New York and Boston next week

Everybody's registering for 6UADEC. Too bad I cannot make it :(. Apparently I should have not taken Roozbeh's words about not having funds to go to 6UADEC seriously, since they are trying anyway. Only thing lost was my opporunity to apply for a Canadian visa to be able to come back to Canada after 6UADEC, and that takes some five weeks itself.

Instead, yesterday I finally got a US visa. To make some of you more ashamed of your government, lemme explain the history of this visa. I applied for it on January 23rd, 2004. I was supposed to present in the Internationalization and Unicode Conference on April 1st 2004. The officer told me we've got plently time to get my clearance back. In short, that didn't happened until late August. After that I was busy enough to not go get it (and I needed to bring new documents). So finally I went there on February 7th 2005, to get the visa to visit a friend. Since a clearance is only valid for a few months (three or six, don't know), I had to go over again. But fortunately this time it took less than two months.

So here I go now, with a visa in my passport, and a Bob Dylan presale ticket for the last performance of the tour in my hand for April 30 in New York. So I'm heading there in two days. No plans on how long or where to stay yet, but if everything goes smoothly I plan to make a trip to Boston too, where I would like to meet some Gnome/Red Hat people, if anybody stands up. Any words, offers, interests are more than welcome.

With Roozbeh, we will make sure to update you on our visa problems, you that your goverments think we support our government, you who travel with a tip of your toes.

¶ 7:17 PM