Roberto Live!

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

I woke up today, opened the window and saw a Total-Recall-like Sydney, things are orange and dusty. There’s a massive sandstorm covering large parts of New South Wales at the moment. Apparently Sydneysiders have no experience with the health problems of suspended particles because I saw pictures of people surfing and exercising! If there were an IMECA count in Sydney, I guess we’ll be above 150. Below a picture of the sun, and this is how the sun looks like in Mars.

If you check my Flickr, you’ll see more pictures of Canberra. I had to come back last Friday, to request a new passport in the Mexican embassy. To kill some time before my appointment I went to Old Parliament House. Now it’s a museum, quite awesome, I had the chance to sit on the cabinet’s chair and discuss with my fellow tourists ministers the issue of the “boat people” in the 70′s.

The Mexican embassy is a funny place. There are no security guards at all, they made me wait for around an hour. Besides, now it happens that the passports no longer take 1 working day like in Mexico, but 6 to 8 weeks. Oh well, at least I spent a good day in the capital.

If you want to know what have to do my degree in IT Security with the classes of intelligence that I’m taking now at Macquarie Uni, well here there is a small presentation that pretty much summarises that: The Value of Cyber Intelligence Capabilities, presented by a guy from Deloitte.

By the way, there is Threat Management summit taking place in BrightTalk.com, with very very interesting presenters. All for free!

A very good friend of mine, who’s currently in England but spent some days in Brazil, sent me a postcard of what is possibly the best sight of Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro. I want to go to Rio!!

I don’t know where she is, and unless I want to join the underworld business of Carmen, I need visas to work abroad.

Anyway, the promised visa post. Long-story short: commenting about the difficulty to find a sponsor in Australia (and that was the reason to get abroad), a friend commented out about using job agencies. And he was so correct, I wrote to a few agencies and Robert Walters called back, they were interested in my skills and they said that if I find a contract they’ll work out the visa.

Now the question is: should I try to work in Europe anyway? I don’t necessarily need to leave Australia now.

I know I haven’t updated the blog in more than a month, which is a bit weird but I’ve been busy planning for the future. If you know me well, you already know how I like traveling and meeting different people and loving all the security and open-source stuff in the way. The plan is to do all that stuff at the same time.

So what’s up with me? Well after quitting from Websalad I started a Postgraduate Certificate in Policing, Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism at Macquarie Uni. I’ve never been in a Faculty of Arts before, I guess that makes me a cross-over of Science and Arts now, how cool is that? The main reason for taking this certificate is to expand my skills in national/organisational security and because of the class of cyberterrorism. The cool thing about this class is the fact that you can take it online if you need, then no problems with moving overseas. And no, we can’t still spy on anyone and I don’t have a licence to kill like James Bond, but I have my hopes.

The hot topic that everybody wants to know: how are the visas going? Well, last word from the British was a few weeks ago saying that they couldn’t reply in 28 days and probably in September. Yeah, so slow. The funny stuff is that they advise you not to apply 3 months before of your intended date to be in the UK. Guess what? The application is in 5 months now. Anyway, I’m not in rush at the moment. Danish visa was the backup visa, however Denmark start sounding interesting although I can’t possibly understand the language, well I can read a bit now.

Am I working now? Nope, I couldn’t because of my previous visa. However, a friend of a friend, very kindly advised me how recruitment agencies can sponsor me, solving the problem of the sponsorships. Sort of. I’ll explain more in detail later. I wanted to go to Europe mostly for work experience, although apparently I have the option to stay in Australia now… uhmm hard to decide. Also, it seems there are also opportunities in Shanghai, a quick google showed me that it can be easier than I thought before, still not sure about that.