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.