One of my online friends -- to distinguish from one of my real friends; Sorry, but you can't form as strong an attachment online as face to face; Not that some people don't have better online friends than offline, but that is an issue with the person, not the medium; Online is still too impersonal and detached; Me telling an online friend things that I don't tell offline friends is not a sign of a deeper friendship, just like telling your psychiatrist your deepest feelings doesn't make you closer to her than to your friends. -- anyway, one of my online friend's girlfriend's parents got into a serious car accident.

I find it hard to empathize with that situation, as I've never lost someone really close to me. Relatives die and so forth, but I'm not really close to relatives outside my immediate family. So I don't know what I'd do in my friend's situation. You need to be supportive and so forth and I'm sure if it was someone I really knew it would be easier to feel something. But in a general situation, I'm rather unfeeling about death and suffering. It happens, it's a natural part of life, get over it...

Rent is going to go up again in May. $1075 for a six-month lease and $1225 month-to-month, so it's +$150 for the lease and +$250 month-to-month compared to now. A rent increase makes me look around for another apartment, but the rent that I'm paying is on the low side so unless I'm really committed to moving I'm not going to (at least not for the reason of rent).

The new apartments near Jack London Square (they call it "The Landing at Jack London Square", but I consider JLS to be rather small with a bunch of stuff around it and these apartments are even farther away, although still only 3-4 blocks from JLS) are finally open. Really nice apartments with a gym and pool and other amenities and really expensive. $1550 for a studio of only 500 square feet, $2100 for a 1 bedroom about as big as what I have, $2650 for a two bedroom. Although it'd be nice to live there, I want to get a bigger place and at the two-bedroom price point I might as well get a house. Living in a nice area is not as important -- it's not as if I go out much. The only good thing going for it is living near Dave, but he's still a couple of miles away so it's not going to matter much.

So I'm looking through the Berkeley house listings. It's so hard to tell what's good and what's bad based on the little descriptions and checking things out yourself takes a lot of work. But there are some small places (mostly 2 bed/1 bath for upper $200k to upper $300k) which I can afford. One on Donald's block so I know what the neighborhood is like. Actually, that's a double lot (two small houses) for $340k which is a pretty good price (with no knowledge of the specifics). Also some weird listings like an 11 bed/5.5 bath 3600 sq ft place that's being used as a retirement home. "Can be delivered vacant or with retirement home business." Ok, if you ask for it vacant all those old people are out on the street? Like I'd feel good doing that...

Looks like ICANN may give Verisign (through its subsidiary, Network Solutions) exclusive control of the .com TLD and long-term control of the .net TLD. A lot of people on Slashdot don't like the thought of a big company (or just Network Solutions) controlling the all-important .com TLD. Then again, Slashdotters tend to be way too liberal. Me, I don't think Network Solutions has done a bad job. Sure, it costs $35 a year, but they've kept the system going, relatively well for years. Network Solutions also at least tries to protect people's privacy (by restricting access to its WHOIS database, which is also a sound business decision, but I believe that was overruled in the courts). I'd rather have one good entity doing .com than a half-dozen of varying quality. Other TLDs should be given to other entities, I have no problem with that.

I also saw an ad for some Internet portal (NBCi?) where you can type a word and it takes to you to a specific web site for that word. Actually, I think NBCi has the "get a definition or related links from any word you see" which has been done by other sites. I'm thinking of something else where I saw the commercial and thought "they're setting up a separate DNS system, only it requires a browser plug-in to use" which I thought was a silly idea.