We’ve been in Canberra just over a week now, and it’s been an interesting time for both Deidre and I. Me, for ‘finding my feet’ again, and Deidre, because now she’s living in a new country. It’s a little frustrating for both of us, because ‘proof of residency’ is required for so many things. We can’t even hire a movie from the video store without providing evidence that we live where we do….
Today was uniquely challenging. We had to transfer the registration on our car into our own names, but to do that we had to provide proof of residency. Passports, drivers licences, credit cards, etc etc meant nothing. If we didn’t have anything official with our address on it, we can’t get anywhere. The funny thing is, it seems like in order to get something official with your address on it, you have to provide something official with your address on it….
We managed to get around it by writing a statdec (statutory declaration) with our details and addresses, and we finally got registration papers for the car approved. I think we can now use those rego papers as ‘proof of residency’, ’cause they’re an official document with our address on them. Yay. Now we can go hire a movie…
We’ve been applying for jobs. I’ve applied for a Customer Care Manager role, amongst a number of others, which I think I’ve got a good chance at. I went for an interview with the recruitment agency on Wednesday last week; they wanted to talk to me immediately upon receiving my application, as I was apparently an ‘ideal fit’. The interview went well, I believe. I asked questions of a nature that showed them I knew what I was about, and which they didn’t have answers for. “Good question! But I don’t know the answer to that…” I like that.
They rang me on Thursday and asked what my wage expectations were. I told them (almost twice what I was earning in NZ), which was on the lower end of the wage scale they mentioned on Wednesday, and they said they’d push that to the employer. I was surprised – I haven’t even had an interview with the employer yet, and they were asking for my wage expectations. It seemed positive, but I’ll not count the chickens yet…. I’ll contact them tomorrow and ask how it’s going, as I haven’t heard anything for a couple days.
My new (used) laptop is just great! I had some problems with it in the first few days I had it, and I still do, but hopefully not serious. The keyboard currently doesn’t work; I think it’s a problem with the ribbon connecting it to the motherboard. I’m yet to look for someone to fix it, as that’s a cost I can’t really afford right now. I’m able to use an external keyboard with no problems, so I’ll leave it as it is right now.
I installed Windows Vista on it, and it’s just fantastic! I really love how Vista works, and how it seems so much faster on this laptop than XP was. I think that, as long as you have a grunty peice of hardware, Vista will work better than XP.
I really love a feature that allows you to see small representations of each of your open applications, so you can choose which one you want to access.
Windows Explore is a lot snazzier too:
There’s a lot of special effects and better ways of doing things that I really, really like. Even with the faults and problems I’ve had with this laptop, I’m so very glad I bought it. 17″ screen, 256Mb dedicated graphics card, dual 2Ghz processors, and fantastic sound from its speakers! It rocks!
Canberra is great. I’m back home, and I love it! Driving around the city areas, the countryside, walking through the shopping centres and malls, eating at the restaurants… I’m home. It feels great.
More soon.
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