Buying a house in California...?

My girlfriend, who I've spent the last four toughest years in my life with, suggested that we should get a house together when a good deal surfaced. I said, "Fine, but I think a good deal is really hard to define now. Even though the interest rate is STILL low, the house price in California is JUST TOO HIGH." She suggested that we should get one in the East Bay area (Hayward, San Leandro...etc) where more people are moving to and house value are more likely to increase comparing to San Jose and San Francisco. I thought it may be a good idea since we plan to get marry and get a house anyway. Getting it earlier and start to own a house may not be a bad investment after all...

New notebook computer

I ordered a brand new ultra light notebook from BestBuy.com a week ago. The delivery was made very fast although I was not able to actually get it four days after the product was delivered (Major delay was made since I live in an address different from my billing address and I relied on my landlord's son to retrieve all my mails/shipments for me...)
It is an Averatec 3200 Series and I am very happy about this laptop since it is sooo small and light (1 inch thin and 4.5 lbs) even though the battery life is a bit shorter than other similiar products (longest so far I can get only 2 hours and 50 minutes) and the machine is extremely hot during intensive computation and optical drive read/writing. I am still installing all the software including sharing 20 GB of hard drive space with Knoppix Linux.