The t.echnologist experiment

I’ve started a site called ‘t.echnologist.com’.

The point of this site is to provide articles and information on latest tech. Reports on markets trends and advices on agency software and hardware. Ultimately the next part is to stoke some ideas in the creative couldron.

I want to be able to inspire cool thinking. It’s obviously initially going to have to come form me, I’ll have to put in the hard yards and create new ideas. Then I have to visualise them! That’s a bit more of an effort for me.

However, when it’s all done, it will ultimately be an outlet for myself to learn, and create. Hopefully, I’ll find a way to get other people on board. We’ll be able to create and dream new ideas, using new technology, and hopefully inspire others to create products that we would never have seen otherwise.

The visa extension debacle.

Finally, I’ve got my NZ Visa extended. After a good month of preparation, what with medicals, paperwork and the money to pay for it, I’ve got the stamp of approval and I’m now legal here until July 2011.

It didn’t all go swimmingly well though. I really dislike forms and will try to do as little as possible to read them completely. This was my initial downfall. I’d like to pass it off as dyslexia, but the truth is that forms, whatever shape they come in and if more than 3 or 4 boxes long, scare me.

So I didn’t read all the form and trusted the administrator at the desk in the immigration office to provide me yes or no answers to my questiononic statements.

‘is this all I need?’
‘yes’
‘have I filled out the pages correctly’
‘we don’t have time to check them for you’
‘I’ve got my medical, the initial form and my money, that’s enough’
‘yes’

Obviously it was not enough,  as I got my application sent back to me in the post a week later. As I live in apartment blocks the post didn’t get delivered to me and I had to rearrange to get the package delivered to the post shop to get my documents back which took another 10 days of mostly my languidity.

I had thought that my visa expired on the 3rd of August. I’ve thought this for a year. This being my mental context, I now thought that I was illegal in New Zealand, and had to leave the country. Nervously, I phoned up immigration and was assured I didn’t have to leave the country, I just had to provide a detailed cover note as to why I was in this position and then pay more money, $260, more than twice the original fee. The immigration officer receiving this note would made a judgement on the basis of what he read.

Now I was confused! I then received and email from immigration telling me that I had 12 days before my visa expired? Which was it? 12 days or already expired?

So I went to immigration with my forms, and the bits of documentation I was missing. My passport (this now seems like an idiotic thing ont to include) and my financial balance.

They confirmed that I had until the 31st of August. They showed me that in fact my passport also said 31st of August in a doctors handwriting scribble that I thought was actually a signature.

I resubmitted the application and in a week, I had an email telling me the status of my application had changed. This was too soon! The process takes a month so I must have failed again. Perhaps it was the money that wasn’t enough, though the admin girl at immigration had told me that I would probably be fine. Perhaps I missed some more documentation, or I needed to refill the form out again. I got angry, and all the permutations in my mind began to present themselves. how could I mess this up? I leave everything to the last minute!

I went on the immigration website and tried to log in. To no avail, I simply couldn’t find the log in link. I searched the help section, I searched Google. I searched my Gmail. Nothing.

My brain fog lifted, and I tried the front page again and saw the link staring at me disguised as an image. I clicked that and followed the process through.

When I had logged in, I saw my status had been extended to July 2011. Well that was it then! Done! I double checked it a view times and found out more information but it was true, finally I got another 11 months on my visa.

Never had I been more emotionally involved in a form.

The lift that gets me down..

An agitating lift is one that refuses to acknowledge your first 3 attempts at designating a preferred floor.

Once it’s seems to have chosen a destination you turn round to cast dispersions of dispair at the mirrored wall. Seconds later you comprehend that you have ceased travel not at your required port of call, but at floor 7. Floor 7 is neither floor 6 where you are compassed, nor floor 3 from which you embarked.

Before you’ve had adequate time to first inwardly infuriate, then react to enact the appropriate repose, another fellow lift communteer, sifts in to position and interacts with said mechanisms with out a wiff of failure or distress. A simple pleasure for a simple journey. This bedevilled device then chauffeurs your new mused envee, to his/her immediate future without a whiff of what has just been.

You are now a passenger. An unfortunate out of control victim of a nonchalant and stubborn creation of a designer/developer/engineer who has apparently met the deadline leaving a few bugs in the system.

The futility of this affair is a charm to some I’m sure, but being the subject of elevator born harassment is quite waring after a time. I can honestly bare witness to this fact of my troubled relationship with the counter-weighted mundane monstrosity that treats me in the fashion of a condescending butler, mute of tongue.

Ironically, I’m moved to become more like my despised dualent for we are both (for the time) highly strung.

No Sh….izzle Sherlock (spoiler).

Recently I’ve been passing time with the new Sherlock Holmes series from the BBC. Sherlock Holmes based in the modern day. It’s such a classic character composition that I don’t seem to mind what format it comes in, as long as it’s good.

In the series, many of characters  have websites, Mr Watson has his blog, and Sherlock has his ‘The Science of Deduction‘ website.

On Sherlocks website you can find hidden messages he’s been getting from ‘Anonymous’ . ‘Anonymous’ is taunting Sherlock with hidden messages, which Sherlock can’t be bothered with so he opens them out to the public.

The most recent one ‘hidden message 3‘, is a simple letter swap encryption. By substituting the characters in the message for self created symbols, you get a visual encryption. It’s not hard to break. It took me about 1-2 minutes from first seeing it, taking a screenshot and decoding it. It’s good fun though, I hope some harder ones come a long.

Here’s my solution (‘Sherlock I have found you’):

Where have you been?

As of this moment in time, I have 8 days left until my NZ visa expires, so I should really get on and apply for that!

With my end of year taxes coming up, and next to no documentation for it all, including bank statements, I’m feeling a little far away from where I need to be at the moment. However, my accountant assures me it can be done from such a distance.

Projects

A couple of interesting projects I’m working at the moment are in the mix. One is a personal project of mine I’m working on with a few friends, and another is one I’m pushing for a national V8 raceteam.

The former involves a Tumblr style blog, but aimed specifically at travellers. You can post various types of blog entry (video/audio/note/pictures) which is then geotagged and then displayed on a map alongside your post. The posts can be syndicated to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr other WordPress blogs etc. It should be really easy to use and be very useful. At least we hope so. We’re building it in such a way, that it can be used from our free companion iPhone app, or any number of other mobile devices that support GPS, audio, video etc..

The latter, is a really cool project where we’re hoping to get a national V8 raceteam to build a remote control life sized racecar, controlled by an iPhone. Even better is we’re hoping the teams charity side, which helps kids from poor backgrounds to get an interest and basic education in engineering. If all goes well, we should get some news coverage.