dvcat

I will be moving to the bay area once I graduate in a few months. One of the big plus points for me to move to the bay area will be to try to interact and learn from a bunch of smart people by going to hacker dojos, user group meets and conferences (mainly in machine learning and other data related things). My day job will involve some travel (within the bay area) so I probably have to get a car. Keeping this in mind, can people comment on some good places where I should live, how much I can expect to pay each month in food, rent, utilities, insurance etc (I want to keep irrelevant expenses as low as possible just because I want to save some $$$ for a rainy day), things I should sign up for to get to know about hacker like events (apart from read HN)?

Thanks!

I am new to the world of Java. I have written a ton of code in C++/Python but somehow I find my usual tool Vim not as usable for writing Java code. Since I cant get away without writing Java code, I would greatly appreciate some recommendations on good Mac OSish IDEs apart from the monster in the room (Eclipse). I tried Eclim but it didn't exactly work as well I expected it too.