by R.I. Pienaar | Mar 4, 2008 | Front Page
Today my UK passport finally arrived, I did have to go for an interview where they re-established that I am who I say I am.
The interview was quite interesting, when I went to write my Britishness Test there were only 4 or so other people at the test and I kind of looked at that as an indication that perhaps, as usual, there is more hype in the media related to immigration than is really needed.
They arrange the interview meetings in blocks of 45 minutes and only allow you in 10 minutes before your block start, so you can know who is in there are all people who are applying for their first passport. I went to the interview center in Elephant & Castle, its a fairly big facility with almost 30 interview cubicles, in my 45 minutes block there were about 80 or so people waiting for the interview.
This kind of brought it home a bit more that yes really there is a massive immigration problem, the interview centers are open 6 days a week and if they are usually anywhere near as busy as when I went – noon on a Friday – then I’d say the rate of immigration is totally unsustainable. It is easier to visualize the problem in a setting like this than to read some big figure in a news paper.
The interview itself was very professionally done, the woman who interviewed me were friendly, thorough and I think the whole thing was actually pretty enjoyable apart from the obvious inconvenience involved. They mostly asked me to confirm what I already filled in on my application forms but also some extra things like what is my Car Registration, what bank accounts I have and when they were opened. It was all simple stuff and went really quick.
by R.I. Pienaar | Feb 13, 2008 | Front Page, Usefull Things
Today on freshmeat I noticed 2 useful utilities for anyone running Xen Servers.
The first is called Virt-top it is a easier to read top like tool than xm top that shows all virtual machines memory and CPU usage in a nice display including totals etc:
The other – Virt-P2V – it’s a CD Image that you can boot a physical machine with that will then convert it to a virtual machine for you. It will scp the drive image to a destination of your choice and create a config file to boot it after asking you some questions. I intend to use this to move a VMWare virtual machine to Xen soon, will post here and see how it goes.
Both of these come from a Red Hat employee, with some luck we’ll see these included in Red Hat Linux soon.
by R.I. Pienaar | Feb 11, 2008 | Front Page
I previously mentioned that got a letter confirming it all went well with my application for naturalisation, the whole process is now more or less done.
I had the ceremony last Thursday and around 11:24 in the morning the Mayor of Greenwich handed me my certificate so I am now all done with that and a full Citizen of the United Kingdom. I arrived here on the 2nd of Feb 2002 and became a citizen on the 7th of Feb 2008. I could have applied last year in March already and probably would have been done with it all around September but I was procrastinating and eventually the noise about the reforms in the immigration laws gave me the kick I needed to complete it.
The biggest advantage I’ll see immediately is of course the passport, traveling as a South African – or in fact being a South African out of South Africa – is such a liability your whole life is just tough, massive headache of visas, immigration time wasting etcetc, endless hassle. In tourist visas alone I spent about GBP500 in the last few years never mind all the time wasted in getting those and even just in queuing in the non EU citizen lines at airports, all gone now! I’ve also had to struggle quite a lot with tenancy agreements for flats that I rent etc as I was never sure if I’ll even be in the country for the year they want you to sign, so had to always get 6 month break clauses put in etc.
This is a part of the certificate I received during the ceremony:
Today I’ll apply for my first UK passport, it should come through in about 2 weeks unfortunately just too late to attend FOSDEM.
The process for applying for citizenship is all hyped up to be this fantastic experience for applicants, a great introduction to the country and its people. This is done through the test you need to pass and a formal ceremony that even includes singing God Save The Queen.
Overall I’d say the whole thing just left me cold, personally I see little point to most of the hoops I had to jump through. I have to say though that the test has some value – it tests that you have a grasp of English and in that function its a success so I’d keep it for that reason. The ceremonies though? waste of time and money in my eye.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 30, 2008 | Photography, Photography Equipment
I’ve a fairly short history with film, only started on it in September 2006 and it’s pretty much taken over for me from much of my digital camera work.
Since September 2006 I bought quite a few bits of film camera equipment, lenses aside this is what I have:
The most recent additions are the bottom two, they’re medium format cameras and something I’ve been intending to get into for a while. I bought the Seagull on eBay for cheap to see if I like the format and have some great results with it, especially considering it cost only GBP40.
So after loving the medium format as a medium I decided to get a proper medium format camera, I decided on a SLR rather than a TLR so got the Bronica SQA, it’s a square format medium format camera with interchangeable lenses, backs and finders. You can even buy Polaroid or digital backs for it to.
We took it out yesterday during lunch for a quick test and I love the shots we got, it’s lovely to use though it has no light meter so I use one of my hand held light meters, the shot below and ones it links too were all done with a 1 degree spot meter and metered using the Zone Systems.
I love working with the medium format negatives, they are roughtly 6 cm x 6cm each with big generous borders between negatives. This makes working with them so easy, easy to cut, easy to handle safely without touching the photos etc.
I found my developing results with them were much better than with 35mm, maybe I have just been more careful, will need to see when I do my next 35mm and compare.
Since using film my general photography has improved a lot, I now find that I am forced to spend a lot more time thinking about a shot, putting up tripod, metering it by hand, looking at every bit of detail of the photo to do the metering correctly etc, my % of shots taken to shots that I love is much higher than before and as a result even my digital photography has improved. I take fewer shots and get many more keepers. I think I’ll be doing film work till they stop making it.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 19, 2008 | Front Page
I just received the following in the post:
Thanks you for submitting your application for British citizenship. I am pleased to say that the application has been succesful and you will shortly receive a letter inviting you to attend a citizenship ceremony.
Hooray.
