After living with my parents for two years following my graduation from college, I now have an apartment of my own. Yay!

It’s nice to be living on my own again. Living with parents and siblings is nice for having family around, and it’s a great way to save money, but after awhile one starts to lose the sense of independence that one had gained while away at college. I think two years was a good balance.

This move has, of course, meant lots of shopping for a number of miscellaneous things, like a toaster oven and a computer desk. I got the toaster at Target, along with some dishes and silverware. The desk came from Ikea, along with a matching bookshelf that I haven’t yet assembled. I still need to get a TV and a stand for it, though that’s more for the sake of video games and occasional movies than actually watching broadcast TV.

I wanted to get Verizon’s FTTP service, FiOS, for Internet access, since it’s quite fast (even in the upstream direction!) and not too expensive, Unfortunately, it’s not available here, or at least not yet. I went with Comcast’s cable broadband instead, but just a few days after my move-in, lo and behold: Verizon is installing their new fiber cables to the apartment buildings here. They must have seen me coming. :-)

Incidentally, Comcast’s setup procedure sucks for Linux users. When the modem is first connected, you’re stuck in a sandbox where all you can connect to is a Comcast server that wants you to run an “installation wizard”. The installation wizard is a Windows executable that fiddles with your network settings, changes your browser’s homepage to Comcast.net, replaces IE’s “spinning ‘e’” throbber icon with the Comcast logo, sets up your Comcast email address, installs their “Desktop Doctor” troubleshooting software, and then, finally, uploads some sort of configuration file to the modem so that you’re not in the sandbox anymore.

Needless to say, I didn’t want all the extra crud that the wizard installs. I called Comcast’s support line, hoping they could just change something on their end to get me out of the unnecessary sandbox, but they told me it’d take three days to do that — apparently they’d have to send a technician on a house call to manually upload that configuration file to the modem. I ended up doing the setup using a VMware virtual machine, with a snapshot so I could roll back all the changes once I was done. But it’d be nice if they'd just give me the connectivity and make it straightforward to skip the rest.