Tons of work and staying at my mothers place in order to take care of the cat while my mother is on vacation has left me a little out of the free software loop for the past few weeks.
When I work much as I do now I usually tend to start pondering my career choices. While I believe that I can always change the direction of my career if I so desire I also recognise that for each year I continue at my current job the road to doing something very different gets longer. Which means that if I really want to do something else the sooner the better. Question of course is if I really want to do something else, I mean in general I am happy about my work situation, and I can’t help wondering if my longing for something else is just the classic ‘grass is greener on the other side of the fence’ trap that we all tend to fall into from time to time.
Another part of the equation is that each time I do these ponderings I realize that while I do want something else I don’t really have a clear idea what it is. Only thing I really do want to do is write fiction, but I guess my current job should be as good as any to combine with that since chances of me making a living of writing isn’t that high, especially not short term.
GNOME
The work/living situation combined with a some social obligations has resultet in almost no GNOME effort from me for the last 10 days or so. Did manage to integrate some patches into GStreamer over a week ago which I am happy about. I feel there is no greater disservice an ambitious free software project can to itself than not review/commit submitted patches. Project leaders/maintainers/core devs who doesn’t do this sends out a clear message saying ‘this is a one man show and plans on staying that way’ IMHO.
Been building up a nice list of stories for a new summary so hopefully I be able to actually get it done this weekend.
Australia
I haven’t said much about my effort to get a work permit in Australia for some time as there hasn’t been much to report.
But I did check last weekend and found that 12 weeks had passed since I sent my initial application for certification to ACS. Considering that they promised a reply in 10 weeks I felt I had reason enough to try contacting them even if their homepage threatens to delay the application further if you inquire about status. Learned two things, the first being that the rules for qualification had changed in October which means that in the middle of reviewing my (and other applications) the rules had changed. Haven’t read through the new rules yet, but worst case scenario is me not qualifying anymore. Secondly it could be that this change has lead to delays in the process since many applications might had to be re-evaluated. ACS has not sent me any info on this so I don’t really know. Secondly I got an autoreply on my inquiry, telling me the person who does the certifications was on vacation and would be back the 19th November.
Could of course be that this is the reason I have no response yet, simply because he left for vacation just before replying to my application which has caused an extra 2-4 weeks delay depending on the lenght of the vacation.
Of course I now need to send another mail if I want ot get some feedback since the autoroply stated that all mails recieved during vacation period would be deleted.
So when I finally get my hopefully positive reponse from ACS I should be ready to move on to sending my appliclation to the Australian Authorities proper. So my current estimate for having the work permit in hand is somewhere around march-april next year.