Back in Canada, for now…
Hey everyone - it's just prior to supper time here at the Irish's, thought I'd give everyone a (not-so) quick update.
Christmas Eve and Day were both great, hanging out with my family again was very refreshing and of course very fun. I was given the honor of playing the trumpet for my parent's church service on Christmas Eve (I normally do for Easter/Christmas services). That went well, and we had a quiet rest of Christmas Eve. Christmas morning was fun with the opening of the gifts, and in the afternoon we had a great time at my grandparent's house in Spencer. Unfortunately, as we were literally in the driveway about to leave, my grandmother tripped over a marble spacer on the floor and fell. Her kneecap cracked (not quite broken completely, but almost), and bruised up her face pretty badly. She is in the hospital now, and due to the fall, she's having complications in her brain. The doctors are working on fixing her up, so we all hope she'll be okay soon.
In more uplifting news, I received a new camera from my parents! This will come in very handy for our trip to Costa Rica coming up this Thursday (whoa!). We'll be there a full week, all-inclusive with an open bar. 
My brother and sister-in-law (and mother- and father-to-be) were super generous and gave us a Ryobi Table Saw for Christmas. Now I can finally start making some basic furniture for our house. I just have to give myself a quick lesson on it, and I'll be ready to go.
Okay, well that's about it. Below I've included a couple of pictures I took while I was there. The house pictured is my parents house, where I was born and raised. The second is a panorama of train tracks down by my grandparent's house in Spencer. When we were kids we used to run down there while we were visiting them and put pennies on the track to get them all flatened. The photos below are resized considerably, given that the originals were over 8000 pixels in width. If you'd like a higher resolution of either, go ahead and leave a comment.
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- Home
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- Train Tracks
Work Permit, SIN: It Feels Like I’ve Done This Before…
So I got my work permit in the mail yesterday (WOOT!), and went to renew my old SIN card. It all had a feeling of deja vu...
Anyway, I've got my SIN, my work permit, and I'm ready to work! Starting the job hunt today. Wish me luck!
Cheers.
Permanent Residency: Approved!!!
Checked the mail at 12:50pm today, and there it was. Two envelopes, one for Nadia and one for me. Nadia's was the letter from immigration telling her that she was approved as a sponsor for me, and my letter was telling me that I was approved for both permanent residency and my work permit. The work permit will apparently be sent soon by Vegreville. As soon as I get it, I can begin working again! 
I won't "officially" be a Permanent Resident of Canada until I am contacted by Canadian Immigration (CIC) in Scarborough for an appointment, at which time we'll have to pay another $490 for the "Right of Permanent Residency" and then we'll most likely get the official documentation. That should happen in January or February if what we've been reading from others' experiences are accurate. Anyway, that doesn't matter all that much in comparison to getting the work permit. Once I receive my work permit I'll be able to begin working full time again!
WOOHOO!
The Case of the Empty Mailbox
Nothing in the mail yet from immigration. We're hoping that tomorrow will be the day. Thanks to everyone who have given both Nadia and I support.
Over the weekend my wonderful wife gave me an early Christmas gift (due to mail-in rebate deadlines, haha). It was 2GB of RAM for my computer. She had snooped inside my computer to see what memory I had, and got me the same kind. I don't want to sound as excited as I was due to fears that I may sound as nerdy as I actually am, so we'll just say that I was really, really happy with it! My excitement led to me taking the leap into installing Windows Vista x64. I had been running XP x86, but with 4GB of RAM, it would only recognize 3.5GB. I figure if I upgrade to an x64 OS, I might as well make the leap to Vista as well - so I did.
I (cough) acquired it (cough) on Sunday and was able to install it Sunday night with no issues whatsoever. One of the main reasons I waited to make the jump to Vista was because of its well-documented issues at launch. I'm convinced it was released without being even 90% completed, and was the product of a deadline, not of quality. Now that SP1 (Service Pack 1) has been out for quite some time, and SP2 is currently in beta, I felt (and have now confirmed) that all of the kinks must have been worked out. User Account Control (UAC for short) was still extremely annoying in giving popup notifications asking you to Allow or Deny permission for almost any program you run. A neat little tool called TweakUAC fixed that right up by putting UAC into "Quiet Mode." A great example of the annoying UAC was when I attempted to delete a shortcut in my Start Menu > All Programs menu. It had to ask me 3 separate times if I was sure I wanted to delete this measly shortcut. YES, DEAR GOD YES JUST DELETE IT.
Anyway, I have all of my normal everyday programs installed again, and everything is running very smoothly. I really love the new UI, all of the Aero effects, etc. etc. It's a breath of fresh air from the stagnant fruitiness of Windows XP (although we said the same thing about Windows XP when it came out regarding Windows 2000/ME).
I had a somewhat awful night's sleep last night, I've been somewhat hazy all day, and I just finished a session of karate tonight. Needless to say, I could probably qualify as a pile of mush at the moment. Time to hit the hay and hope for a great tomorrow.
Cheers.
Immigration Verdict: Coming Soon
Well, the verdict is in. And it's in some envelope or package, on it's way to my house. Inside is the decision made by Canadian Immigration on whether or not I can be a permanent resident of Canada. The online status checker tool as I have so cleverly named it has notified us that they have sent us their decision on December 2nd (yesterday), and nothing else. They did not tell us if it was accepted or denied, just that it was sent.
How's that for efficiency.
Organization of Awesomeness
The friendly people behind Ubuntu, a free alternative to Windows XP/Vista, will send you a free CD of their product if you fill out a form online. So I did, and I had them ship it to the Organization of Awesomeness, located at my home address. It said it would take a few weeks to get here, so I just forgot about it. Well, yesterday it came in the mail and I got a pretty good laugh. Here are a couple of pictures!
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- The Whole Package
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- Organization of Awesomeness
Site Cleaning and Whatnot
Decided to clean up the extraneous sections of this website. My portfolio was way too out of date, so I completely got rid of it, and with the Presidential Election now over, there's no point in having a Politics section either.
I should probably get going on that CSS part, though.
My contract work looks like it will be picking up again. The major reason there was so little work done in November was because almost every member of the team (there are only about 5 or 6 of us) went on a 2 or 3 week vacation. December should be back to normal.
I've got a couple of side projects going on as well. The wife of my brother-in-law's friend (had to think about that for a second) is opening up a wedding service company, so a website is being completed by both Nadia and myself. My contract with the Region I Chapter of the VPPPA (www.vppregion1.com) is bringing in some work in the realm of a new design, and added functionality. Fortunately, this means I won't be entirely broke for Christmas. Unfortunately this means that things like reading the Feynman Lectures, brushing up on PHP, and learning Ruby on Rails and Python will have to be moved to that friendly old backburner.
In my last post I mentioned I'll be heading home to Massachusetts for Christmas. This is now confirmed, and I can also confirm that Nadia will be joining me! Last year she wasn't able to accompany me due to work restrictions, but we have got around that this year.
That's all folks!