Moving in is going well. There's great things and not-so-great things about this place. I love the apartment itself — very spacious, nice carpets, etc. And the location is awesome — about half a mile down the road I have a Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Circuit City, Books-A-Million, Sav-A-Center grocery store, Waffle House, IHOP, and a bunch of other stuff. About five miles away there's another large collection of useful stores including Best Buy. And of course, being a two-minute walk from Bryan and Cat is great — quite a step up from having a four-hour plane ride separating me from my nearest friends.

There are a few things I'm less excited about. The internet connection in this apartment complex is incredibly unreliable. It gets really slow during the day, and often goes down completely, requiring the modem to be unplugged in order to reset it. Some days it doesn't go down much, but yesterday it was going down every 20-30 minutes. That might not be so terrible if I just checked my email every once in a while, but I'm going to be spending eight hours a day on it, so that's not going to be acceptable.

The apartment complex doesn't allow other providers to offer service here, so at the moment the only other option is to get a Verizon AirCard, based on the cell phone network. That wouldn't be a terrible option (I'd have internet access from almost anywhere), but it only works for one computer at a time. There is a box called the Junxion designed to share an AirCard internet connection with an entire network, but it costs $600. I imagine I could probably build one myself out of a cheap laptop for less, so I might try doing that.

I'm kind of considering starting a petition to convince the apartment complex to allow third-party carriers to offer service, or at least make their service more reliable. The woman in the office said that about 80% of the residents have the internet service, and that it's this unreliable for all of them. I can't imagine I'm the only one bothered by it.

Anyway, that's really the only long-term concern with this place. The other issues are more transient: It's really hot right now — which is not fun when your car has no air conditioning — and the move has left me pretty tight financially. I haven't been able to afford to buy any furniture yet, so my apartment is still bare and I still have to sit on the floor to watch TV or work on the computer. But those issues won't last too long. In a month or so things should be much better.