I have been living in Ventura, California (where’s that?) for about two weeks now. I love it so far. The weather is a perfect 65-75 and Sunny every day so far. It cools off into the 50s at night.

When I leave my apartment, if I turn left on the main cross street, it’s only about 10 minute drive to this beautiful beach. While I was there on Sunday I watched a school of dolphins about 100 yards offshore.

If I turn right on the same street, I am in the hills in about 5 minutes, where there are great views of the whole valley after a short walk. From there, I can look out across the city and see fields of strawberries, oranges, lemons, peaches and other crops. (I have been enjoying unbelievably good fresh strawberries every day.) Beyond The fields are the harbors & beaches. Out near the horizon are the Channel Islands, which are a National Park.

I have posted some photos from the drive and my first week here.

I am looking forward to starting work on Tuesday.

Like most people, I was not on 35W last week when it fell.

Update: I posted some of my photos of the site.

After much procrastination, I have put the photos of my June trip to Europe up on Flickr.

I wrote some Perl modules a while back and have always meant to release them to the general community. I haven’t had time to do all that is required to get them up to CPAN yet (namely write tests), but here is the first step. See the “Software by Tom” page.

I expect to release one or two more additional projects soon.

This week the Portland Project released version 1.0. (I spent the summer in Portland working on this.) Linux User & Developer magazine is publishing an article (pdf) in this month’s issue about the Portland effort. This summer we also noticed that Google picked up a pre-release version for their beta release of Google Earth for Linux.