We had an awesome cable internet provider in San Francisco but unfortunately they don’t serve our new area. So we were in the market for a new internet company.

I consulted DSL Reports to see if I could find another small cable or DSL provider with good customer reviews. That’s how I found Astound in the first place. Unfortunately this only led to dead ends, such as business wireless providers that would charge north of $100 per month.

I knew that as a last resort I could go to Comcast for cable. However, I was trying to avoid this if at all possible. Firstly, I checked out their pricing and it was quite expensive. Secondly, I have never heard anyone say a good word about Comcast – they seem to be one of the most-hated companies in America.

There were no other cable companies in my area so I started looking into DSL. Every DSL company I spoke to said that I would need to get an AT&T phone line and switch it over. They couldn’t confirm DSL availability for my address without a phone number. Since you can get a phone line through cable, I clearly didn’t want to order a phone number for the purposes of DSL if I was going to end up with cable anyway.

The only company that could confirm DSL availability for my address was AT&T. And unfortunately our address was coming up in the system as NOT served by DSL. Given that we are in the middle of a Silicon Valley town, I was shocked! -1 to AT&T.

Just as we were on the verge of ordering Comcast cable, I found out from a neighbour downstairs that she was an AT&T DSL customer. There are only four apartments in the building and AT&T was saying that apartments 1 and 3 could get DSL but apartments 2 and 4 could not, despite the fact that 2 and 4 are closer to the phone line. She was in the process of moving apartments within the same building and stood to lose her service. -1 to AT&T.

Fortunately my neighbour managed to talk to an engineer who confirmed that this was an error and if there was DSL to the building it would be to the entire building. +1 to AT&T. He said that he would update the addresses in the system but it would take a week before it would update for the sales and customer service departments. -1 to At&T.

Once this process was complete, I tried to order DSL from AT&T. I looked at other DSL providers but AT&T offered a discount for bundling phone and internet and had a pretty sweet special that would give me a very high speed for a year at a much cheaper price. +1 to AT&T. The downside was that I was locked into a contract for a year even though I wasn’t yet sure about the quality of service. -1 to AT&T.

I decided to go with it anyway on the basis of my neighbor’s experience but when I tried to order the phone and internet online, the system wouldn’t let me select internet as an option, despite confirming the availability of DSL to my home. -1 to AT&T.

AT&T’s website has a system where you can chat to help/sales agents, which is a great facility when you really don’t want to spend lots of time and money on the phone. +1 to AT&T. The online chat agent told me to put through an order for home phone and an order for DSL without home phone separately and then call to merge the orders. I did so but when I called to merge the orders I was told this was incorrect advice and they would have to cancel the order for DSL without home phone and do a new one, attaching it to the phone line. -1 to AT&T.

I ordered the DSL line to be attached to the home phone order but I was unable to cancel the order for DSL without home phone until 24 hours had gone by. -1 to AT&T. I waited until the time had passed then phoned back and cancelled the order. I was very clear about which order to keep alive and which order to cancel and thankfully AT&T got this right. +1 to AT&T.

We bought a modem through AT&T because we didn’t have one (we had returned the previous one to Astound) and we wanted to ensure compatibility. It was expensive – $75 including postage just for a modem (we already had a wireless router). -1 to AT&T. When it showed up, it was without voice filters and there was a message saying “this compartment intentionally left empty (filters not required for customers without AT&T voice service)”. Since we had ordered voice services, we did need filters. -1 to AT&T.

I called AT&T and explained the situation. They said they would send me voice filters and it should take two days to get to me. +1 to AT&T. At my request, they credited my account for an extra week since I was yet to start getting service. +1 to AT&T.

When the voice filters arrived on Thursday, we plugged everything in but the DSL still did not work. -1 to AT&T. I called the help desk on Friday and they eventually confirmed a fault on the line. They said they could send an engineer that day. +1 to AT&T. But they said the engineer’s slot was between 10am and 8pm. -1 to AT&T.

Fortunately, the engineer showed up at midday. +1 to AT&T. The fault was not in our house but further down the line. He managed to fix it. +1 to AT&T.

When I tried to register, I couldn’t do this in Firefox or Chrome. -1 to AT&T. The website claimed to support Safari, but this didn’t work either, even though I had the latest version. -1 to AT&T. The engineer brought his Windows laptop upstairs and I used that to register. +1 to AT&T

When my husband came home, he tried to set up the wireless router. AT&T wouldn’t authenticate the router and after an hour of fiddling with the configurations, everything was broken. -1 to AT&T.

I called the help desk again this morning, though I eventually shunted them over to talk to my husband. They said they didn’t support Linksys routers and seemed to want to put everything back so we could only connect via an ethernet cable one machine at a time. -1 to AT&T. Eventually, after a lot of arguing and questions, it turned out that the password for configuring modems and routers was different to the password that I had set up when I registered. I had never been given this password so presumably it was embedded in the modem. -1 to AT&T.

Once we had the correct password, we were able to get everything working relatively quickly. The speed so far seems fine. +1 to AT&T.

I’m so grateful to finally have internet at home as I’ve been spending a lot of time going to the library, Starbucks and borrowing the neighbour’s wifi (with her permission but it’s been a patchy service). However, I’m cranky that it’s taken seven weeks since we moved into the new place to get to this point! -1 to AT&T.

That’s 17 negative points to AT&T and 11 positive points. That makes a net score of negative 6 and I think I was being generous! Hmmm….

Spotting hummingbirds is one the great joys of living in California. They are just so darn cute! We have hung a hummingbird feeder on our balcony and the little birds have been coming to visit. They usually announce themselves with the loud whir of wings and sometimes they tweet.

In the wild, they usually hover while they drink from flowers. However, our feeder has a ring that they can perch on so we often see them quite still. Sometimes they stop feeding and have a little sing.

They’re territorial and I have seen one bird chase away another before. We had a cardboard hummingbird hanging off the feeder for a while but I removed it as I was worried it might be scaring some of the less assertive birds away.

They’re really hoeing into the syrup water – we’ll have to refill after just a few days!

This is a pretty good selection – you can see that we are getting a few different species of hummingbird. Some have iridescent blue-green colouring, other ones are red like a robin redbreast. Lovely! For more photos see the Flickr set.

Look how German and 1980s she looks here. And look how dark the imagery is, with the wasteland landscape and mushroom clouds.

I also found this slightly bizarre 2009 version. It’s much brighter and peppier and more cartoonish and there’s a few sections in French.

By the way, I refuse to listen to the English version, “99 Red Balloons”. It’s a bad translation for starters, starting with the title and all the way through the lyrics. “Luft” means “air” not “red” and if you watch the videos above you’ll see they both have balloons of many colours. Also, I just don’t think it’s quite as lyrical.

The biggest advantage with the move is that my husband can walk or cycle to work rather than having a mammoth commute from the city. We are also saving a huge amount of money on rent. But there are a few other nice side-benefits as well. Firstly, the weather is so much better than in the city. San Francisco is infamous for being cold and foggy in summer but it’s very much a micro-climate and everywhere else in the Bay Area is warm and sunny at this time of year. Secondly, we are now only 10-20 minutes’ drive from great hikes in the state parks. If you look at the map of the Bay Area below, you can see that the peninsula is rimmed by green. Thirdly I didn’t have a pool near me in the city and since moving here I’ve been swimming a few times a week, which is something I really enjoy. There are tennis courts too but you need a key and I haven’t got myself organised yet, nor do I have a partner to play with.

View Larger Map

We have bought a car – a 2007 Prius and we got a great price for it. My husband bought it the day I was coming back from New York and came to pick me up from the airport. It’s amazing to me that we both went 33 years without a car or even a driving licence but within six months of moving to California we had our licences and within a year we had a car. The Prius is not the most exciting car in the world but the fuel efficiency is terrific (we’ve rented a few cars so we have a good basis for comparison) and because they are so common in the Bay Area, there are some good options on the second-hand market. It’s a lot newer than I expected that we would be able to afford, though there are also quite a few miles on the clock already. This area is great for walking or cycling (flat, unlike the city) and there’s a train up to San Francisco that takes 40 minutes to an hour, but it’s really great to have the freedom of a car and be able to get out to do hikes on the weekend.

I had a great time in New York, though it was unpleasantly hot and humid. I stayed with our friends Mike and Jessica in Brooklyn and met their gorgeous one-year-old daughter. I also stayed with a travel writing friend Wendy at her mother’s apartment in Midtown, in order to spread myself around a bit. I caught up with my friends Rema and Sheelagh and Alex and Kachina and their two-year-old son. TBEX itself was hectic with lots of late-night partying going on and it was really great to meet so many people that I’ve known online for so long. I have promised a lot of New York-related blog posts and so far I have this post on gorillas at Bronx Zoo and this video of a cool interactive art project involving street pianos.

Please subscribe to Roaming Tales or join the page on Facebook to keep up with the new posts. Among the upcoming posts, I have Cajun food in Staten Island, a behind-the-scenes tour of restoration efforts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a review of an Afghan restaurant in Manhattan.

If you are interested in my professional work, I have been writing a bit for The Australian lately. I had an article on electric cars in news today and a feature on stem cell research ethics in the health section late last month.

It’s been a fantastic weekend, crammed with fun things. Yesterday was especially full. At lunch time we headed to Golden Gate Park for BattleUS, a slalom skating competition. Our friend Natalie was competing in the international women’s tournament and we arrived just in time for her heat. We were well impressed by her mastery of tricks and speed – and so were the judges, as she got through her heat to the semi-finals held today.

I didn’t make it down to the park again today but I was excited to hear that she made it through to the finals and came fourth overall in the women’s comp. Her world ranking was 53 before this weekend and she’s probably shot forward a few places now. Well done, Nat! (It’s not been updated yet but I’m sure they’ll show the results on this page soon!).

Slalom involves skating around cones in all sorts of configurations including on toes or heels and even jumping. It’s pretty cool to watch! As well as the women’s heats, we saw the men’s heats. It was a warm day and I enjoyed sitting on the hillside, chasing the shade as it retreated the hill and tanning my legs. As well as the slalom, I also watched a gopher digging up the hillside and poking his head out from time to time, which was terribly cute!

In the evening we met up with a friend FeLicia, who I met in writing class. We had a simple Asian dinner at a restaurant called LimeTree in the Inner Sunset. Then we went to see the end-of-year show for the San Francisco Circus Center. It was a really high-quality show for only $20 – my favourite act was the aerial hoop spinning. In the first act, they had a man doing it; they topped this with twin girls in the second act! I also loved the rope climbing, the Chippendale-inspired shirtless hoop diving, the unicycles and several (though not all) of the clown acts.

We spent two consecutive Saturdays hiring a car, driving down to Palo Alto, and spending the day looking at places. We nearly took a place in – I kid you not on the name – Professorville in Palo Alto. This was a quirky craftsman cottage with red windows – but we were gazumped by an eager tenant offering more money and a quicker rental. We thought very seriously about a place in the hills in Portola Valley, backing on to wilderness with miles of hiking trails – but we decided that it would be too isolated and would mean buying not one, but two, cars. Finally, we took a two-bedroom unit in a central location, close to shops and parks and even a pool nearby. We don’t have a long credit history in this country but our current landlord gave us a fantastic reference and that clinched the place for us – yay!

I haven’t actually seen the place myself yet. My husband went to see it in his lunch hour or after work and got the low-down from the current tenants. You might think I’m mad but actually this bodes well – out of the seven homes we have shared, he has chosen three of them sight unseen by me and they have been the best three of the lot! I’m told the place is nice, with a balcony, a parking space and only four units in the complex. Having said that, it sounds a lot more functional than our current home, which is a gorgeous two-bedroom cottage surrounded by flower gardens in a great neighbourhood. That’s okay – we’re going to be saving a lot of money on rent, nearly a grand per month, so we’ll be able to afford other compensations.

We’ll be moving sometime in the second half of June. I know our new address already, so feel free to write to me and ask. We’ll get mail forwarding anyway though so it doesn’t really matter for the time being.

I’m really glad to have this squared away. Once we have a firm move-in date I can start booking removalists and cleaners and so on and try to make it all fit in around my trip to New York.

We are busy playing host in our final days in this house. We had Matt Judd stay with us last weekend, after he finished attending a conference in San Francisco. We had a great time, showing him the Ferry Building, our favourite hang-outs in the Mission, and the California Academy of Sciences. Matt even inspired me to join him for a jog on Sunday morning after a little too much indulgence on Saturday! We’ll have Natalie stay with us on Thursday night before her slalom skating competition this weekend. That’s it for house guests, but hopefully we might have some friends over for dinner soon too.

The photo is of my mother and me some time in the late 1970s or 1980 at the latest. All you can see in the background are trees and a rainwater tank, but I am pretty sure we are at our log-cabin home on the NSW South Coast where I lived with both my parents until I was four.

Thanks for the memories, Mum.

I will miss our little home in Noe Valley. We have a super-cute cottage with a garden and view of the city, friendly neighbours, a rec centre with a tennis court nearby, lots of cafés and shops, and a tram line into town. San Francisco is not a big city but it’s interesting – there is always something going on. I’ve also got friends here – in the city and also in the East Bay. It’s started to feel like home.

Still there are advantages to the move. San Francisco is foggy and cold in summer but elsewhere in the Bay Area it is sunny and warm. I’m looking forward to that! We should get more for our money in terms of housing stock without being too suburban – the places we are looking are really more like little, upmarket towns than suburbs. Although I work from home, the location should be better for me in my coverage of the media and tech scene in Silicon Valley. We are planning to buy a car and this will also be good for my travel writing as it will make short trips out of town far more convenient and cost-effective. (We both got our driving licences earlier this year – I got mine about five weeks before my husband so I joke that I am the senior driver!)

We have let our landlord know and we need to get the house ready for tenancy viewings so that we can get it rented out and avoid any double rent. We have also started looking down south – we rented a car on Saturday and saw a few places and we plan to do this again this weekend. Hopefully we will find somewhere soon as I am going to New York in June and I would like to have everything in place before then. I dislike moving but I’ve done it enough times by now that I should be quite good at it! Wish us luck!

I’ve also started an advanced fiction writing workshop with Linda Watanabe McFerrin, who I first met at the Book Passage Travel Writing & Photography Conference last August. That’s once a week until the end of June with one-to-one work outside the group meetings as well. I’ve been trying to write a novel for some time and I’m hoping this could get me on track.

Meanwhile, I’m expecting to go to New York at the end of June for TBEX10, the Travel Blog Exchange conference. I’ve raised money through a site called Kickstarter, which is about funding creative projects by raising money from the public. A few face-to-face friends have contributed but mostly it’s been online friends – readers of my food and travel blog Roaming Tales and Twitter followers. I still need to book my airline ticket and arrange a hotel but I’m excited by the trip – it’ll let me meet a lot of fellow bloggers face to face, plus I’ll get to see friends in New York and hang out in the city for a few days.

I’ve updated my travel blog quite a bit lately, so please do check it out or become a fan on Facebook. This week’s posts have mostly been about Hearst Castle on the California Coast.

LA Times | 2 May 2010: San Francisco: The rolling transit museum known as the F line
Travel article on San Francisco’s historic trams, which come from all around the world, including Melbourne.

Galavanting | 2 May 2010: Behind the Veil
Travel essay on spending a week living with an Iraqi family in Syria and my experience as a woman in this part of the world.

The Australian | 15 March 2010: Home invasion of 3D’s visual power
Feature for Media section on 3D television.

The Australian | 1 March 2010: Faceless no more – Facebook admits errors
Feature for Media section on Facebook’s response to cyber-vandalism of tribute sites for dead children.

New Statesman | 14 January 2010: Our friends electric
Article on renewable energy – wind, wave and tidal – in the Orkney Islands of Scotland. (I made a trip to Orkney to research this right before leaving Britain, in June 2009).