Roberto Live!

If you haven’t checked out my flicker, I have pictures of Dallas.  I’ll post later the pictures of Houston.

All my best wishes to Heidi and Tony my ex-housemates because his little boy, Nick,  arrived to the world (and 4 hours after he was born his picture is already on Internet, that’s speed)! I wish to be in there with them but that’s an unfortunate side-effect of being traveling around the world. Now I need to go back to Australia sooner Congratulations guys!

Alright, I’m on the Northern (read “normal”) hemisphere again. After Australia I went to the US. First to Dallas where I met Kim after a couple of years, and that was awesome, even when it was quite cold. Then I went to Houston which is a cool city but probably the most exciting things over there are the shops and the Space Centre. I’ll put pictures (and videos) of NASA later, it was absolute awesome. I think I liked Dallas a bit more anyway.

Now I’m in Mexico, for the following 30 days. The plan at the moment is to get a job in Singapore in these 4 weeks. I might move to the UK in mid-2010 and then maybe trying Denmark. Ultimately, I want to come back to Australia in a not too distant future.

Bye-bye Australia (at least for now), I’m heading to Dallas, then Houston, the Villahermosa then Singapore for work. It was such a good journey in here, I met incredible people and the future seems exciting. I’ll miss everybody in Australia!! And like the dolphins said: “So long, and thanks for all the fish!”

Guess what? Our application that we submitted for Mashup Australia, Suburb Matchmaker, seems to be one of the favourites. We even got an article in Open Australia and published in the Google blog! We still have work to do but at least we’re getting attention from the public and hopefully people in NSW and other places in Australia will realise of its real potential.

Now, you can help us by checking our application and voting for us. Twitter and Facebook have also been quite useful. Any feedback or comment is more than welcome!

I just came back from the OpenAustralia Hackfest, which took place at the offices of Google in Sydney. Honestly I went there expecting very little (I’m quite busy at the moment finishing papers at Uni, looking for job in a few countries and planning a relocation of continents). Daniela, a good friend of mine, met me a few weeks ago trying to figure out what project to do, so at the end we thought the database of NSW Crime would be an interesting good mashup. Well you won’t believe that, but we met a few guys over there and ended up with a quite robust database and a prototype and we won the first place. Yep, just like that, everybody liked it because Raul (a Spanish-speaking, how funny is that?), the guy presenting it, suggested using the database to find the best suburb to get a girl (since now we can filter by age, income, sex, marital status, education, and population size).

There is a contest that finishes on Friday, we’re going to be working on the project now that we know we have a chance. And even if we don’t win I think is good way to start using that data for monitoring the level of security. I’m (unofficially) in charge of the data mining, I’ve been merging information lot of information in a consolidated database (more than 1.7 million records so far). So it looks good so far, keep on this frequency and I’ll keep you updated about the progress.

This blog moved out of California to live in Michigan under a new hosting. I was about to hire the new virtual servers in A2, but I don’t have enough time at the moment to set  all services up in Linux for myself and under 128MB of RAM, perhaps in a few months. Anyway, I’m happy that now I have SSH access (yay! managing files under FTP is brain-damaging), RoR, Python and InnoDB with MySQL, now I can have all kind of orgiastic fun.

I moved DNS records as well, if you can’t see this blog let me know

Because the British bureaucrats will sink the kingdom.

I think I have been officially ripped off by a foreign country. Yeah you guessed correctly, the British didn’t reply to my visa working visa request at the end of September as promised. I sent another fax and they haven’t replied yet. They state that there’s no refunds once an application is placed. They can give no information over the phone. And there no signs of my 600 pounds of course.

On the good news, I started to apply for jobs in Australia and it happens there are some companies interested in sponsorships. Also, I got another skills assessment from ACS, which place my skills as 2231-79  Computer Professional – specialising in Data Warehousing  (fancy, isn’t it?), which in part of the Critical Skills List. Still the application make take 12 months or so. Anyway, I’m trying to be a bit more careful about the jobs and companies I’m applying for. Better not rushing and landing an interesting position.

About Denmark, well they haven’t replied yet although I haven’t chased either. That’s a different case. The government  says that they’re very short of supply of specialised IT workers, however I have found very few jobs on internet. Not sure if Danes prefer to advertise in newspapers, or simply they exclusively do it in Danish. Anyway, I think it’d be a competitive advantage if I know some Danish, useless outside of Denmark but at least I won’t get lost in København