Nick's blog

Oh, and I forgot: More customs/immigration excitement!

After being questioned by customs, I was, to my not-so-great surprise, directed to the immigration counter for further investigation. I got a rather friendly person, who nevertheless was asking about my work/holiday/movement situation in great detail. I discussed my previous issues, and he asked for the documentation I'd hustled up but never had to use last time. As I did, he recaps:

Him: So, you work for this US company, Haydrian
Me: Used to. I resigned
Him: Oh. Right, in that case don't worry. Just show me your return ticket.
Me: shows ticket
Him: examining ticket Why'd you quit?
I explain.
Him: Off you go, then. And good luck!

So there's the easy way to solve all your issues: resign!

I just got back into .ca this evening. In some ways, it feels like I never left - my apartment is, of course, exactly as I left it, as is Vancouver, and Hayley and I are back to trying to deal with the inadequacies of text and voice chat. I miss her already.

I wish I'd only gone up for a couple of days to pack. At least this way I have time to catch up with Illiad, KS and Dark before I head back for good.

I'm also thinking I may just stick as close to NZ time as I can. I don't have anything to do in my mornings anyway.

I got another call from my boss yesterday. Instead of the expected wind-down time with misc. tasks to do, it seems yesterday was my last day. Rather a disappointment, I was hoping they'd give me a decent notice period, especially after he expressed thanks for me informing them promptly about the situation. Not totally unexpected, but I was rather hoping to have the job through to the end of the month.

So now I'm actively submitting applications. The company I mentioned previously got back to me - they've filled the positions I applied for, but would still like to get together with me to talk. I'm arranging a date as soon as I get back, but I'm skeptical it'll lead to (near-term) work. :/

I've also sent an application in for a position dealing with GIS related technologies, which interest me very much. The job ad portrays a very positive attitude - they're more interested in the person and their skills than the individual technologies they know. Sounds like the sort of company I'd like to work for.

Just heard back from my boss. Unsurprisingly, they don't think me working from NZ long-term is a practical proposition. Given that, they'll keep me going with bits and pieces of work (basically, anything that doesn't require a huge learning curve that they'll never get a chance to recoup the effort expended on) for a while, but I expect I'll be finishing up with them in the fairly near future.

Looks like it's time for me to find a new job in NZ. I have somewhere in mind to apply first - they look really interesting. They offered me a job interview previously, but only after I'd already accepted a position elsewhere. Hoping for better luck this time.

So. The promised post about just why I'm back in NZ.

Fair warning: For once, this is not a post about XML transforms, or work, or travel, or anything like that. If you're allergic to emotions, stop reading now. Still reading? Good.

Just over a month ago - very shortly after I moved into my Vancouver apartment, I got talking with a good friend of mine - someone I'd known for years, but only ever seen as a friend. Things went from there, and pretty soon I found myself trying to work out how I can get back to NZ to see her. To put it simply, I'm crazy about her.

Thanks to the wise advice of several people I trust (you know who you are), I arranged a 3 week trip back to NZ. Having got here, pretty much from day 1 I knew that I no longer wanted to work away from NZ.

So who is this wonderful person, you ask? Her name is Hayley - #sporks members will know her as Lex (but then, this is all old news to #sporks members anyway) - and she is, without a doubt in my mind, the most wondeful person in the world.

I have never been happier in my life than I have in the last couple of weeks, and even my impending return to Canada on the 25th struggles to cast a shadow over my mood.

This is helped, of course, by the fact that I just got off the phone to my boss, and told him - without doubt or reservation - that I'm no longer in a position to work in the US in the forseeable future. That I intend to spend that time in NZ, and as much of it as possible with Hayley.

Finishing this post, with Hayley sitting here next to me, I seriously feel the best I've ever felt.

Well, I'm back in NZ for a few weeks - until the 25th. Something important - really, really important, in the category of 'most important things ever' - has come up in NZ, and I convinced my employer to let me work from NZ for a while for 'personal' reasons.

I would really, really love to go into details here, but it's probably not wise. More later, including all the juicy details. This assumes that there is actually anyone who reads this that doesn't already know exactly what I'm talking about, anyway. Which I doubt.

In response to Myke's request for a way to generate an HTML page containing the newest items from a bunch of RSS feeds, I made a suggestion: Use Google Reader to aggregate the feeds for you, export them using the 'sharing' functionality, and then simply transform the resulting ATOM feed into an HTML page using some XSLT on serverside.

I thought there'd be a ready-made XSLT stylesheet for transforming ATOM out there, but I had absolutely no luck finding one. So, I hacked together a basic one for the purpose. Here it is:

I've only tested it with google's atom, but it ought to work with any valid atom feed. I also haven't attempted to format the dates into something more user-friendly - I'm sure XSLT has the facility, but I'll be damned if I can find it right now. Finally, only the title, url, dates and summary are exposed, but it's pretty trivial to add more.

So, I was a little bored, and had an idea. The commonly used (alphabetic) phone keypad layout is not particularly efficient when it comes to T9 (one digit per letter) style entry - there are a lot of collisions. What would an ideal keypad layout look like?

So I hunted up a computer-readable english dictionary with frequency scores (a 0-16 scale), and devised a way to score the efficiency of a layout: group words by the digits they translate into with that layout, and multiply together their frequency scores. So, for example, two colliding words with frequency 8 would score 64 points, while a collision between a word with frequency 1 and one with frequency 15 would score only 15 points. The idea is that collisions between words with greatly different frequencies are much easier to resolve - it'll almost always be the more common word - whilst collisions between similar words are generally bad. Then, sum up all the products to get the final score.

I then seeded a Genetic Algorithm with the default keypad layout, and ran generations of randomly mutating layouts (by reassigning letters at random) then scoring them, then selecting the few layouts with the lowest scores, and repeating.

The default keypad layout scores a whopping 8,853,348 points.
The most optimal layout I could find scores only 71,063 points. The layout was:

{gr',aky,cej,lw-,fimxz,hn,ps,qtu,bdov}

Various variations on the placing of the apostrophe and hyphen also had the same score.
Each group represents letters to go on one key - order doesn't matter for the purpose of this.

This was a 40th generation result of the original (generation 0) default layout. I have a complete 'geneaology', of course. This was the best run of several I did totally from scratch - the best results seem to occur when I select a reasonably large 'breeding population', not just the few very fittest ones - the geneaology for the winner has several steps where the parent scored better than the child.

I just found it interesting how incredibly inefficient the default layout is when it comes to collisions. A pity nobody will ever use anything else.

The next step, of course, would be to construct another GA based on the optimum keypad layout for this key mapping, so as to minimise finger movement between letters when typing a large corpus.

I've been a bit of an ass lately. Sorry.

It's been brought to my attention that I've frequently been less than friendly the past few weeks, culminating with the almighty row in #sporks a day or two ago. A lot of it stems from what's been going on in my life recently - moving, new job, visa problems etc - but that's no excuse. In the past few days, particularly, I've found myself snapping at the smallest things. Once or twice, nothing more than another spam arriving in my inbox was been enough to get me angry(er). Something that took no more than a second to review and delete.

Now that I'm aware of it, I'm actually feeling a hell of a lot better already. I ought to be more like my ordinary, sanguine self, hopefully. If I'm not, pull me up on it. Tell me I'm being an ass again.

A bunch of photos of my new apartment. Please forgive the poor compositing on the two of my work area, I didn't have a tripod, and it wasn't possible to get the whole thing with a single frame (too much dynamic range).






Edit: Added a picture of how it looks at sunset:

As much as I like sleeping in Dark's lounge, eating his breakfast cereal, and working from his dinner table, I have been desperately searching for a furnished apartment I can stay in while I'm here. All at once, on Thursday, my search paid off - with two seperate apartments. I took the slightly more expensive and slightly larger one, paying $100 less than Too Much for it. It's still a studio apartment, but it has a murphy bed, placed such that I can fold it up when I have people around, but I don't have to if I don't. It has a nice little enclosed balcony/conservatory area with a computer workstation. I can work whilst looking out over the city from my dizzyingly high 32nd floor perspective.

Photos will be forthcoming once I'm moved in, later today.

So, I made it back into Canada. After all the extensive, lawyer-assisted preparations so I would be able to explain myself in sufficient and excrutiating detail to the customs officers, I was simply waved through with nary a glance.

Then, as I pull away, suitcase in tow, the officer goes "Hold on a moment". "Uh oh", I think, "now I get the half hour of going over all my documentation 5 times before they're satisfied". I return to the desk, and give him back my passport. The passport scanner is flashing "NZ Passport Alert!!!" on and off. The screen has a single line entry " Personal Marajuana Posession". I have no idea what it's talking about - I presume a name collision. He puts the passport back on the scanner, waits a couple of seconds, takes it off, hands it back, and tells me I can go. I do.

Today was the day I was scheduled to go back up to Canada, after 3 weeks down here in Seattle training at the offices of the company I contract for. In an ideal world, I would have headed back to Vancouver, whereupon I would have located a furnished apartment to stay in until the end of June, or, with an application to Canadian immigration, possibly as late as October.

Instead, I spent 4 hours getting down there, 3/4 of an hour being interrogated by Canadian Immigration personnell, 6 hours sitting in a stationary train being watched over by a security guard, and another 4 hours back to Seattle.

Basically, the Canadian customs officer decided my reasons for wanting to (re)enter Canada weren't wholesome enough. The fact that I was contracting for a Seattle company, and planning on staying in Vancouver with trips down to Seattle at intervals, apparrently indicated to him that:
1) I was doing this to avoid US visa requirements, which prohibit me from working for the Seattle company as an employee in Seattle, by tele-commuting from the conveniently-nearby Vancouver.
2) He had no proof that my company was even applying for an H1B VISA, and that they weren't just bullshitting me, or that I wasn't intending to just stay in Canada indefinitely.

So, here I am back in Seattle. In a different hotel, since my old one had already cleaned and re-rented my old room.

Oh, and someone remind me to tell you all about the least competent security guard I've ever met, when I'm less tired and pissed off.

Edited: More paranoia - removed the name of the company I work for. Sorry.

- Coins are 1c (useless bits of copper), 5c, 10c and 25c. Canada sensibly has $1 (a 'Loonie') and $2 (a 'Toonie') coins. The US still has scraps of tattered paper for $1, and nothing for $2.

- The 5c coin is bigger than the 10c coin. So is the 1c coin. Yes, the 10c coin is the smallest coin of the lot.

- 10 coins are 'dimes', and 5c coins are 'nickels'. The 10c coin doesn't even say what its value in cents is, just 'one dime'.

- Pedestrian crossing buttons are sometimes on the side of the pole facing the direction you want to cross, and sometimes 90 degrees from that (with an arrow pointing the direction you should cross for this button). They are never on the opposite side of the pole to the direction you are going so you can press it as you approach.

- The only 'barn dance' crossing I have encountered has a recorded voice telling people how to use it.

- Cars drive on the right (duh).

- Most roads are more than two lanes, even right in the middle of town.

- The lanes are really narrow.

- Instead of one set of signals, possibly with additional left and right arrow signals, there's often a set of signals over each lane.

- Cars can ignore the red light when turning right if there's nothing coming. Smart idea.

- Some crossings in Vancouver have a counter under them indicating how much longer you have to cross. Another smart idea.

- In the US, your taxi driver will always ask you if you like "this country". This is a trick question. There is only one correct answer.

- Tipping.

- When you eat in a resteraunt, your bill is brought to you in a little folder. You insert cash and/or credit-cards, and they take it away again.

- A manual transmission car is a 'stick shift'.

- Everyone thinks you're from Australia.

- EFTPOS is called Interac instead.

- Late night bookstores, with multiple large shelves of sci-fi and fantasy titles. I'm going to end up spending waaay too much on books.

- The books are really cheap, though.

- Cars stop for you at corners, even when there's no pedestrian or signalled crossing.

- You can buy a reasonable lunch for under $5.

- 'Kiwifruit' is called just 'Kiwi'. Saying you're a Kiwi is liable to get some odd looks.

- It's winter.

- Most power plugs can be inserted upside-down.

- Toilets have some sort of weird system where they first drain, then refill, instead of just using a u-bend.

On Sunday evening (a little before midnight - the Amtrak train got in really late), I arrived at my accommodations for the next 3 weeks - the Pacific Inn in Bellevue. Checking in, the person at the desk asked me for my passport or driver's license so he could take a copy of it. I gave him my passport, which he took to another room to photocopy.

I waited for him to return. And waited. And waited. About 5 minutes after he left, he came back in, without my passport or a copy, and said "You're a software guy, right?".

I'm sure you can see what's coming. He was unable to operate the photocopier. He asked me to take a look. I pressed the '+' button to increase the number of copies from 0 to 1, then pressed the copy button. It copied.

What amuses me here isn't that he was unable to operate the photocopier - any photocopier that defaults to 0 copies (and returns to that when all its copies are made) is particularaly badly designed, and it's not surprising he had trouble if he hadn't used it before. What amuses me is how incredibly stereotypical it is. Geek arrives in a hotel, and is immediately called on to help fix something that's preventing him from being able to check in.

Anyway, the apartments are nice. I have a small loft apartment, with a kitchenette, a lounge area (with a desk and proper office chair - yaay!) and a bathroom, then a short flight of stairs up to an area with my bed. It's small (or should I say 'compact'?), but quite nice. Definitely an improvement over the American Extended Stay I was in last time. Internet is provided via Ethernet cable, which I have hooked up to a newly purchased Airport Express so I can have wireless (two levels of NAT, though - yuck). Access is, unfortunately, rather slow. Also, random ports - 993 for SSL IMAP, 9898 for my IRC proxy - seem to be blocked. It might be the Airport Express, but I doubt it.