My experiences trying to setup an xe.com FX account

So, I've been living pretty cheap up here in the frozen wastelands of the north, and have been saving as hard as I can. The up-shot of all this is I have more cash than the 10 grand limit customs allows you when entering the US. Go me.


So, I go through the hoop-jumping of setting up an xe.com/fx account:

• Send them a recent bank statement
• Take a long lunch, and walk up to a public notary to get a notarized copy of passport
• Sit through a phone interview

Then, I get the same automated email again, asking either to turn up at their North Vancouver office, or submit a notarized copy of my passport / drivers license.

I ring them up, explain that yes, right now I am a Canadian resident, despite having an Irish accent. I explain that my company has moved me around quite a bit, and no I haven't been a resident for the last 2 years.

The lady on the other end wants me to go to their office in North Van to submit to what I can only presume would be a vigorous cavity search. Given I'd already spent 25cad and half an afternoon getting the notarized passport copy, I was in no mood to undertake a 10km round-trip, either by public transport or taxi, either in terms of money or time spent.

So, xe.com have declined to do business with me, missing out on getting their percentage of the $bignum I'm moving to the states.


Fail.

00 status confirmed

I ended up being awake all night thinking about the consulate interview.

I then went to the consulate this morning, waited for 3 hours and 58 minutes, and then had a 2 minute interview, at the end of which my visa was approved. I can pick up my passport on Thursday, and enter the US any point after Sept 15th.

I need to get the relocation people going on coming to my place and box up my stuff, and that's about it - then it's back to LA, moving in with Samantha and two cats.

Now, I'm drinking scotch, watching The Outer Limits, and chilling out.


I note Android finally finally has a Facebook app. Hurrah. I've also just found the joy of Android Widgets. Pretty cool.

Memorial Day weekend

Finishing out the memorial day weekend watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and banging out a blog post. Samantha arrived Thursday night with my Casio Exilim FC100, and my HTC ADP1. Went to watch Ireland win vs Canada in rugby on Saturday. Samantha wasn't feeling that well, so spent the remainder of the weekend looking after her and generally trying to keep her comfortable. In between, I got a prototype of TargetScheme running on the ADP1 - needed to rework it a bit to take into account that I'm pointing with my finger instead of a stylus, but I think I have a workable solution. Currently have the UI layout hardcoded, need to figure out how to use the XML layout so I can add in menus, score lists etc.

Samantha just landed at LAX - I'm looking forward to doing the same, I'll find out in July if I'm here for 6 months or a year. It can't go quick enough (don't get me wrong, Vancouver is nice, and everyone I've met up here has been lovely), but I want to get on with my life with Samantha, and my career with Treyarch.

Samantha

I miss her an epic amount. She's sick with the chickenpox and miserable, and all I want in the world is to wrap my arms around her and make her feel better. But I can't, because I'm stuck up here in the frozen wastelands of the north. Fucking visas.

Catch up

It occurs to me that I haven't updated the blog since I moved to Vancouver. Have found a really great house to live in, just off Commercial Drive.Really great landlord, and really friendly housemates. Sharing a house has really worked out, as living in an apartment didn't seem like a good idea when I'm here on my own.

I've joined an archery meetup group - it's proving to be a lot of fun, as I can just shoot a wooden bow, relax and concentrate on my form. I've ordered some low poundage KAP limbs from a local archery supplier so I can really go to town on my form with the X-Factor. I've been thinking about a complete gear change - right now it's a toss-up between the Bernardini Luxor and the W&W TF Apecs. Very different bows, and I'll have to think about it carefully. The torque compensator in the Apecs is very interesting, and from what I've seen Frangilli has switched back from the Bernardini to the Apecs, and I've moved away from heavy risers since I gave up the 2001 VBS. More research needed. Either way, I'll be pairing the riser with W&W Apecs Prime Limbs and some form of stiff single rod stabilization, like the Soma CEX2 or Fiberbow S3 or something similar.

I dropped Samantha off at the airport earlier today, she came up to visit for a week. I miss her. It was really good to see her. She's very good to me.

Work has been busy; they've given me my own office, which has been kind of odd, and a little bit lonely sometimes, but such is life. I walk the 1.8km to and from work every day, and it's doing me good. I have a bike getting fixed up in the local bike shop, which will be useful for getting around.

iPhone toolchain continued

After attending a python talk at SCALE7x, I did some googling, and it turns out there is a port of pyobjc for the iPhone - whilst useful, I wanted to get into some proper 2D graphics coding, especially with the excellent Cocos2d framework. My last attempt at building a toolchain on my Debian Lenny box ended in failure. However, I came accross iphonedevonlinux which gives you a neat little bash script that abstracts out all the pain of building the iPhone toolchain on Linux. Worked pretty well, I've just compiled my first HelloWorld to the iPhone and (after calling ldid to "sign" the binary) it worked perfectly. Only requirements are an apple developer login (free) and the iphone sdk from apple (downloadable from apple). The script does the rest, including grabbing the latest firmware if you give it your apple dev id and pass. Only non-obvious but was when it died immediately trying to build the toolchain with a misplaced @ error - turns out I had to install gcc objc support - once I did that it compiled straight off. Good times.

The move to Vancouver is becoming a bit more real - I have an appointment at the embassy next week. I've been doing my research, and I should have an archery club within reach. Once I'm settled up there, I intend to get some low-poundage limbs and spend the long lonely evenings working on my form; my current Samick Extremes are just too heavy to do any kind of meaningful form adjustment.

Citizenship

I had the pleasure of watching my better half Yoeum (now Samantha, for the confused - she's changing her name along with her citizenship) be sworn in as a United States citizen this morning. 6000 people all becoming citizens. I'll need to be here 7 years as a permanent resident before I become eligible.

Things are starting to come together for the move to Canada - looks like I'll be up there for 6 months at the least. Still in two minds on whether to bring the mx5 up with me, or put it up on blocks and stick a tarp over it till I get back.