that canadian girl

Last night, I had a little whingefest about David Cameron’s statement that there are “too many immigrants” coming to Britain, which prompted me to highlight that fully legitimate, well educated migrants like myself didn’t appreciate being included in that statement after all our contributions in taxes and hard work.

This morning, I was very interested when I saw that Tony Sharp, a Conservative councillor for Brickhill Ward in Wellingborough had responded to my post. He quite rightly pointed out that Mr. Cameron’s statement was referring to “low skilled workers” as opposed to Highly Skilled Migrants, who are apparently more welcome. [Welcome to the traffic from the ConservativeHome blog, btw!]

In his comment, Tony mentioned a post he wrote a few weeks ago on the issue some Highly Skilled Migrants are having to deal with. In summary:

The entry criteria was tightened last year. Fair enough, there is nothing wrong with reviewing and updating a policy for new applicants that exists to benefit this country. But in one of the most spiteful, wrongheaded and self damaging decisions yet taken by Labour, it was decided to also apply the new rules retrospectively to those Highly Skilled Migrants (HSM) who had been granted entry under the old rules. Many of the HSM already working here are being told they no longer meet the criteria and are being refused the right to remain.

Now, I’m gobsmacked for two reasons here. The most obvious being that moving the goalpost on existing migrants is just the kind of madness I expect from immigration nowadays. And the second, that the criteria are being tightened. Here’s why that surprises me - When I moved to the UK, I did not qualify for a work visa as Highly Skilled Migrant. University degree in Communication & Marketing, enough funds to support myself, multilingual, no criminal record, people both in Canada and the UK who have known me for a long time and could vouch for me. That wasn’t good enough. But for once, today, I’m happy not to be under the HSM program, because getting the rug pulled from under my feet would set me off on another rant, and no one likes to see that.

In fact, for Mr. Sharp’s benefit and anyone else interested, here’s the breakdown of my progress towards becoming a British Citizen. It’s the long and winding road, as opposed to the HSM program.

1. Dec 2001-Dec 2002: Working Holidaymaker visa - That was nice and easy to get and not too expensive either. They were just getting me hooked, the bastards!
2. May-August 2003: Working Holidaymaker visa was still valid for a few months, so it covered me for that summer
3. May 2004: Planning on moving to the UK permanently on a Highly Skilled Migrant visa, but I was told I did not qualify for it. Thankfully, my gorgeous British man (we were engaged at the time) agreed to scooting the wedding forward a year, so I was granted a fiance visa on the requirement that we got married within 6 months of me arriving in the UK. However, until I was married, I was allowed to reside in the UK, but not work.
4. July 2004: After the wedding, I returned to my favourite place in the world, Croydon, to get a married visa, which finally allowed me to take up employment.
5. August 2006: Two years of marriage, which I now need to prove to my Croydon mates in letters, bills, pictures, holiday tickets. I literally showed up with a suitcase of information, yet they still looked at me like I was some suspicious drug smuggler with a fake marriage arrangement. But I was granted a leave to remain visa (basically permanent residency).
6. We’re now in August 2007 and it’s now up to me to apply for British Citizenship, but after the circus which I’ve described above, I’m in no rush to go do the Britishness Test. I consider myself as British as some people who’ve lived here all their life: I say knackered, bloody, can’t be arsed, I can tell a good pint from North American swill, I watch Red Dwarf, Peep Show and Spaced. I whinge about the Tube every time I go into London. I’ve passed my UK driving license on the first go. What more do you want? Oh, for me to go answer a handful of pub quiz trivia questions on the history of Britain to prove I’m really Britanicised? Well… bollocks to that for now. I’ll travel on a Canadian passport!

All this to say, low skill or high skill, it’s a pain to migrate to the UK, and I would love to see an improved process so that others like me don’t have to go through this chaotic process.

Two questions for the Facebook team:

• How can a married woman be found by her old school friends via search? They can’t. Even if you put your maiden name in your profile, it won’t come up in a search.
• How can a woman change her profile to her married name? There is no name change option, and not many users will be keen to create a whole new account under their married name. [Update: Credit to the #mobitopia guys who pointed out I was talking out of my arse. Under Account, you can change your name.]

I would love for Facebook to allow you to enter a maiden name somewhere, enabling users who search for you to see that your name has since changed.

Evening kids, and welcome to Vero’s daily bitch-out about something or other.

Today, I’ve got a bone to pick with my old friend David Cameron. For those who either a. aren’t based in the UK, b. aren’t interested in politics or c. live under a rock, he’s the leader of the Conservative party.

Immigration over the past decade has been “too high” and needs to be better controlled, Conservative leader David Cameron has told the BBC’s Newsnight. People’s concerns were “not because of different cultures” or the colour of someone’s skin but pressure on schools, hospitals and housing, he said. [BBC News, today]

I won’t go on much about the latter statement, because I agree that there are pressures on schools, hospitals and housing, all of which scare the bejeezus out of me. But just quickly, a. education in the UK, unless you pay vast amounts, your kids will inevitably be truant chavs it seems, b. the hospitals and local clinics I’ve seen so far made me feel sicker when I left than when I’d walked in, a stark opposite to the clinically clean Montfort Hospital or Children’s Hospital I’ve been to in my Canadian youth, and c. house prices are exorbitant and unrealistic, if you’re not already in the UK, just watch an episode of Location x3, you’ll agree.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the UK. I (generally) love people’s less brash and aggressive attitude than one would find in North America. Humour, culture and music, I feel far more in tune with than any North American guff that gets produced. And friends and family, which I have here, I adore too.

What I will go on about is how, as far as legal immigrants are concerned, we have to jump through such hoops to get into this bloody land of King Arthur, Amy Winehouse and fish & chips. After those pirouettes, I expect no less than to be welcomed with open arms.

I’ve paid disgraceful amounts in visa fees (4 visas in total, one more to come possibly), filled in the worst forms I’ve ever seen without complaining, spent some severely traumatising days queuing at the Croydon Home Office, being herded like a sheep and treated like a criminal*. I’m University-educated, well-spoken… usually, and I make enough money to fund myself and give up a generous chunk of my monthly salary in taxes - so hearing that there’s too many immigrants around winds me up just a tad bit.

There’s unquestionably some work to be done in the key areas that keep a “First World” country up and running, there undoubtedly are some immigrants which don’t give to the country as much as they take, but please Davie, don’t paint us all immigrants with the same bold magnolia paintbrush. Look at your own populace and join Ann Widdecombe in her war against the UK’s very own benefits culture. Oh yes, that’d be fun!

Otherwise it’s you and me, handbags at dawn, baby!

[* Andrew presses me to add “and paid some unbelievable parking fees!”]
[Disclaimer: The theories above are provided under Creative Commons license, on an as-is basis and the author takes no responsibilities over any of her own words and accepts that the statements above are like Swiss Cheese. She’s in rant mode tonight.]

Run for your life, the Daleks have arrived and will EXTERMINATE everything in their path!

More awesome Flickr pics here
[Via BoingBoing]

Every so often, I trawl through my blog’s search logs to find out what topics have ignited the interest of readers. There’s the top content, the usual search terms. But then there’s the dregs, the random gobshite some people search for that leaves me completely mystified HOW that landed them on my blog!

So here’s to sharing the random Google search results some people have used to find some of my posts.

• “toby carvery nutritional information”: I dunno, what’s the nutritional information for cardboard?
• “how the canadian girls do they look like”: How the who wha?!
• “where to place l plates on ford ka”: Right, and they should let you pass your test why?
• “guardian journalists rubbish web copywriters”: Hah, you said it first, mate!
• “husband corset”: *Slips her the phone number of a good marriage therapist*
• “imovie 08 red line when trying to drag clips”: To fix this, Step 1 - Take iMovie disc out of drive, Step 2 - Put back in packaging, Step 3 - Take back to store and demand a copy of iMovie ‘06.
• “funny & nasty domain names blog”: I don’t think my blog has a nasty name *cries* I’m hurt.
• “tablets to get into a mood of sex”: Open email. Check spam folder. There you go, plenty of “sexy mood” tablets for ya!
• “how do you work out if a girl fancies you” & “how to make a move to make out with a girl”: Hmm how to explain you have NO hope.
• “where can i read the latest darwin award entries?”: Uhh let’s see DarwinAwards.com?
• “my sister-in-law nude pictures”: Dude, that’s NEVER a good idea…
• “thong knickers banned in schools”: Excuse my ignorance, but umm, do they check every morning?
• “canadian pillow humping”: Buahahaha wtf?
• “smartass”: Oh, sorry, I’ll stop now.

Previous edition: Funny Google Searches: Looking Back at 2006 Edition

On Thursday, I got annoyed enough with my half-assed Twitter username, and not getting a response from the team that I made a blog post out of it.

The next morning, I woke up to find a response to my feature request from 6th August from Crystal at Twitter:

Hello Vero,

Thanks for your email, apologies for the delay. We do this for the sake of ease. The limit on characters is mainly for SMS purposes; each message you send will include the user name associated with your number. Twitter messages have a 140 character limit, and a minimum of 10 characters is your phone number; adding 15 characters for a user name to 10 characters minimum for a phone number would be at least 25 of 140 characters. A long user name will also make it difficult for people to direct text you from their phones. Sorry about that! Can we send you a t shirt to make up for it?

Thanks,

Crystal

So there it is, I won’t get my full username back, which means I’ll continue to miss most @replies unless I change my username altogether. Part of why I’m making a big deal out of this is out of curiosity to see what it would take to get a response, but also because it strikes me as a bit of a lazy fix to truncate usernames of legacy users to 15chars retrospectively. Oh well, I still love Twitter.

As for the tshirt, I’m a sucker for schwag, so hopefully Twitter will send it to me even though I’m not based in the US.

A few weeks ago, I ordered a laptop bag from Etsy.com. I’d never bought anything there but had heard some positive comments about it being a friendly eBay for handcrafted goods. The stuff undeniably looked cool, and the general feel of the site was positive. I contacted a seller to find out whether he could customise the bag I liked to be padded and suitable for my MacBook Pro. I was so excited when Stilleto, aka Dave Gratto, agreed to make a bespoke laptop bag for me.

It took a few weeks (due to international shipping), but once the bag, skinny wallet and wrist lanyard for my work dongle arrived, I felt like a kid on Christmas day. Once I got over the initial excitement, I started wondering why Dave was making bags and accessories and why he’d picked Etsy as his online selling market. So I thought I’d ask him a few questions.

First, what inspired you to start making bags and other sewn funky things?

Many many years ago. i was in college taking architectural drafting while my brother was at a prestigious school for fashion design. As much as I loved my career choice I couldnt help but see my brother using very similar skills in building patterns and creating products he loved. Thats when I decided that not only did I want to draft and design, I wanted to build. Knowing that I wasnt about to build a house, I started to dabble in my brothers homework projects.

So to make a long story short; I chose a different direction. with drafting skills in hand, Forced my brother to teach me everything he knew and here I am today.

Where do you find such funky materials?

All my material choices are very random, I try to find fresh, modern, vintage and odd materials. Finding materials is an addiction. I scout the material stores, Internet, Second hand stores, clothing stores, ect.

If I’m in a mall or a clothing store I generally come out with 2 or 3 garments with the intention to cut them up and design wallets or bags out of them. I’ve used bedding, curtains hand painted fabrics, even an ironing board cover.

Everything can be used for something. Open your creative mind and your grandmas ugliest moo moo could become the coolest hat wallet or bag everyone will want.

Did you used to sell your creations locally before you decided to start selling online?

I did sell locally within my city (Vancouver B.C.) I would take my finished products with business cards to stores and work. I have done some craft fairs and was lucky enough to sell a few in some stores. Since I was spending 40-50 hours a week at my office job, I was never able to concentrate fully on my products.

Now that I have reached the ripe age of 30+ I’ve decided to spend more time doing the things that I want to do. Hence Etsy.

What made you choose Etsy as a suitable selling place? Do you also sell elsewhere online?

Etsy: I took in some fabric to a coworker at my office job and she asked me if I’ve ever been to Etsy, “Never” I said. That afternoon when I checked it out for the first time; I was hooked.

Etsy is a great community. The sellers and buyers are always friendly and always willing to lend a hand. I have never had so much exposure from strangers just willing to lend a hand. I have learned to never be greedy as a seller, Always take pride in your work and a little extra sweat and blood goes a long long way.

Since Etsy, my brother of many talents has designed me a website called Oddities

Right now it is very fresh but quickly becoming Hot. Not only will there be items for sale from Stilleto but we have also added a few other cool shops, chat room, cool links and fun things to do as well as cool buys.

Does selling to someone halfway across the world (like to me) feel any different for you than selling to the local passers-by who pop by your shop?

The great thing about the internet is that not only am I selling in B.C. but I am also selling everywhere around the globe. I have sold to England, Denmark, Europe, Philippines, Japan and of course The United States and Canada. Just knowing that I have one of my products on the other side of the globe is truly exciting.

I received an email a couple of months ago from a girl in Oregon, U.S.A. She tells me she was at a club and met someone sporting a Stilleto bag, She then contacted me the next day to place an order, This to me is probably better than sex ??

I can only thank people like yourself for my success. The way I see it; This is only the beginning.

Diggnation 106: Alex points out that iPhone contains “fuck” in its dictionary. Props Apple, Nokia just pretends words like that don’t exist.

“A man has been arrested after being spotted allegedly sitting in a street with a laptop using someone else’s unsecured wireless connection. Is it immoral to do this?”

This BBC article made me laugh. It must’ve been a slow day for the coppers in that area for them to resort to arresting cheeky wifi thieves.

Couldn’t help but pipe up on the topic. I personally don’t think it should be considered a crime to nick somebody else’s open wireless connection. Now, I’m not condoning using your neighbour’s connection to do your illegal bidding or max out the connection on BitTorrent, but the occasional browsing via your phone or laptop when you’re in another area where the nearest legit hotspot is miles away, it’s a pretty inoffensive activity.

What no one has mentioned so far is the risk of using an open connection. It’s quite possible for someone to setup a wireless connection as a trap for naive people who choose to use it for online banking, online shopping or logging in to email and other accounts. Snap their details on it’s way to the World Wild Web and you’ve got yourself some very useful personal information to pay for your next shopping spree.

Now, to the real guilty party - If you’re enough of a doofus to leave your wifi open, you should expect somebody to borrow the connection. In fact, if you’re that doofus, pay your router a little visit and go stick a nice little password on there. It takes 5 minutes and it stops the freeloaders.

Since April, I’ve been asking Twitter to fix a problem.

Bet I’m not the only one coming up with bug fix requests and ideas. They must have bug fix requests coming out their ears. I appreciate that. But they’re ignoring me completely. So I’m going to publicly stamp my feet and have a bit of a strop, and hope something happens.

I signed up for Twitter in December 2006. At that point, I selected the username “thatcanadiangirl” because I’m original like that. The system didn’t complain about it and I went on my merry way using Twitter. Later on, I tried to change some of my settings, but this wasn’t possible. Documented on Flickr and emailed Twitter flagging up the bug. No response.

I coped with it figuring changing my full name wasn’t exactly important. But curiosity killed the cat and a few months later, I figured out I was now able to change my settings! So woohoo, go add my real name in there or a URL or something!

But nooo, Twitter had fixed this the lazy way. By truncating my username to 15 characters with no regards for us existing 16 char users. Umm, do I cut a foot off your body because you’re too tall to fit in my front door?

So now my username is “thatcanadiangir”, without the L. I probably miss half my @replies but Twitter isn’t fussed. No replies to emails I sent again.

So here I am, with an incomplete username and no response from my otherwise beloved Twitter, sobbing into my beer, alone in the corner.

An update from i-Justine on her iPhone bills. No more 300 pages bills!

Learning to cook

Back in March, I wrote about my disbelief at Britain can on average only cook 4.1 meals. I’m still adamant that this stat has got to be wrong, my brain won’t let me accept that people can have such a creativity lobotomy that they’re unable to put 3-4 ingredients together in a pan to make something vaguely edible.

Yet, in the past few days, I’ve heard enough conversation from otherwise very clever people (most of them anyways) to convince me that the unfortunate reality is as grim as The Scotman’s research described. I then watched one of my favourite podcast trainwrecks, otherwise known as Ctrl+Alt+Chicken, where Alex & Heather try to make Chicken Cordon Bleu and massacre the chicken, to say the least*. These people speak of Cooking (with a capital C) as a mystic, black hat Art, to which only select people are privy.

HELLO!? This isn’t Scientology. You don’t need to put 10 years of your life and a few million bucks to find the Truth. That’s simply NOT what cooking is.

The truth is that cooking is all about experimenting. I consider myself an excellent cook, but I still poopoo the occasional meal. I’ll make a dish which ends up too salty, slightly undercooked, too watery or contains some oddly-matched flavours. Does it matter? Nope! It’s never been such a failure that we’ve had to resort to takeaway menus, but yes, mistakes happen. It just means that the next time, I’ll have a better idea of how to pair flavours and how long to cook the dish for.

Learning to take on new projects

If cooking is about creativity, experimenting and watching closely for results, then it’s a whole lot like brewing up any new project, isn’t it? Except in the latter, you don’t get tomato sauce splattered all over your new white top.

New projects are all about leaving the known comfort zone, look at what others have done, and then take a different tangent. Keep it simple the first time if you’re nervous about it. Sometimes (often?) it’ll totally bomb, but if you clean up the war wounds and move on, one day, your experiment is bound to turn into an absolute chef d’oeuvre. Too many people seem to be holding back for fear of failure.

So whether it’s cooking or creating your own business, web app or clothing shop, get excited and try something new. I’m sure it makes life a whole lot better.

[* I’m really ragging on Ctrl+Alt+Chicken but they’re a laugh to watch, so if they ever read this, I hope they won’t take offense at my comments and let me buy them a beer if the occasion arises.]

A few weeks ago, we bought an Apple TV. For those who aren’t familiar with it but have used a recent Mac, just picture it as Front Row on steroids. And on your TV.

The first logical thing to do was to put as much music as possible on its weighty 160GB hard drive, so that we could listen to it without worrying about having a laptop nearby to control the music being piped out by an Airport Express into the lounge stereo. While that was good, it became about 10 times better once we added our own pictures instead of the handful of default flower pictures Apple sticks on the Apple TV!

Every time we listen to music in the lounge now, we’re treated to a medley of pictures going back as far as ten years. “Who on earth is that?” “Was my hair seriously that bad?” “Wow, she was drunk at that wedding…” It’s a laugh really. As long as there are no cheeky snapshots of me in only my underwear, post-sunburn on holiday, trying to take a tank top off while causing myself the least amount of pain possible. *grumbles*

But in the past few days, we’ve discovered a whole new side to the Apple TV. Video podcasts. I’m not new to podcasts at all, or videocasts. But watching them on a normal tv instead of the corner of your computer while you’re working brings them to life.

My video podcast diet recently has mostly consisted of:

• Diggnation episodes: The format is two guys sitting on a sofa (Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht), some beers, two laptops, a bunch of ranty stories. Somehow, it should suck. Yet, it’s oddly entertaining.
• Some Ctrl+Alt+Chicken which can be described as non-cooks cooking, drinking and generally risking food poisoning. Or more succintly, as something resembling a TV trainwreck. But I still like it.
• Some surreal TikiBar TV: Still can’t figure out who’s making money and how out of this show. It’s plain weird.
• All topped off with a few eps of the Merlin Show which hasn’t had me as riveted to the TV as I had hoped. I’ll give it another chance though.

You can download any of these via iTunes. And you can feel free to recommend any of your own favourite video, or audio-only, podcasts!

If you’re thinking of attending South by South West Interactive (lovingly known as SXSWi by the regulars) in March 2008, why not make yourself heard and go have a pick of your favourites in the Panel Picker? I’ve gone through all 683 events, selecting all the interesting mobile, search, blogging or social/community panels.

The festival is in Austin, Texas, which isn’t next door, that’s a given. But from all the feedback I’ve had, it’s absolutely worth attending. Now fingers crossed I get to attend.

Who’s going with me?

Having just read David Pogue’s review of iMovie ‘08, I think it’s safe to say it doesn’t appeal to me and I won’t be rushing out to get a copy. Going from a somewhat buggy but generally nicely featured video editing application to what sounds like a painfully basic piece of software doesn’t strike me as such a great idea.

IMovie ‘08, on the other hand, has been totally misnamed. It’s not iMovie at all. In fact, it’s nothing like its predecessor and contains none of the same code or design. It’s designed for an utterly different task, and a lot of people are screaming bloody murder.

The new iMovie was, as Apple admits, designed primarily for throwing together movies quickly. It lets you scan through a clip to see what’s in it, isolate the good parts, and rapidly drop them into a sequence.

But iMovie 6 was just as good at those tasks; you could scrub through, chop and drag its clips just as easily. Meanwhile, iMovie ‘08 is incapable of the more sophisticated editing that the old iMovie made so enjoyable. The old iMovie offered the essential tools of professional programs like Final Cut Pro without the cost or complexity.

The new iMovie, for example, is probably the only video-editing program on the market with no timeline—no horizontal, scrolling strip that displays your clips laid end to end, with their lengths representing their durations. You have no indication of how many minutes into your movie you are.

What more can I say? Other than “Bollocks to that, I’m sticking to the old one!”

This country is completely bonkers this summer. We’ve had so little sunshine, no opportunities for BBQ and a ridiculous amount of rain, I’m finding myself feeling like I’ve got some sort of Seasonal Affective Disorder, causing me to feel completely knackered and sleepy!

I would love a sunny weekend, hot enough for shorts and a BBQ!

At the moment, I just want a kitten to curl up with and a good book. (As an aside, I finished reading Harry Potter last night. Shame it’s all over now, it’s such easy holiday-style reading!)

So yeah… cup of green tea and some music will do.

I’m getting unhealthily excited over Ecto 3 coming out in the near future. I’ve tried to use Ecto as offline blogging app before, but there were a few deal-breakers for me in the way it dealt with my messy updating of drafts on the web or offline in Ecto, so I’ve always ended up going straight back to WordPress’ online editor and plain TextMate files while offline.

However, Ecto 3 is now in alpha (download at your own risk) and Chris Messina documented it nicely in screenshots. I’ve only just downloaded it so it’s too early to say whether my deal-breakers have been mended, but I’ll be having a play with it as soon as I have some more spare time…

Now that I spend hours a day looking at the WordPress admin section, I’ve started using a few plugins that make my life easier, like ViperVideoTags and a Technorati tagging tool, which I’ll detail later on.

But in the meantime, here’s a useful list of writing tools for other WordPress users. Spotted this in Mashable and thought it was too good not to share.

Today, there were far too many news items on which I wanted to comment, so rather than write five separate posts, I thought I’d merge them into one highly artistic drawing.

1. Nokia admits to battery issue: I’ve blogged about this on Taptology earlier this afternoon, but the gist of it is that Nokia is having to recall 46 million batteries due to overheating and a risk of them going pop inadvertently.
2. Kids need to walk to school: In my days, we had to walk uphill both ways in 5ft of heavy snow, but today increasingly overweight kids are getting dropped off at the school door by lazy, time-poor parents, resulting in an all around jolly (read “fat”) family. If there were less cars in the city, we’d be solving the Cambridge Congestion Charge issue at the same time!
3. Mattel recalls toys for containing lead and small magnets: Toys with unsafe small magnets and lead-based paint is cause for a recall, ensuring kids don’t swallow two magnets, as these might be cause for indigestion or magnetised-together bowels. Sorry but I’m finding that mental picture far too funny for my own good… Plus a bit of lead paint is good character building, my dad would’ve said when I was a kid.
4. Too much caffeine: A girl was taken to hospital after ingesting 7 double espressos. Methink she was just doing some necessary preparations and practicing for those long “last night before essay hand-in deadline” sessions.
5. Scotland throws a strop asking for its independence (and some pocket money, plskthx): Another one I covered a little earlier (with a great comment from Liz) - Scotland’s SNP government has set out its plans for a referendum on independence, despite opposition from the other main political parties.

And that’s the news for today! That Canadian Girl: Reading the news so you don’t have to

I find it difficult to believe that no one along the line from high manager to the mailroom guy spoke up to suggest offering e-billing earlier to customers. Is it a requirement to be devoid of any common sense to work at AT&T?!

I can hear the trees crying for their lost brothers and sisters from here.

[Via Engadget]