Hi all, just a quick update. After 10,000 km and 11 hours in flight, I braved the ordeal of American customs. I was searched for bombs, patted down and everything!
It’s very hot here. My flight for Denver leaves in about an hour. My phone also works here so you can call me (in emergencies only).
I have finally received my passport with Visa attached!
It was quite an experience. The immigration consultant called me this morning to inform me that the DS2019 had arrived from Boston. I signed the form and she took it in to the consulate which meant I could have left today (Monday) instead of Wednesday as we previously had thought.
So, I scrambled to get a flight for today confirmed, but it became more and more apparent that it was near to impossible to make it from the consulate at 2:30pm (when they give back your passport) to the airport at 2:55pm (the required 3 hours prior to my booked flight).
So, I am now scheduled to leave at 5:55pm on Tuesday 18th July. This time, it looks like I will actually be leaving! For those of you who are really interested, a copy of my itinerary is below. I checked it very carefully this time because one of the previous versions had me ending up in Houston! Continue reading Finally, we have liftoff
Well, today I had my Visa interview. It was actually surprisingly painless. I left home early so that I could speak with the immigration consultant, the person I spoke to wasn’t the head immigration consultant (Barbara J) and so she didn’t actually have any advice for me around the interview questions for immigration.
The interview turned out to be something of a non-event. After waiting nearly an hour, I got the opportunity to speak to a very nice man who asked me a few simple questions about the kind of training I would be getting in the US and then sent me on my way.
Also, I confirmed something that had been mentioned to me the day before: the DS2109 form has not arrived yet. Now, the DS2109 is an approval form which the CIEE sends to the American Consulate in New Zealand to tell them that my training program has been approved for the purposes of a J1 visa. The J1 Visa is a training/study Visa which allows holders to live in the US for the purposes of training or study. That’s the Visa I am going under.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, because the Visa has been delayed (it was only sent from Boston yesterday) I will most likely only get my Visa on Wednesday which means I can only fly out on Wednesday night. Beca have me booked in on flights for today, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, just in case.
On the plus side, it means that I get a chance to visit with friends and family some more and maybe obsess a little over packing. I also plan on helping out with a photo exhibition in the city which could be great fun.
I have heaps of photos from my many going away parties to upload, I will do so shortly 🙂
Ok, first thing I have done you may not have noticed: I have added subscription functionality to my blog. So now you can receive an email every time I make an update.
Cornelia: I have subscribed you already, because you were complaining before that I don’t tell you what’s going on. You have no excuses now, since you’ll receive an email every time I write anything :p
Another thing I have been working on is my Geographical Positioning Systems. I bought a GPS receiver (the last one on that site) which I have been playing with for a while now. I am quite impressed. It was cheap, only about AU $130, but it comes with all the trimmings: car charger, wall charger, USB charger. Continue reading GPS Tracking
So I am now officially a New Zealand citizen! The ceremony was very nice. There were only about 20 people there so it was quite cosy.
The person leading the ceremony made it out to be a very special (almost spiritual) occasion. I disagreed with him a little there. For me, the special / spiritual occasion had already happened many years ago, the moment I set foot on New Zealand soil. A date I will forever remember: December 5th, 1997. Continue reading I never swear
Well, after a great deal of toing and froing, my citizenship ceremony is scheduled for Thursday 15th June at 1pm. It will be at the Auckland Citizenship office at the AA Centre, level 6, 99 Albert Street.
The “Texas Counters” on the left hand side give you a good idea of the number of seconds remaining before my citizenship is confirmed.
After the ceremony, I can apply for a passport, that takes 3 days minimum if I pay them money. This means that, allowing for shipping and suchlike, that I can expect my passport by the 22nd of June.
Edit: You know, after showing these cool dynamically updating counters to my family, Arth says: “I’ll just print it out for your Mom”.
^^;;
My hands are still shaking with adrenaline as I write this. Sarah & I were coming home from lunch down Triploi road (A), past a primary school on our right and a dairy (tea room) on our left. I passed a rather unremarkable car on the side of the road. It was a dark blue station wagon. Later Sarah tells me it was probably a Subaru Legacy, one of the most popular cars in New Zealand. He looked like he was meaning to turn out into the street, but he didn’t have his indicators on, so I passed him. Click on the map to the right to the the details of our little trip with markers.
As I passed, I realised he was pulling off in spite of me. So I sped up a little so as to take over smoothly and indicated to the left to signal my intention. Instead he speeds away, Sarah yells “careful!” and I shift over to the right as he bolts past me. I hear his engine hum impressively as he motors past and I try to avoid hitting the oncoming traffic.
“Holy fuck!” Sarah commented sedately as he sped away “Yeah, that was fucking weird” I said. We were considering reporting him to someone when we suddenly saw something that made our blood run cold: the passenger’s door flew open and someone tried to jump out, gave up and closed the door again, or perhaps they were pulled back (B). Continue reading The Chase
I downloaded a nifty open-source tool the other day. It’s called FMA or Float’s Mobile Agent. It’s a lovely little tool which connects to your mobile phone through a bluetooth COM port and sucks all the data from your phone onto your computer. It’s great, I especially like the fact that it can tell the temperature of your phone!
Anyway, so it grabs all your meetings, contacts etc and then you want to synchronise with Outlook. I tried it, and it failed. Damnit! Damn stupid open source software I cursed fluidly. Continue reading I can program
Ok, most of you are fully aware that I am a geek. As such, I like geeky toys and whatnot. That said, I haven’t had much reason to buy anything suitably geeky in, well, forever. The technology has just never been cool enough in my opinion. A pocket PC I can also use as a mobile phone? Yawn, snore.
For years I have had this romantic notion of a personal area network (PAN) in my head. The PAN is the backbone of your own personal (some say wearable) computer which is always at hand (some say pervasive or ubiquitous). I originally thought the PAN would piggy-back on the body’s own electromagnetic field but when Bluetooth came out I decided it would have to do for now.
Many of you know that I worked at a place called Cecil for quite some time. The source of a great deal of joy and a great deal of stress for me for quite a few years.
Leaving a position like that, in a job like that, part of you (the vindictive mean-spirited part of you) kind of hopes the whole place will fall apart without you. That somehow, without your incredible insight/skill/talent/charisma, the whole operation will grind to a screaming halt.
Of course, that didn’t happen, they soldiered on and seemed to go from strength to strength, I was almost offended when (in my absence) they started breaking all the “rules” I’d ever assumed about software development… Continue reading Vindication