More adventures in Australia

Yes, I've been obsessed the last year or so. If you're tired of hearing about Bitcoin, check out our Cassowary Tales blog, which we're updating (ok, Michele has been mostly updating, I've been slacking) with stories of our latest trip to Australia.

A Charlie Brown Christmas (tree)

We're hosting Christmas for Michele's siblings; this is an email she sent them a couple of days ago.


Ok so I learned something this year.  Don't pick out a tree during a torrential rain storm.
The only day we had enough time to get a tree and set it up was last Sunday.  So even though it was raining -- off we went.

Well the heavens pretty much opened up the moment we arrived at the tree lot. Fine.  "We won't melt" Robin declared.  Fine.  Now I'm shamed into being a trooper by my 10 year old.   Except she has a hood and I cleverly forgot a hat. 

So off we went up and down the aisles of trees in the pouring rain.  You know what?  In the pouring cold rain all trees pretty much look the same.  So when you've forgotten a rain hat you tend to make the tree picking out process go as quickly as possible.  Robin's one constraint was that the tree be nice and bushy, so you can't see the trunk.

Upon spotting the first bushy tree
"That one looks good" says me
"OOoo" says Will (for the record he said this about every tree)
"This one is nice and bushy" says Robin
"Ok look there is daddy coming back from the ATM, let's get this one" says me as I scurry to the boy scout hut. 

The boy scouts were not out in the lot selling the trees and assisting in the customers' decision making as they normally do.  No. They were smart. They were in the boy scout hut huddled next to the wood burning stove.  Our declaration to the scouts that we'd picked out our tree was not met with joy over another sales, the benefits of which would go into the smore fund for the summer's camping adventure.  No, I believed that one of them actually groaned.  You see they were obligated carry the tree to our car and secure it to the roof with twine. 

Skip ahead a few hours.  We put the tree in the garage to 'dry' off a bit and now Gavin has carried it into the house and to the living room.  He is positioning it while I turn the dang little screws on the stand to secure the tree.

One screw isn't meeting resistance. 

me: "Gavin. There is a hole in this tree."
Gavin: "A hole?"
me: "yeah part of the trunk is rotted or something"
Gavin "well let's turn it 45˚ so the screw can bite into wood"  <-- a problem solver that Gavin!

We did and the stand is stable but the hole is still there.  And... the tree dropped two dustpans' worth of needles within a few hours.  I've never seen so much debris from a fresh tree.   Then I noticed several dead branches.  Also, if you touch the back side of the tree the needles readily fall.

No, we are not getting another tree.  This one will just have to tough it out.  We've got the lights up and the decorations and no one is to touch the back side of the tree.

And so you are all welcome for Christmas but don't make fun of our tree.  It looks fine.  It is doing its job of holding up lights and ornaments. A tree doesn't need needles to do hold up lights and ornaments, just branches.  Our tree has branches....

So don't make fun of our Christmas tree.
It isn't half dead it is..... health impaired.

-Ish

Money, Fixed

I'm happiest when I'm working on One Big Thing. I think I've found my next Big Thing, and I'm excited!

Bitcoin is a new kind of money that fixes a bunch of bugs in the old-fashioned money you have in your bank account and your wallet.

Getting excited about a new kind of money is kind of crazy. You're probably thinking I've been brainwashed by the loony wing of Tea Party that believes that the Federal Reserve was illegally created and that we should go back to a solid currency backed by gold stored in Fort Knox. Or that I've drunk the Rainbow Sunshine Kool-Aid of the loony wanna-be Socialists who think that local currencies are the answer to everybody's economic problems.

I'm excited because Bitcoin isn't a pie-in-the-sky theoretical idea for how to make a better currency. It is a working system that a few geeks (like me!) are already using and trying to break. It fixes these bugs in our current monetary systems:

• It doesn't require trust in any central authority; there is no central bank or company or board of directors controlling the currency.
• It is immune from long-term inflation, because it is designed so that only a limited number of Bitcoins will ever be created.
• It is a global currency and, like the Internet, national borders are pretty much irrelevant in the Bitcoin world.
• Because it is based on the best currently-known cryptography, it cannot be counterfeited.

Of course, it is possible there's some terrible, fundamental flaw in the Bitcoin system that nobody has thought of yet. I've been thinking about it really hard (and dissecting the C++ source code) for the last month or so and I can't see any flaws, but I know that time and experience are the only true test of any new system.

I'm already putting my Bitcoins where my mouth is, and have created a simple little website to get some experience with handling Bitcoins. The Bitcoin Faucet will give you 5 Bitcoins to play with.

For free.

Maybe I am crazy. What percentage of crazy people think they're sane?

Three cool tools

1. Localocracy. Email lists, blogs and online bulletin boards are all used to talk about local politics, but they're all less-than-ideal forums for ideas. Discussions easily wander off topic, anonymous people can make nasty personal attacks and the people with the most time on their hands (or who are the most willing to spend hours reading blogs or mailing lists) can overwhelm the discussion.

Localocracy is an Amherst start-up that's trying a new approach for discussing local issues, and they're using Spring Town Meeting as a "beta test." Any registered Amherst voter can sign up for free and give their opinions, and anybody at all can go and see what people in Amherst are talking about.

2. Dropbox. Create a folder that's shared on all of your Windows, Mac and Linux machines (and on your iPhone, if you like). Michele tried a couple of solutions before settling on Dropbox-- she'd email herself files before heading home (WAY to easy to get confused about which was the latest version) and she tried carrying an external USB disk back and forth to work (inconvenient and losing or dropping the disk or thumb drive would be a minor disaster). Dropbox has been working perfectly for her; it's easy and the first two gigabytes of storage is free.

3. LastPass. One of my technical interests is computer security, but until recently I was pretty lazy about passwords. I used one "low security" password (easily guessed, something like "password123") for all the websites where I didn't really care about security. I'm not terribly worried about somebody guessing my hulu.com password and adding "The Bad Girls Club" to my viewing queue. And I used a "high security," not-easily-guessed password for everything else (banking sites, online stock broker, etc).

OpenID is starting to solve the "every website in the world wants me to create a new username and password" problem, but until OpenID is supported everywhere I'll be using LastPass. It lets me have a different, super-secure password for every website I visit, all protected by one super-secure password that is all I need to remember. It works on Mac, Windows and Linux (and on your iPhone or BlackBerry if you upgrade to the $1-per-month Premium version), and even though all my passwords are stored encrypted on the Lastpass servers, my master password never leaves my computers so it's as secure as possible.

They even make it easy to export all of your passwords so I can back them up into my safe-deposit box (or in an encrypted folder on my hard drive) just in case LastPass ever goes out of business. Nice!

Unions aren't for Entrepreneurs

My position at UMass is covered by a collective bargaining agreement, so I got to experience firsthand what it's like to work in a union.

The experience wasn't pleasant-- I quit at the end of August, mostly because I want to take bigger risks to get bigger potential rewards, but at least partly because of the rigid, one-size-fits-all, stuck-in-the-1950's nature of the union.

I'll admit I was vaguely cynical about unions before working under one. They seemed like "socialism lite" -- the idea being that if the Workers of the Company Unite, then they will get a More Fair Share of the wealth that their Hard Work creates for the Greedy Capitalists who own the company.

I'm not sure what the story would be for unions at UMass; maybe "Workers Unite So We Get A Bigger Share of Taxpayer's Money" ?

Anyway, I was cynical because I have faith that free-market competition keeps the Greedy Capitalists in check, and any increases in wages or benefits that the union wins are just passed along to consumers (who are, in a 100%-unionized society, those very same union members) in the form of higher prices.

But I was just vaguely cynical because I thought maybe there was some productivity benefit to being in a union; maybe having a union bargain on your behalf lets you concentrate on doing your job, so you don't have to worry about raises or benefits or any of that stuff.

I was naive. I am now thoroughly cynical about unions.

Maybe if I was the full-time primary-breadwinner and Michele was a traditional stay-at-home-mom I would appreciate the job security and health benefits of the unionized job.

But I wasn't. I was working 24 hours a week and was already covered under Michele's health insurance.

Unions are progressive, so I kind of expected that maybe the union would support somebody like me who chose to work less to spend more time with their kids.

Maybe they would pro-rate union dues so that part-time workers paid less than full-time workers. Or maybe they'd have progressive dues, so that higher-paid techies (like me) would pay more than lower-paid secretaries.

Well... no. Dues is dues, and everybody pays the same, regardless of how much they make or how many hours they work.

Or maybe they'd work out a deal with UMass so that people who have health care coverage through their spouses could forgo duplicate coverage and get a share of the savings.

Well... no.

Or maybe they'd bargain so that the people who were the most productive were paid the most, so I'd be rewarded for doing a good job.

Hell no! During the state budget process I received a barrage of emails from the union encouraging me to contact my representatives and complain about proposals to increase merit pay at UMass.

But the thing that bothered me the most was the letter I received a while ago demanding that I either pay the union "agency fee" or be fired.

You see, I decided when I was hired not to join the union (yes, they put me on their lobbying mailing list nonetheless). Then, after working a year, I get a rather threatening letter, saying that I owed PSUMTA money because I'd decided not to join their organization.

"That can't be right," I thought to myself-- I've never heard of an "agency fee" and there was nothing in the employment contract with UMass about being required to pay the union. "Ignorance of the law is No Excuse!" -- so I did some digging in the Massachusetts General Laws, and learned that yes, indeed, if I wanted to keep my job at UMass I had to pay up.

According to the law, I wasn't supposed to get just a nasty-gram in the mail-- they were also supposed to send me information on exactly what the agency fee was for (they're not allowed to charge for any lobbying or political stuff that they do) and how to appeal it.

Unions are supposed to be looking after worker's rights, so it struck me as highly hypocritical of them not to follow the law as they threatened to have me fired.

Individually I found everybody I communicated with in the PSUMTA organization to be pleasant and helpful.

But collectively... it was like communicating with any other large bureaucracy. "I'm sorry, that can't be changed, it's just the way it is and it's been done that way for a long time."

Which, to my ears, translates as "We are the Borg. You will be assimilated."

Florence Savings Bank Wins Again

I didn't realize how much I take money for granted until coming here to Australia. A lot of economic concepts like exchange rates affecting imports and exports are suddenly very real; while we're here, we're importing Australian stuff and experiences into ourselves, and paying for it with US dollars.

I performed a little experiment the other day to get a handle on another economic concept that's affecting me personally: transaction costs. Every time I move money from the US to Australia transaction fees are tacked on, and it's not easy to figure out who's charging what. Sure, your credit card company will tell you about any fixed fees, but how do you know you're getting a good exchange rate?

So I stood at an ATM machine and withdrew $150 Australian dollars from my Florence Savings Bank checking account and got another $150AUD using my SchwabOne visa card. Then I went home and calculated how much it would've cost me to move money from my US PayPal account to my Australian PayPal account (yeah, they have PayPal and Eby here down under), and checked my statements to see how much that $150AUD cost me in US dollars. Results:

$150AUD cost me $123.23USD via Florence Savings
$150AUD cost me $125.29USD via Schwab
$150AUD would cost $129.61USD via PayPal

So, my little local bank wins!

I got the Schwab visa card just to come to Australia, because it has no foreign currency cash advance fee (most credit cards do).

I was surprised PayPal was the most expensive option; their transaction fee is low ($1.50AUD), but their exchange rate isn't very good (or at least wasn't very good on the day I did the experiment).

Now, if only the exchange rate would start heading in the right direction...

South Mission Beach

We're living in South Mission Beach, Australia for the next five months, and Michele and I and the kids will be writing about our experiences on our "Cassowary Tales" blog. I'll still be posting about non-Australia-related stuff here.

South Mission Beach is a little town on the tropical northeast coast of Australia, between Townsville and Cairns. And, marvel of marvels, they've got town-wide high-speed wireless internet. I believe the Australian government has been subsidizing the infrastructure, but the service isn't free-- $150 Australian dollars (AUD) for the USB modem doo-hickey, and then $100 AUD buys 6 gigabytes of data transfer. Even in South Mission Beach there are two wireless providers, competing against each other to keep prices low and service high. So far, at least, it seems to be working.

The US Stimulus contains billions of dollars for high-speed Internet. If we get a system like they have here in Australia, I won't complain.

---

Update 27 July: I'm not as happy with wireless internet as I was a week ago; it's kinda flaky. It would be more than fine if we were light Internet users; it's great for email and occasional web surfing, but it's not super reliable. So we're getting wired with DSL this week (which'll end up costing something like $3 per day).

Drugs! On the Common!

So I was driving to the Mall to buy Will new soccer stuff, and had completely forgotten that ExtRavaGanja is happening downtown today until I drove past the Common and saw all the, uh, interesting-looking people walking around.

I've never actually been to the Amherst ganja festival; I don't like crowds or loud music, and I decided halfway through college that I don't need or want any mind-altering substances. My mind is just fine the way it is; altering it made it different, but not better. Well, except for caffeine. It makes me perky. Oh, and beer and hard cider. They're tasty.

Anyway, I'll enjoy Extravaganja from a distance again this year. I've loaded up the soundtrack to Weeds (Soundtrack: highly recommended. Series: season 1 was great, then it went downhill) on my iPod so I can groove to Ganja Babe as I take down our storm windows.

Kitchen Remodeling is Fun! (right?)

After we remodeled the kitchen in our tiny, 900-square-foot bowling-alley-of-a-house in Palo Alto ten years ago we swore we would never do it again.

Hah! Just three houses later we're doing it again. Michele has been documenting the process in photos on Facebook. It's actually a great time to remodel; interest rates are low, scheduling subcontractors is pretty easy, and we've had no trouble at all getting permits and inspections out of Town Hall (our contractor was very pleasantly surprised that our permit arrived in two days).

And we can feel patriotic that we're doing our part to stimulate the economy as we try to get the drywall dust off the ficus...

Dinner with Kids

We have some hard and fast rules about dinner in our house:

• We all eat dinner together
• Once you leave the table, you're done. No grazing.
• If you don't like what's for dinner after you've tried a taste, you can have bread and butter instead.

We don't have any rules about finishing everything on your plate, never use food as a reward or punishment, and, in general, try not to care about what the kids are or are not eating. I'm generally more successful at not caring than Michele. I was please to run across this today from Bryan Caplan:

Parents habitually try to influence what their kids eat. "Eat up." "Clean your plate." "No dessert until you finish your vegetables." "Soda? No, you get milk." At least in the modern U.S., parents' main goals seem to be to (a) Increase the total amount of food kids eat, and (b) Increase the healthiness of the food they do eat.

Does all this nagging actually work? You can't answer this question just by correlating parents' nagging with childrens' eating. As usual, we have to consider the possibility that the cause of the correlation is partially or entirely genetic. Maybe health-conscious parents sire health-conscious kids, and the nagging is just a lot of hot air.

What do the data say? The best paper I tracked down was John Hewitt's "The Genetics of Obesity" (1997, Behavior Genetics 27). It's got very strong results: Nature can account for all of the family resemblance in the Body Mass Index; nurture doesn't matter at all...

Or, in other words, nag your kids to eat their broccoli if it makes you feel better... but it won't make them any skinnier, and probably won't make them any healthier, either. I save my nagging for the really important stuff, like cleaning up Legos after they're done playing ("if I step on ONE MORE of those little bricks I'm THROWING THEM ALL AWAY!")

Biking in Solvang

The Tour of California bike race is happening as I write this, and today's stage is a 15-mile time trial in Solvang.

That brings back lots of memories; in high school I lived at 1980 Alamo Pintado Road. Today Lance Armstrong will be racing up that street!

They'll be following the route of what was my favorite ride-- from my house up into Los Olivos, then up a short hill and down Ballard Canyon road, through Solvang, and back up Alamo Pintado road to home. There's a really fun, fast, almost-hairpin turn on Ballard Canyon road that was covered in gravel one day... I still have some faint scars on my knee from the crash ("merely a flesh wound"). Google Street View took a nice picture of it:


View Larger Map

It's a beautiful ride; on cold days near the end of winter like today I do miss California weather.

Hiding Mistakes

When I was a teenager and saw other pregnant teenagers at my Arkansas high school, but none at my California high school, I assumed that the Arkansas kids were fooling around more.

I realize now that probably wasn't true. I can think of at least three other hypotheses that might explain my observation:

1. The California kids were better at using birth control.
2. Girls in California left school to have their babies.
3. Girls in California had more abortions.

Being the great big Data Geek that I am, I decided to look at the numbers. A little googling on "Teen Pregnancy" turned up rates for both pregnancies and live births in Arkansas and California in the 80's, and the numbers are pretty clear (click here for the data).

The most likely reason I didn't see any pregnant girls at my California high school is because they had abortions. I was hoping that maybe superior sex education in California would explain the difference, but it's very clear from the data that California kids got pregnant more than Arkansas kids. They just had fewer babies.

I'm writing about this not because I want to generate a discussion about the morality of abortion, but to marvel at the tools and data we all have available right at our fingertips to help us figure out whether or not what we believe is correct. A lot has changed since 1981-- including the teen pregnancy and abortion rates, which, happily, are WAY down from the 80's.

Mena, Arkansas

My family moved to Mena, Arkansas in 1981, when I was a freshman in high school.

We were living in a "double-wide" in a mobile home park in Buellton, California. It wasn't a bad place-- no decaying cars on cinder blocks or mongrel dogs or broken screen doors. Instead there was a swimming pool and playground and a lot of quiet, old, retired people.

But it was a place full of bad memories. We moved there to be close to Vandenberg Air Force Base, so my dad, who was a World War II vet, could get treated for lung cancer. It didn't work; he got sicker and sicker and eventually, after almost two years of radiation and chemotherapy and even Laetrile, he died.

After a couple of years my mum decided that we'd be better off somewhere else; somewhere where we could afford to live in a bigger house, without neighbors ten feet from us on all sides. So, we ended up in Arkansas.

Mena was (and probably still is) in a dry, all-white county. Our movers (who were black) were genuinely worried about getting out of the county before sundown; I guess they wanted to go someplace where they could get a beer with dinner and not have to worry about getting lynched.

I remember being shocked on my first day of school there, when I saw two very-pregnant girls walking around during lunch recess. The designated smoking area behind the gym, for students 18 or older, was also something we didn't have back in my California high school.

Fighting was common. I saw this kid named "Rusty" hit another kid named "Red" (I swear I'm not making this up) in the face, knocking him down and winning the fight-- and breaking his wrist in the process. I'd say that Rusty was the overall loser in that exchange, but the general opinion around school was that Red was a loser and Rusty a hero.

We moved back to California after just a few months, but I think even if we'd stayed my life would have turned out mostly the same. Academically, the Arkansas public school wasn't a whole lot worse than the California public school-- at least, it wasn't worse for a straight-A student who spent all of his spare time reading.

It certainly gave me an appreciation for the cultural diversity of the United States. And a heathy skepticism for the notion that all cultures should be treated with equal respect.

Would it be evil if...

I sent email to my State Representative a couple of months ago, asking for some general information about the State budget. I followed up by sending her snail-mail a couple of weeks ago, asking the same questions, but still haven't had a response.

I'd like to figure out if she's ignoring me or if, maybe, she's just overwhelmed with mail. Would it be evil of me to send another email asking, say, what the campaign donation limit is for State campaigns, and if it's too early to donate to her election campaign, and then seeing how long it takes to get a response?

It's sneaky, and potentially embarrassing, and kinda mean, so I'm reluctant to do it.

But I'm really, really tempted...

---

UPDATE 16 Feb: I gave into temptation, and sent her another email a few days ago. No reply yet, so maybe she just doesn't respond to email. Or postal mail. I suppose I could call her and ask her about the State Budget, but I kinda doubt she's got all the numbers memorized.

Feeling virtuous on vacation

Maho Bay Camps on St John (one of the US Virgin Islands) is an "Eco-Resort." We stayed there last week, and mostly had a fantastic time. Highlights were:

Watching two big iguanas crawl around in the trees above our tent cabin.

Snorkeling and building sand castles on the beach; seeing a sea turtle and a really big (sting? manta?) ray.

Watching glass-blowing after dinner.

No jet-skis, no drunken college students, no people selling drugs or tourist knick-knacks on the beach.

We were itchy from bug-bites, and the beds weren't super comfortable, and the tent cabin felt cramped and small at times, the people who stay and work there are pretty much uniformly white, privileged folk from the US and Europe, and I never did get used to the lack of hot showers, but, overall, it was very nice. We didn't mind carrying our own drinking water, or walking up and down scores of steps to get to the beach, or strolling to the toilet, flashlight in hand in the middle of the night.

While I was there, I kept thinking about the notion of "eco-tourism." Does it really make sense to fly thousands of miles and spend thousands of dollars going to an environmentally-more-friendly eco-resort? I haven't bothered to work out how much CO2 our trip there and back released into the atomosphere (6 hours of car/taxi rides, about 9 hours of plane flights, and 2 hours of ferry boat rides), but that part can't have been good for the environment.

Should I feel virtuous because we took cold showers and stayed in tents with hermit crabs, geckos, chickens and iguanas living under them?

Or should I feel guilty for spending money on a vacation instead of donating it to a charity dedicated to saving the environment?

Perhaps the starkest example of the contradictions inherent in the Maho Bay style of "eco-tourism" was one night at dinner, where one of the main dishes was Prince Edward Island mussels. We went all the way from Massachusetts to the Virgin Islands to eat mussels from Canada????

Hmm. I've been thinking a lot lately about luxury versus charity; how do we figure out what luxuries we "deserve," or how do we figure out what luxuries we should sacrifice to help make the world a better place?

Happy Halloween

We had fun carving pumpkins again this year. My sister-in-law gave us a Martha Stewart pumpking carving kit a couple of years ago, and I gotta confess, having the right tools makes the job a whole lot easier. The keyhole saw, linoleum cutter, and scraper are the three essential items to make the job easy.

I experimented using my electric jig saw to carve the pumpkin (as recommended by the Extreme Pumpkins web site), and it worked great for cutting out the tops-- but probably only a little bit better than the good-old-fashioned keyhole saw. And for carving the face, the hand-held saw is defintely better. Unlike the folks at Extreme Pumpkins, I'm going to refrain from participating in any pumpkin pyrotechnics...

I'm Allergic to Guinea Pigs

I'm allergic to guinea pigs. Also dogs, dust mites, ragweed, English plantain (which is a weed, not a type of banana), two kinds of mold and birch trees.

I know this because a few weeks ago I was allergy tested. It's a pretty simple medical procedure-- they dip teeny-tiny needles into purified allergens, then poke them into your back or arm and wait to see if you get what looks like a mosquito bite.

It's a nice application of scientific testing and controls-- they also poke you with a needle dipped in NOTHING to make sure it's not the needles causing the bumps, and a needle dipped in pure histamine to make sure you're reactive-- histamine is actually the stuff your body makes in reaction to an allergen like mosquito spit, and which causes the allergic welts.

Happily, there's a 93%-effective cure for allergies. Unhappily, the cure involves getting increasingly concentrated injections of the stuff to which you're allergic. For me, that translates into around 300 shots in my arms over the next two years.

I'd actually visited with a doctor at the Northampton Wellness Associates; they treat allergies both using the traditional shot-in-the-arm method and with a newfangled drops-under-the-tongue method that sounds less painful. But I just couldn't bring myself to support a place that promotes chelation therapy. Besides, the shots have more solid medical evidence that they're effective, and Dr. Bayuk's office is right next to the bike path in Florence so I go to try out the new bike path extension under Hwy. 91 (it's very nice).

So, if all goes well, next allergy season I'll be breathing easy. I'll still be allergic to guinea pigs, though-- they only test for that allergy, they don't give shots for it. I think I can live with that.

All the Cool Kids Have One

I spent $5 on this PayPal Security doo-hickey.

Now, whenever I want to login to my PayPal account, I enter my username and password and the six-digit number that the thingamajig generates when I poke it's button.

I wouldn't have bothered spending the $5 if it was only good for logging into PayPal-- the last thing I need is 7 different dongles hanging off my keychain for securely logging into different web sites. I did bother because the same device works for any web site that supports the OpenID standard. Not many do today, but I predict that over the next couple of years OpenID will become widely supported. If you're a geeky early adopter like me, check out https://pip.verisignlabs.com/ for details.

If you're not a geeky early-adopter, but you use PayPal more than twice a month or keep more than $1,000 in your PayPal account (the cash in my PayPal account is earning 5.2% interest right now, which is darn hard to beat), you should pay the $5 for the extra security.

Australian Humor

One of the benefits of having Australian relatives (Uncle, Aunt, and cousins) is that the kids regularly get Australian picture books.

The latest is "In the Bush: Our Holiday at Wombat Flat." It's kind of an Australian version of "Where's Waldo", only instead of geeky looking people in stripey hats, it's full of beer-drinking people doing all sorts of dangerous and politically incorrect things.

The Andresen household gives it four thumbs up, even though it has words we don't understand (what the heck is a "hoon"?), and even though we're probably missing half the jokes.

Three years ago today...

Three years ago today I took the Oath of Citizenship in Boston.

I was born in Melbourne, Australia, but moved to the U.S. when I was a wee lad. My mum had applied for citizenship for me a couple of times when I was growing up, but the INS managed to lose the paperwork and/or lose track of us (we moved around a lot when I was growing up).

I liked being an "alien"-- it was just a random interesting fact about me, and besides not being able to vote, it didn't really affect my life much.

Then sometime in the 90's they made green cards expire once a decade or so. Up until that time, my green card was cute-- it had a picture of 5-year-old me on it. I hate dealing with bureaucratic nonsense, and figured I'd have less to deal with in the long run if I went ahead and became a citizen. Here's what the process was like for a white, professional, spotlessly-clean criminal record, been-living-here-for-25-years college graduate:

I sent in my citizenship application in 1996. Then waited.

After six months, I sent in the "hey, do you still have my paperwork?" form.

Then I waited.

After a year, I sent in the "hey, are you processing my application?" form again.

After a while I get a letter saying that I have to send in fingerprints. So, off to the local police station, get fingerprinted, get them to sign the appropriate paperwork, and send that in.

A couple months later-- get told that the fingerprints aren't good enough, I have to have them done again. Ok.... back to the local police office, they do it again, send them in.

Then more waiting. I was happy to get a letter in the mail telling me to show up at the INS office next Wednesday-- even though that meant a three hour round trip to the nearest immigration office. After waiting an hour for my name to be called, I spend about 10 minutes taking the citizenship exam and talking with a bureaucrat. I think the bureaucrat was an immigrant, too-- his english was a little hard to understand.

Now comes an interesting twist-- while waiting some more, we move from Wisconsin to Massachusetts. I fill out the form that tells them that I'm moving and send that in. Then send in a "hey, are you still processing my application?" form again (even though I'd never actually gotten a response to any of those, I figured it couldn't hurt).

I really hoped the move wouldn't mean I'd have to start the process all over again (I'd been waiting three years at this point). And Yay! I didn't! In January of 2004 I get a message from the BOSTON immigration office that I must drive to Boston (a 4 hour round trip...) and get my fingerprints taken AGAIN. Next Thursday. At 10:30AM.

Yes Sir, whatever you say, Sir. And I guess the third time was the charm-- because Lo and Behold, a Miracle! A short 4 months later I get a letter telling me to come to Boston in a few weeks for my naturalization ceremony.

And that's how I became a citizen on Flag Day, June 14, 2004.