So I’ve been in Austin since Jan 15th now and we’re getting settled pretty quickly.
The movement relocation package was good, it took a whole lot of stress of of us and let me basically just hit the ground running at work. More than half our stuff is still in boxes but we don’t care since we’re moving into a house soon. We got a short-term lease on an apartment but we found a house in short order. The prices are really good here and I wasn’t expecting to find something so nice so fast but since it meets are needs we’re just going to move on it right away. We close at the end of Feb.
We had some problems with the movers.. the scratched the wood floor in our old house really bad and I can’t find my main windows source control server or networking hardware. Luckily I backed up all my subversion stuff on an external hard drive and burned to a CD. Hopefully the stuff is buried in some box somewhere in some corner of a closet.
My replacement dell laptop that I was sent already died. The diagnostics indicate the CPU is bad. I need to try calling them again to see what they can do. I was all ready to write a glowing review 
As a result I’ve been working primary on OSX on a dual proc G5 which is fun but none of the XNA stuff is portable of course which completely sucks and reminds me of another reason not to like it. I’ve been playing with pygame a bit and that is interesting but startup time is really slow on the mac.. maybe I’ll post more about this in the future.
I just busted open the high score on the Astroids cabinet at work (97220) so I’m feeling pretty good about that and made my first major checkin on the MMO server side. I’ve already got some big stuff to work on so that has pretty much been guiding me deep into the bowels of every aspect of the game and server system. Hopefully at some point I’ll get access to a windows machine at home but it probably won’t be for at least another month. Combined with my hectic work schedule it’s going to be a bit before I can move any XNA stuff forward. If I can get my svn stuff imported to textdrive repositories I’ll probably begin porting rampart/beatbox to Mac.
Jacob:
I’m at Dell Headquarters right nearby and I just read this last post. I moved here from the Pacific Northwest as well about three years ago and really like it. Austin is a cool town and if you can deal with the heat you’ll probably enjoy it here.
The post mentions you have a laptop with bad proc and if you need any help with that or have any questions about Austin feel free to email me.
Neil Dell, Inc. neil@dell.com