I’ve been feeling fairly ill recently. I don’t know what it is, and I’ve been to see various doctors about it. The effects are being constantly so tired that I’m pretty much unable to concentrate on anything. As a consequence I’ve not done much work, and not done much of anything else either.

Plan for the next few months:

• 8th May - 12th May: break in Thailand
• 13th May - 20th May: back to Macau: Christina and I are packing her belongings to move to Europe
• 20th May - approx 1st June: in London with my parents. Various visa things have still to be organized.
• Whole of June: in Vienna
• Approx 1st July - 19th July: more preparations for the wedding
• 20th July - 28th July: honeymoon Maldives
• Start of August onwards: Vienna

On Monday we went over to Hong Kong to make the application for the Fiancee Visa, for Christina to enter the UK to get married. She is allowed to enter the UK anyway for tourism, but to get married the visa is required. The visa lasts 6 months, does not entitle Christina to work in the UK, and after marriage the next visa (Spouse Visa) has to be applied for (although we will do this for Austria instead of the UK).

I had prepared lots of documents for the application process; however by the time we went over there this set of documents had grown to at least twice or three-times this amount.

Ironically there was some repeating-DVD on the TV screens in the waiting room, where some applicant actress says “wow, I didn’t know it would be that fast and easy!”. I thought this was extremely ironic.

But in fact, contrary to our expectations, it was indeed both fast and easy (not including preparation of the documents). They called us 45 minutes after we left the building to tell us Christina’s passport containing the visa could be picked up.

We had prepared all the documents with the originals and copies collated (as they said they needed to take both away, and would give us the copies back). I had thus prepared a large spreadsheet listing all the documents that I wanted back (e.g. original bank statements). I thought merely sorting all this stuff out to give back to us would take half a day! But when we got the documents back they were all collated just as we’d given them to them, i.e. they hadn’t even taken the copies out. I suppose they didn’t look at the documents that much, or even at all?

The only things they took out were the copy of the passports (incl. stamps of our entry/exit to/from Macau/Europe) and my covering letter explaining my financial and employment situation, our plan to live with my parents initially when in the UK etc.

So maybe we could have spared most of the effort of the preparation of the documents? (Or maybe not, maybe a precondition of granting the visa was a certain mandatory documentary weight?)

Anyway, it’s good news. We have to make an application in the UK to “give notice”. But I’ve had chats with the office that do that, they imply it’s easy, and that the Fiancée Visa is the difficult one. So let’s hope that’s true.

You want to get married in the UK to a non-EU citizen? Then you’re going to need a lot of documents.

My fiancée and I have gone through the application form, and created a spreadsheet listing all the supporting documentation required. I think I have about 25 documents to prepare, and Christina a similar number—whereby some documents are not in fact single documents, but tasks such as “all tax documents for the last year”, or “all invoices”!

I’ve now prepared about 1cm of documentation.

(P.S. Thankfully we can both see and even edit the spreadsheet at the same time due to the great collaboration features in Google Spreadsheets!)

My future wife and I have decided to start our lives together in Austria instead of the UK.

Nevertheless I’m leaving Vienna tomorrow for about 5 months, but from August onwards I’ll be back permanently. I’ll be available for software architecture and development work, as before.

Currently I’m working for easyname.eu and uboot.com, and also working on a private project (website allowing collaborative diagram creation); if I ever really make any progress on that I’ll write a blog post describing it in more detail!

Plan for the next few months:

I suddenly got an email out of the blue today:

Dear Sir / Madam:

We have received your application, an interview will be arranged for shortlisted candidates. Thank you for your interest to join our team!

Human Resources

Initially I thought it was spam (although the normally good Gmail spam system hadn’t marked it as spam), then I saw the company name, and saw they were based in Macau.

A quick search for that company’s name in my email found one outgoing message to them, applying for a job, dated December 8th, 2006! Today is February 19th, 2008.

There was a discussion on Slashdot about corporate ethics and system administrators reading other people’s emails. That reminded me of the following story:

A friend of a friend was working in IT as a Windows administrator. He was called to fix some boss’ computer, who then went out to lunch leaving the friend alone with the computer. The friend happened to see a mail on the boss’ computer that he found interesting, so he forwarded it to himself.

This is surely a bad thing to do, and the end of the story is that he got fired, but he probably would have got away with it apart from the mistake he made…

He managed to spell his own name wrong in his email address. So when the the boss got back from lunch, there was the bounce mail waiting for him in his inbox, with the friend’s misspelt name…

I’m heading back to Vienna tomorrow (Saturday). I land at 17:30 or thereabouts.

Alas it’s too late to go to BarCamp Vienna (on Saturday), which upsets me greatly. I think that’s the 4th BarCamp I’ve missed due to not being in Vienna. Hopefully I’ll be here for the next one. I tried to change my flight but the cost would have been over € 300.

In addition there’s an open day on Sunday at the Tudor Barn in England where I’m getting married. It would have been lovely to go to that but that also would have required a change of flight (in the other direction).

And hopefully when I get to Vienna, my toilet will be OK…..

The night before I left Vienna (mid December), which was a Saturday, I went to the pub with some friends. Needless to say my plan was to pack on the day of departure, Sunday. I got back late, but with 6 hours sleep I would have had (just) sufficient time to get up at 9am, pack, and make my train.

I got back and to my horror — the whole of my toilet floor was covered in water (thankfully water into the toilet not out of it!). I had to leave the next day, a Sunday, it was now 03:00 on that Sunday morning, and my parents had paid for the hotel room in the Austrian village where they we were staying, for Sunday night.

What I did first—obviously!—was panic! What I did second was to ring the Austrian girlfriend of the friend I’d been out with that night. I knew she’d be awake as we shared a taxi together and I got out first. She advised me of an Austrian 24-hour plumber I could call. That was a real life-saver!

Then I made a bit of a negotiation mistake. The plumber advised me on the phone he only accepted cash. I pointed out that I would only be able to get out € 400 (the limit on my card). While he was on his way, I went to the cash machine and got out that full amount. Once he’d done the work he told me the bill came to € 398, quite a coincidence…?

Now the thing about my toilet is that it used to be the floor’s toilet. So the main tap which turns off the water to my flat doesn’t actually turn off the water to the toilet; the toilet is before that tap. But not to fear, there’s another tap just for the toilet. I started to turn that tap and the toilet did stop dripping, but now the tap started dripping! I turned the tap back on, hoping to revert to the situation that the toilet was dripping, but now they were both dripping! Nightmare.

When he came, he said he’d have to turn the water off in the basement. Now when I moved in to my flat 9 years ago, there were a bunch of keys hanging up on the inside of one of the cupboards. To this day I don’t know what they’re all for. So I grabbed them all and I set off for the basement with the plumber who’d just arrived; at 04:00 Sunday morning, in winter in continental Europe, chilly with snow on the ground outside, 5 hours before the time to get up (and not fully sober, I must confess, although seeing all that water helped.)

Basically under the building where I live—which is neither modern nor well-maintained I must assert—there is a labyrinth system of brick tunnels. It’s really amazing. And so many wires and pipes, in all different directions. And all so dusty and nasty! And one of them, probably, was the tap to turn off the water to the tap next to my toilet.

We didn’t find the tap. He even asked me if I had any documentation on the tap structure of the building! So he did what I can only describe as a “hack” on the tap next to my toilet to make it stop dripping and also stop supplying water to the toilet. He fixed the toilet with what might also be described as a “hack”. I finally got to bed at 6am.

A few hours later, I awoke, I packed, and I got my train. Needless to say I forgot any of my skiing clothes (I was going to a ski resort, although not to ski), I brought normal clothes including some summer clothes, enough for about 4 days. I wondered why my case was so light yet I was going away for so long? But it didn’t occur to me what the reason could be or what I could do about it!

I have been living with the consequences of that bad packing experience—the complete lack of clothes—for the last 6 weeks.

Anyway - this is all to say, I hope his hack worked? I’ll see when I get back to Vienna tomorrow.

Well I can’t be beaten by Barbara can I :)

• Skiing in Mallnitz Austria (Jan)
• Living in Macau (Feb-Mar, Jun, Oct-Nov)
• Two weekends to Hong Kong (Mar, Jun)
• Holiday in Yangshuo (small Village in China, Apr)
• Vienna and London obviously!
• Stassburg to visit my friend Johanna
• Venice and Salzburg in August
• Malaysia (Sep)
• Seefeld with my parents (twice: Jan, Dec)
• Paris for New Years

It has been suggested that this blog does not contain enough personal content.

This Christmas I visited my parents in Seefeld in Austria, am now in the UK with my parents and Christina and will be going to Paris for New Years. You can see the progress of this voyage on the following Maptales story. It contains locations, text and photos.

My Austrian mobile phone works again.

1. Originally I asked them to send the new SIM card to Macau, they didn’t want to do that. Thankfully I am not the sort of business person who relies heavily on their phone while also travelling a lot. If you are that sort of person, probably better not choose Telering.
2. Then they said they would send the new SIM card to Vienna. 1.5 months later when I arrived back from Macau, it wasn’t there with my post.
3. I went to my normal Telering shop at Stephansplatz, it was closed.
4. So I went into a different shop today, and they gave me a new SIM card. The girl was quite confused by the fact that there was a “lock” on my account (presumably from when I rang up and told them I’d lost the phone?). But her colleague told her to ignore that. The SIM card she gave me didn’t work.
5. Just now I rang up, and they told me “it doesn’t work because your account is locked”. They unlocked that now, and now it works.