The first move

After a slightly more difficult than expected search I've found a new house to live in. It's a share house a few hundred metres from my current house. I wanted somewhere that close since I don't have a car and so need somewhere central with good public transport. My current location is perfect in these respects and the new house will be just as good.

I'll start moving my stuff into the new house next weekend, but this weekend it's the move into the new office. I'm packing today, and tomorrow, with the help of a mate and his trailer will move my computers, books and desks. I'm only taking what is necessary for working on Sydney, all other distractions will go to the new house or into storage.

I've made a slight miscalculation with the amount of notice I had to give for my current residence. I thought I had to give 2 weeks notice that I was going to move out. It turns out I need to give 3 weeks notice before I leave. That's an extra $270 I'm going to have to pay to my old landlord for a flat I'll have moved out of and will be completely empty and unused during that third week. At a time when I'm also having to fork out bond money for both the new house and new office it's a costly mistake. A simple call to the real estate agent on my part to check how much notice I needed to give would have been advisable.

I can't dwell on that though, the purpose of the move wasn't to save money but to create a better working environment. The money I will be saving in rent, $65 per week, is just a nice side-benefit. The real measure of success will be if I'm able to once again properly focus on Sydney.

These boxes aren't going to pack themselves though so it's time to stop procrastinating and get to work. I'll post again soon once I've settled in.

Time to start packing

I'm starting to organise for the move to the new shared office space. I've received confirmation by email stating what the rent and bond will be and the date I can move in it so it's all stations go. The rent will be $55 per week and I can start moving in on the 16th of this month. My tenancy will be based on a handshake agreement between myself and the other tenants so I at least wanted those important figures and dates in writing from day one.

Currently I pay $270 per week for my 1 bedroom unit (home/office), sleeping upstairs and working, cooking, eating, washing in the one room downstairs. It's a little pricey mainly because of the location, almost in the centre of the city. I could justify the high weekly cost when I was paying for only half the rent, $135, with personal funds and the other half, $135, with business funds. Once I move into the new office though I can't really justify spending the whole $270 solely on a place to live.

So as well as moving to a new office I'll also be moving house. These last 18 months were my first experience of living alone in a 1 bedroom place and I have to admit I didn't really like it much. It's far too isolating especially when you're working alone most of the time as well.

I'll be going back to living in share accomodation and it's something I'm looking forward to. I'd lived in share accomodation for about 7 years with nearly 20 different people before my current house. It's not for everyone but I enjoy the variety you get from with living with people of all types.

I wouldn't consider moving back to share accomodation if I was still working from home. Nobody wants a flatmate that's home all the time or else they wouldn't after a few months of me hanging around the house all day every day. There's also the security aspect, usually flatmates are OK but then there's their friends, people who forget to lock the doors and parties where you don't know most of the people wandering around your house.

Hopefully I'll find a suitable share house in the same suburb I'm in now. My current suburb is ideal being in a central location, with excellent public transport on my doorstep and within walking distance of my favourite pubs and venues. A room for around the same rent as what I currently pay, $135 out of personal funds, will put me ahead by close to $100 per week and in a better work environment as well. After that there'll be no more excuses for not making the progress I should be.

A second blog

I've started another blog, titled Lachlan on Delphi. I'll be using it to record my experiences mainly with Borland's Delphi software development environment with the odd excursion into other areas. I won't be discussing Sydney over there, so if you're not a programmer it probably won't interest you much.

On a sidenote, if you are a programmer and you haven't looked at Delphi in a while, it's time you took another look. Borland is taking back their position of producing the best development tools on the market with the latest version of Delphi. The new Delphi 2005 supports Win32 development with Object Pascal and .NET development with both C# and Object Pascal all in the one IDE. Throw in a bunch of other enhancements like refactoring, direct integration to version control, automatic file history tracking, a highly customisable IDE and a Model Driven Architecture framework and it's proving to be a killer release.