A long time between posts. Not really a novel thing for me. But this time I have some sort of excuse.
I spent most of March and April in Jakarta, Indonesia; my wife's home town. We were back there to apply for my wife's spouse visa. The embassy's website states that spouse visa applications average 3--5 months to process. We put a lot of work into ours. We asked questions about what to submit and completed some tasks before submitting the application where others would wait to be asked by the embassy. I also wrote a 23-page supporting letter full of photos that we printed in colour. The upshot of all this is that a decision was made on my wife's visa in two days and she was granted her visa. We are back in Australia now and getting on with life.
The last weeks before we left for Jakarta were hectic for us. I had a couple of dentist's appointments, I submitted my PhD thesis and had a promotion interview at work. We also were preparing my wife's visa application, completing the medical check up and getting documents certified. Now, two months later, I still have dentist's appointments and I haven't heard anything about my thesis, but I did get the promotion.
But for the first few weeks in Jakarta, when we were finalising the visa application, our time for those two months was fairly relaxed. I spent most of the time keeping my 9-month old niece company and trying to keep her from hurting herself. An amusing time. She seemed to get louder by the day; and, now that we have left, we have been told that the house is much quieter.
I did get to do some reading on Objective-C and iPhone development. I worked through some exercises in two texts: Learn Objective-C on the Mac and Beginning iPhone Development.
Now I feel like getting back into some focused software development in my spare time. I've written before (I think) that a hallmark of my programming to date has been its incompleteness. I want to set myself some well-bounded applications to develop and see them through. I'll list the applications I am thinking about in my next post.
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3 comments:
Congratulations (Visa)! and Congratulations (Promotion)!
Wow, talk about busy times. I feel lazy now, all I did was, err, not much out of the normal.
Before you know it your thesis will be back and you'll be doing the final fixups. Then, when that's done, you'll have to get all your cards changed to read "Dr." rather than "Mr." So it doesn't look like the busy times are going to stop any time soon!
Congratulations again!
Thanks.
Don't have any cards ... so no extra work there.
I don't know if I'll be advertising the "Dr." prefix, or " PhD." suffix. Might be detrimental to any chances of joining FogCreek Software ;). Of course, it may help my chances at Google. Decisions, decisions. Perhaps I'll split the differences and go to Atlassian! :P
Atlassian FTW!
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