the area for only seven months. I am at my old apartment on 120^th street as I write this, and I'm still feeling regretful of my decision to move. Today is the last day of my lease. It's only natural that I feel this way: This apartment was unusually spacious for Manhattan standards, had a great view, an elevator big enough for my bike, and a washer and dryer inside. It was a much higher standard of living than I anticipated before I arrived in the US. But the real reason I am sad to leave is the neighborhood - despite it's stereotypical reputation as a 'dodgy' neighborhood, El Barrio is not only very safe and peaceful, it also has a lot of charm, great food, lots of family run businesses and restaurants, hardly any chain stores, and a sense of community which you can find in only very few other neighborhoods in New York. There were several times I felt guilty about the comfort I was enjoying. It's a well known fact that gentrification has been forcing local residents out of the area for a few years now, and newly-built 'luxury' apartments such as this one - which sticks out like a sore thumb among beautiful old townhouses - are to blame for the rising rent.

Prices seem to have fallen badly this year, though. We were offered a decent reduction on the monthly rent by our landlord, as were our neighbors. The offer came too late; I had by then, already signed up for a new place (the UES apartment), and plans for the move were pretty much irreversible.

On the bright side, I will be saving some money (I had better, given that the new house is nowhere as comfortable as the last). I'll also be closer to work/University, which means my bike ride will be shorter. The most interesting thing is my room: It is connected to the house by a spiral staircase, and leads straight to an almost private terrace!

"Scottish-fold-style sitting contest, for cats."

SETL is incidentally one of the languages we will be studying as part of the 'Honors Programming Languages' course. SETL is said to have indirectly influenced Python. It is based on Set Theory and allows very succinct list-comprehension-like one-liners. At the start of the course (in January), we were told that it was decided to drop Python in SETL's favor since SETL would be more 'fun'.

Another drink I know from a Steely Dan song, again one with rampant Manhattan imagery?

Bad Sneakers and a Piña Colada my friend
Stompin' on the avenue by Radio City with a
Transistor and a large sum of money to spend

This is a ThinkPad X301 (see this ThinkWiki entry for non-biased specs). Probably not the sort of laptop you buy on a grad-student budget, but it was available for a discount at the University computer store.

Debian 'Lenny' is now happily running on it, no major problems in installation or configuration except:

• Wifi is non-free. I overlooked the fact that Intel wifi drivers need proprietary firmware blobs. It works but to depend on the non-free firmware is a shame. Customizing the laptop from Levovo directly may have yielded some free (albeit costlier) options. I wonder what other non-free devices I may encounter. I'm happy with whatever is working out-of-the-box, though.
• There is a stupid glitch that prevents me from using the TrackPad (unless I choose to sacrifice the wonderful TrackPoint scrolling feature famously associated with ThinkPads). This is a problem only for distributions that use fully HAL-automated hardware configuration; it is too late, however, to revert to hand-customized configuration files (xorg.conf, etc).
• Minor suspend/resume issues which I am sure will smoothen out soon.

I still have a few left.

New York is very cold, but the snow is gone. East Harlem, where I now live, is obviously in every way imaginable, a huge change from the various Tokyo localities where I've lived over the last few years. But it has a lot of character. Not far away is a Mom-and-Pop joint that serves delicious Dominican food. Many a five-dollar meal was had there until a home-food routine was finally established this weekend. A trip to Flushing, Queens has provided a reassuringly high selection of Korean (Kimchi here is delicious) and Japanese groceries. In Manhattan, I have been spoken to in Spanish a few times; I probably ought to start learning it. I am taking the subway until I get down to re-assembling my bike. (I carried it with me on the plane!)

Initial impressions of grad school:

• Fewer classroom hours than I expected, but much more than everyone else (who asks me how many courses I am taking) did.
• There are too many interesting courses, and too little time.
• Homework is harder than lectures.
• Both the central NYU library and the department library are to me, utterly awe-inspiring.
• Lecture-halls (at least the ones I've seen) are strictly non-posh.
• Superficial differences at the inter-departmental level (appearance and styling of infrastructure, etc) are enormous.
• Efficiency: Things are so fast and low-ceremony (at NYU). I got an ID card in less than a minute.
• Campus food is good.
• I think it might be more fun than I expected.

The Computer Science department at NYU is part of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. The department seems nice, and there's a decent amount of interesting research they do. While the program is more computer science as opposed to engineering (which is what I want anyway) it appears in line with NYU's reputation for interdisciplinary research/study.

So, after five years of working in Japan, writing software and programming in too many languages (for my own good) I find myself headed off to academia. I honestly never thought this would happen. But I'm looking forward to it, and as much as I am dreading actually leaving Tokyo, I am excited by the prospect of change. Classes begin as soon as I get there. I arrive on Monday morning, and with any luck I can make it to the semester's first lecture on Programming Languages.

While my research interests and long term goals are still fuzzy, I'm looking forward to a semester of course-work, and most of it seems like fun.

Having moved out of my apartment, I am staying with Thilo and his wife Cissy and their seven-month old son. My visa finally arrived (i.e., in hand - I was told that it would be approved but after a delay), thus making me feel somewhat confident about announcing that I am actually going!