Complications

So, back on the 9th, I was playing hallway fetch with Hamish, as I often do.  Suddenly he just sat down and started whimpering.  We had to take him to the emergency vet, who gave him pain relief and kept him overnight, and referred us to a specialist.  Turns out it was a herniated disk in his back.  No surgery required unless it recurs or gets worse, but he is now on strict rest, which he is not happy about.  He seems mostly fine now, which makes it worse, but we know we have to be tough.  Only short walks, and no jumping up on the couch or beds.  And we now have a crate we've locked him in while we're away at work, which he hates the most of course.

We'll do what we have to do, but the expense part of it really sucks.  Seems we can't go a week without some or other unexpected multi-hundred or -thousand dollar expense.  Just found our front bumper has been mysteriously crunched and broken underneath (neither of us remember an incident that would have caused it).  So I'll be getting that, and the side ding, and (Uber driver-caused) rear bumper fixed, so we can sell it.  This comes right on the heels of the repairs we had to do after someone tried to steal our car (smashed steering column, broken door lock, and door frame dings from where they pried the window open.

Official

It's official, or at least closer to: we're going.  We've both put in notice at our jobs, and we have appointments at the UK consulate on Monday to get our visas.  (We won't know a date to fly over until we get the visas processed -- as the consulate is closed over Christmas, this could be variable.)  Since it's general knowledge now, I've restored all the earlier posts that I had hidden.

So now it's all about getting ready in earnest.  Today was mostly about listing things on Ebay and getting rid of junk.  I disassembled a dog house, an Ikea cabinet, a CD rack, and a wooden table.  Our trash can is full, and I'm taking a carload to the tip tomorrow.  I think we might have another load or two to follow.  It's a shame it takes moving to take care of this stuff, but being able to pare down excess stuff is a decided advantage of a big move like this.

We also took passport photos for the visa, which both look about as good as you'd expect.  Now we'll always remember how bedraggled we were on this day.

Election

Obviously we were disappointed by the election results.  I haven't even been able to write about it until now.

But it goes deeper than mere disappointment that my candidate lost.  I can only see it as the most grossly stupid thing that America has ever done.  I'm horrified at the result, and terrified for the future.  I find myself frequently just staring off into space, slowly shaking my head.

I can't get my head around how anyone could have voted for this blatantly dishonest, dangerously idiotic, horrifyingly sexist, substance-free huckster.  Whatever problems you might be experiencing, Donald Trump is NOT the solution.  I don't buy the "At least he's not Hillary" argument.  The Republicans had a whole host of candidates who were not Hillary.

I keep coming back to this chart, and coming away terrified that we elected a leader who thinks it's all a big hoax.

More than the national disgrace and international embarrassment.  More than the effects of his science- and reason-defying policies.  More than his already-demonstrated propensity for diplomatic blundering.  This result will echo down the centuries: America will always be remembered as the country that elected him.

Comments blocked on this post, because I want to keep liking the people that I like.

Pictures

I'm generally a fairly messy person, but I do love organising a bunch of data.  So I've been kind of ashamed of how I've had my digital photos organised down through the years.

My pictures are all safe -- I did subscribe to the pay version of a web-based file hosting service a couple of years back, and it's some of the best money I've ever spent.  All my pictures reside there and are replicated across all my systems as a result (along with all my other key projects and documents).  But my Pictures directory has been a jumbled mess for years in terms of organisation.

I've looked at a few file organising programs, but they never seem to do exactly what I want.  So now I'm writing my own.  Features:

1. The main pictures directory will be organised into folders by year, then month.  Other organisers seem to frequently break it down into day folders, but I've always found that annoyingly granular.
2. It will be able to suck up other folders (such as dumps of camera memory cards), read the metadata off the pictures, and automatically file them correctly into this file structure.
3. It will remove duplicates, of course.
4. I've done a partial job of tagging my photos and videos using TagSpaces, which seems to me to be a pretty good standard.  Their UI is a bit clunky though, so instead I'll create a separate directory for each TagSpaces tag, containing soft links to all photos with that tag.  So I'll easily be able to, say, see all my Hamish pictures just by looking in this directory.

It's a pretty straightforward program; I knocked off probably half of it tonight, though I know I'll want to add features as I go.

I have a big box of actual prints, too, that I really should digitise, but of course they won't have the date they were taken in their metadata, so I'm not looking forward to organising them afterwards.

UK? No, I'm not 'kay.

So the roller coaster that has been climbing the hill for three weeks, going chk-chk-chk, is about to go over the top. I'm on a plane tomorrow, and it still doesn't seem real. Though I've been studying and practicing so much that I'm pretty much just ready to get things over with.

There's still a number of likely questions that I'm just dreading being asked. The potential for humiliation just seems massive, and their generosity just seems to make it worse (I don't think they'd ever actually say, "We flew you all the way up here and you don't even know what a websocket is?" but that's what a missed question will feel like.) (Note to self: look up websockets.)

As terrifying as the interview is looking, getting an offer would be almost as terrifying. You know how dolphins can "walk" on top of the water by kicking their tail back and forth really hard? I was thinking recently that that's what my career feels like a lot of the time. I've developed a strong tail from it over the years but a few months back I was thinking how nice it would be to just swim about in the water for a bit. If I get in at Big Company, I'll not only continue the water-walking thing, but I'll have a ball balanced on my nose to boot.

I just had prep phone interview number 3, which contained detailed feedback about the tech phone interview I did last week, and a more detailed breakdown of what I'll be asked about. It did nothing to relieve my stress levels; in fact, after things seeming so surreal all week (especially, going into the office as if everything's normal), this brought reality crashing home. I'll be having five one-hour sessions, each involving at least two of the leadership questions I'm dreading (E.g. "Tell me about a time you took a risk and it failed"). One of the sessions will be entirely that. My "down time" will be a one-hour lunch interview with the managing director of their development centre (boss of 110 people).

I really think they're considering me for too high of a position, as I've barely done much in the way of leading, and I'll be considered for what they call an SD3 (software developer level 3), which they need just a few of, instead of an SD2, which they need a lot of. The day before the interview I'll be getting prep call number four (!) that will at least inform me in fairly specific detail what leadership questions each group will be asking me. But there won't be a lot I can fix at that point, or even now.

Marjorie has been great about trying to buck up my spirits. But I'm pretty sure my concerns are reality-based as opposed to just beating myself up out of a lack of confidence. (This is not to be construed as further beating up of myself, either, please.)

Still, I wrote up something that's a little long to be called a mantra, but which I'll try to keep in mind during the process: “Above all, don’t be intimidated. Especially, no nervous jokes about the pressure of the interview situation, the scale of the company, the surroundings, or the prospective role, or my lack of experience with this or that. Act like this is all natural and fine and expected. Be serious and calm, even if you flub a question, or even if you ace a question. Don't be overly relieved at the end. Don’t speak at all if your voice is breaking out of nervousness (this is a major concern of mine), or if you don't know how you're going to finish a sentence. Don't talk just to fill up space. And remember everyone’s goddamn name for once.”

So at least it'll be all over Tuesday evening, yeah? No. To further complicate things, I had an interview last night with a company in Cambridge, who now wants to see me while I'm up there. They're more of a startup with much shallower pockets - but it could be an alright thing. I'll have next to no spare time while I'm up there, and from what I can tell, you can't really get to Cambridge from Edinburgh. I'm also not keen to take advantage of Big Company's hospitality. (I laid this all out for them, and they just now emailed me back, offering to fly me Edinburgh to Stansted (the London airport everyone forgets is there), then up to their office, during one of the two days I was planning on checking out Edinburgh with Marjorie. Sure. Fine. What else can I say?)

Increasingly, sleep has been just an occasional visitor, who leaves abruptly in the wee hours as if he has an early train to catch. I suspect to see him only here and there in the coming week.

It's all a helluva thing. I don't have any category to put the whole experience into.

[Sad trumpet noise]

Well, that sucks. Big Company in Edinburgh won't be making the offer. I guess I didn't do as well as I thought. I got pretty extensive feedback and couldn't really argue with any of it; they picked out what I agreed were my weak points and said they couldn't get past them in their considerations. But they said I was close (in a way that didn't just sound like they were blowing smoke). And that it's not uncommon for people to get in after several attempts, and they encouraged me to try again in six months to a year.

Drat. It's pretty gutting after working hard and getting my hopes up. I felt like I did as well as I could, but I'm still going to sulk a while.

Meanwhile, it sounds like the Cambridge company wants me. Their CTO is calling me in an hour; I don't think there'll be an offer until next week, but I may have to make a decision soon.

Almost

So, after a period of wondering if it ever might happen, I got close to landing a job in London.

They were willing to sponsor, and I had two interviews, the second with the CEO.  I was a pretty good match, and did pretty good on the interview, but it didn't pan out in the end, unfortunately.

It's given us some hope, but still, it's back to the drawing board right now.  A few irons in the fire still, but I'm having a hard time just getting past the recruiters.

We are still in the process of trying to downsize our life (i.e. get rid of stuff), but we were long overdue for that anyway.  Whatever happens, were not going to be spending another winter in this house -- probably not even another summer.  We need a change.

Hard

Oh it's hard.

The killer is, I've looked at so many jobs, that even if I were find a job tomorrow, it would still mean that 99% of my job-hunting effort was fruitless.  That's just how it works: you roll the dice until you hit Yahtzee.  But it also means that I'm pretty much as close as I was when I started.

In other news, we'll be casting the net wider.

More Brexit

Brexit is looking more and more like a colossal cock-up, but again, that's only the general consensus among the people I know and the media I access.  We can only keep watching the situation and keep trying.  Another potential complicating factor is the imminent decline of London as a financial center.  There seem to be a lot of jobs there in that sector.  Not that I'm looking in London yet, or for that sort of job particularly, but if that all shuts down, there could be a glut of developers on the market.  Uncertain times.

Brexit

Brexit -- wow, that was an historic moment.  (I can say "an historic" when talking about Britain.)  There were enough hints that it was going to go that way, but how weird it still was, when every person I know online, and every editorial source on news sites I frequent, were pulling for Britain to stay in the EU.  Shows how de facto segregated things are, even in this day and age of supposed connection.  Maybe the winning side are wondering, who are all these people who voted to stay in?

I don't fully understand everything that went on, admittedly.  My impression of how this affects our plans to "Brenter" is this, though, in general: not good.

• The anti-immigrant sentiment that won the day can't be good.  There is a basic dumb truth that, as a white male Westerner, it won't affect my chances to get in nearly as much as many others, but how can I feel good about that?  If I do get in, I so much prefer living, working, and being in a diverse culture.
• We trade out the conservative Cameron for the staunch conservative -- who, Boris Johnson maybe?  Not someone I'd relish living under, but worse, even among the downtrodden who are allowed to stay, the safety net will inevitably be cut.  Which sucks on its own, for a lot of people, but personally, it means that Marjorie will have a much harder job finding work in social services.
• What I really forgot to factor in was the pound.  It's already plummeted, against both the US dollar and the Aussie dollar.  This means I'd be earning less there, period.

The one possible favorable outcome is, I wouldn't be competing against all of the EU.  Britain's Tier 2 work visa currently requires companies to show that they can't find someone within the EU to fill the position -- presumably this will go away, but who knows how long it will take.

It's been difficult so far, trying to find work.  I've sent out a lot of CVs -- easy enough in this day and age, but if it's easy for me, it's easy for everyone, and so, how to stand out?  The responses have been tepid at best.  I get occasional glimmers of interest, but it's largely from recruiters who give up when they realize I need sponsorship.

We may have to consider other options, but I will keep at it.  I think we can still make it happen.

CV

I made this [letter] very long only because I have not had the leisure to make it shorter.  -- Blaise Pascal

When we moved to Australia, a couple of recruiters called me out because my resume, done in American style, was only two pages.  Australian CVs are expected to be multiple pages, if justified.  So I made a longer one and have been using it ever since.

UK companies apparently expect only two pages at max.  So today I took my five page CV and somehow pared it down to just two pages.  It was a pain, and not just because I had to fight with Word.

But: it's been submitted now to a UK jobs website, so to some extent, the die is cast.  I suspect I will have to do a lot more work than just waiting for companies to come to me, but we were getting antsy about actually starting to make something happen, so this is a good step.

England plans

So that last post was actually written back in January, but I didn't post it until today.  I'm thinking I might as well revive this blog to keep people informed about our England plans, which yes, are still in progress.  It's generally the worst idea to talk about a thing like this before the actual commitment is there, due to the psychological phenomena I've seen mentioned a few time recently, whereby announced plans tend to fall by the wayside because announcing them gives your brain the payoff ahead of time, leaving only the drudgery of execution.  And man, is there some drudgery ahead.

Still we are pushing on.  We've kind of settled on Bristol as a target - it seems a vibrant city, with weather less miserable than most other UK cities - though it is still very much up in the air.  A lot will depend on where I can find a job.  (Of course, the whole plan depends on if I can find a job.)  I found a massive database put out by the UK government, of companies that are willing to sponsor new hires for Tier 2 visas.  It's in PDF form, with ill-formatted text, and so was a fun challenge to convert it into plain text, filter out the ones with "software" in their name, and geocode them all so I can see them on a map:



A lot are (of course) clustered around London, which may be where we end up out of necessity.  There's only one such company in Bristol (to the left by the controls).

But I can't really apply until we're a lot closer to ready, since I want to be able to actually accept a job and not leave Marjorie in Australia to take care of everything.  So we're in the process of sorting out our stuff.  And it's the same headache I posted about in the early days of this blog, when we were moving to Singapore: every single item in the house involves a store/ship/toss/sell decision.  There's plenty to do on top of that as well, of course.

Next steps

Marjorie and I have moved around a fair a bit at this point, but have been in Melbourne now for close to twelve years.  This is not to say we’ve settled.  We both love Australia in general and Melbourne in particular, but it feels a bit like golden handcuffs.  We’ve talked in the past about buying a house here (we’ve been to a number of auctions and talked to mortgage brokers even) but it just never seemed to happen, probably in part because of a vague dissatisfaction with the idea.

We also have talked a fair bit over the years about trying somewhere else.  Maybe back to the States?  Some places we’ve considered, roughly from most interested to least:

• San Fran - cold, expensive, and Marjorie has a better chance of scoring a job some place that’s a seat of government..
• Austin - would be living in Texas.
• San Diego - unknown to Marjorie, and same job issues for her, but we may go look at some point, Still California-expensive.
• Boulder - cold and small?
• Seattle/Portland - cold and gray.
• Atlanta - feels like going backwards.
• New York - too hectic for Marjorie.  And expensive and not dog-friendly.
• Boston - cold, both weather- and people-wise (my opinion - I’ve just never latched onto that city.  Marjorie likes it a lot more than me).

Add to all of them that the USA just seems nuts to us now.  We’ve considered some other places overseas as well:

• Germany - cold, and language barrier
• France - cold, and language barrier
• Spain - language barrier
• Japan - culture shock, language

It’s harder to move now that we’re older (just because it would be harder to find jobs) and because we have a dog we love dearly.

So yesterday (30/1/2016) Marjorie and I had an idle discussion, as we frequently do, about what we’re going to do.  And for once, an idea seemed to take hold: move to England.  Not London proper, which would seem to be a lot to deal with, but an outlying suburb or anywhere to the south, like Brighton (in hopes of marginally better weather).  We’re in the very early stages of feeling it out, obviously, but we both seemed to latch onto the idea and I think it might actually happen.  We’ve done the overseas move before so we know what it entails, and know we’re capable of it.  And we know enough to keep a lid on things until we nail something down, which is why I’m writing this here.

Lots to do from this point, but it’s exciting.