noizZze

Since 15 October 2007, if you apply for visa, you need to sign the Australian Values Statement to acknowledge that you understand and appreciate the values, way of life and laws of Australia. It’s mandatory now and you can’t get an approval without it.

To give you all necessary facts and figures, they issued a 40-page book called Life in Australia. On its colorful and well-designed pages you learn many curious geographical and lifestyle facts. I only quickly skimmed through it, but my immediate impression was that it is a great and entertaining read.

Here you can learn more about the statement, the procedure and download the book itself. You can also order a printed version on some languages, and they promise to release an audio version soon.

Interesting, hah!

Hey fans of everything concise. My finding of today is Haml and Sass which is a quickly growing replacement for Rhtml (and plain HTML) and CSS. Just check the syntax sample on their main page and admit it, it’s much simpler and cleaner than plain (R)HTML. Everything has a meaning, everything cuts to chase.

Haml can be used with Ruby on Rails as a plug-in that transparently adds the support to your ActiveViews. You simply rename your views from .rhtml to .haml and start deleting redundant code. In case of CSS, you place your .sass in the stylesheets folder and they are automatically compiled on demand. One thing I haven’t figured out yet is whether they do every time, or once per change to save performance.

Haml and Sass are also used in the StaticMatic toolkit, which is exactly how I discovered them. The toolkit lets you put together static sites lighting fast. You simply write your pages in Haml, model your stylesheets in Sass, preview and do a final build. As the result of building you get a bunch of little cute HTML files and CSS stylesheets ready for upload to the site. If you, like me, still like static sites and want to save time on bringing them up and maintaining, it’s your choice.

Let me know what you think. A couple of lines is fine.

On Saturday, as we landed in Kiev on a way back from the vacation in Egypt, my cell buzzed with a message. A second later my heart broke out the chest — a note from my mother said that they had received the letter from ACS with my skill assessment results. Oh my God!

The next day I paid a visit to my parents, opened the letter to learn that I was approved and granted the highest category of IT specialist. On top of that, they certified me suitable for additional points for excessive knowledge in J2EE, and attached the form for a discounted membership. As you may or may not know, ACS is an organization gathering and training IT specialists under its umbrella, which helps immensely when looking for new job opportunities.

The next step would be to collect all documents necessary for the main visa application and proceed with it online. It will probably take another year to process it to immigration office, but still it’s already half way up to success.

Great news, hah!

Finally after a weak of negotiations with local customs and passing metrology we received our ColorVision Spyder2 PRO package. It’s tiny compared to what I expected. All these troubles with government institutions must have made it larger in my eyes.

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