Will be on December 18th. Christine and I both have to go to this as this is where we "prove" that we're really married and this is not some green card scam. There's a lot of paperwork to prepare for it, but we have a little while so it shouldn't be too much of a problem. Progress on residency, hurrah!
Posted in: chaosboy, immigration, united states on October 25, 2007 at at 10:45:00 PM 1 comments
Yesterday was the first sunny day Portland has seen for many a week, so I took advantage of it by heading out to ride the Springwater Trail. This is an old train line through south-east Portland that has been converted into a multi-use path. My eventual goal was Powell Butte, another of the extinct volcanic plugs that are dotted around the area. The view from the top is spectacular, possibly even more so that Rocky Butte, where we had our wedding.
The climb up to the top is along rough dirt paths through beautiful forest, but the relatively flat summit is meadow and old orchards, both remnants of pioneer times in the area.
Here's another QuickTime VR panorama for you... the view starts off looking towards Mount Hood in the ESE and rotates anti-clockwise past the Columbia River Gorge and Mount Adams (which can just be seen peeking over the top of the closer hills) to Mount St Helens to the north.
Click and hold inside the movie to scroll from one end of the view to the other. You can also zoom in (Shift key) and out (Control key or the PC equivalent!).
Of course, I got a flat tyre on my bike at the very furtherest point of my trip and had to stop every couple of miles on the 20 mile return journey to pump it up enough to continue! I was certainly sore and tired when I got home!
Posted in: chaosboy, photography, portland, sport on October 23, 2007 at at 11:04:00 AM 0 comments
Just because I'm not allowed to seek employment yet doesn't mean I'm not keeping myself busy. It's important to keep my hand in, so to speak, so I set myself little design challenges and projects to keep the brain ticking over. One that I've just completed, and am pretty pleased with, is a redesign of Portland's MAX Light Rail system map. The MAX is a fantastic example of a renewed interest in mass transit in America (fighting back against the omnipresent car!). Twenty years ago, it didn't even exist, now it is an integral part of the city with plans for further expansion.
As great as the system is, its system map is severely lacking. I present here the official Tri-Met PDF of the system for your reference. The whole thing is suffering from visual overload... too much information all presented at similar levels of importance. The use of blue type everywhere is overwhelming to the eye and the clumsy use of "TC" and "P" in circles to denote Transit Centers and Park and Ride leads to ugly incidents at Gateway/NE 99th and Parkrose/Sumner, where the designer is at a loss as to where to place the parking symbol. Overall, the map lacks the style and grace of the best transit maps - London, Paris, Sydney and Stuttgart being prime examples of the way to do it right. For a fantastic reference on metro and transit maps around the world, click here.
Of course, I like a challenge... so I decided that I would add in the soon-to-be commenced Green Line as well. This line completely changes the face of downtown as it will run north-south through the nearly completed Transit Mall, rather than east-west as the current lines do. The yellow line will also be rerouted along the mall. Based on information on Tri-Met's site, I have produced this map, which I feel is a vast improvement on the incumbent.
It's a lot more visual than the old map - Transit Centers (white) are now easily distinguished from normal stations (coloured ticks), standard icons are used for Park and Ride and (my addition) bicycle lockers. Black type for station names stops blue from dominating the entire map, and town names are now a shade of grey to stop them from being so visually heavy. Changes of direction in a line are now gracefully curved, rather than abrupt changes of angle. Unforgivably, all type at a 90° angle on the old map read from the left, something I was always taught NEVER to do, so I have amended all the angled type to be read from the right and improved the differentiation between station names and bus route numbers.
The thing that I think reduces clutter the most is the new way I have approached depicting Fare Zones. Rather than use the large and distracting Zone Arrows that had to be placed awkwardly between station names AND the huge travel time lines, I have opted for a far more visual approach and used progressively lighter tints of the line colour. This wouldn't work on a map of the complexity of London or Paris, but on this relatively simple map it works surprisingly well, especially with the legend explaining it so clearly.
I've also included some Portland attractions on the map (the Zoo, Children's Museum and baseball park), although I have cheated and left out the venues at the Rose Quarter. The station name does the work for me there, so it's not too bad. I also like my little pedestrian interchange line between the two Rose Quarter stations, as there's a two block hike between them on foot.
Things I'm not sure about: the curve in the red line to the airport, while geographically more accurate, could be a bit fussy and unnecessary. Also, the travel time lines, while a vast improvement over the old heavy blue ones, don't really work for the downtown part of the yellow/green line, or the Clackamas branch of the green line.
Finally, this whole layout will fall apart somewhat when the extension of the yellow line happens in 2014. From PSU, the line will cross the river and head south to Milwaukie. On my map, this will put Milwaulkie a lot further south than Clackamas, when in reality they are pretty much level. I can't see any better way to represent downtown than what I've done, so it may just have to be that way.
I'd love to hear what you think of my efforts!
Posted in: chaosboy, design, portland on October 22, 2007 at at 10:15:00 AM 4 comments
As you might expect, Halloween is big business here in the States. It kicks off what is known as "the Holiday Season", simply because there's a big holiday festival going on for every month until the end of the year - Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas... an endless orgy of consumerism to be had! As Halloween is pretty much non-existent back home in Australia, I thought I'd give you a bit of a look at what goes on around here during Autumn... I mean Fall, he he he!
Here's the display of enormous carving pumpkins at our local supermarket. There are pallet after pallet of these jack-o-lantern's-in-waiting, all for the bargain basement price of 17 cents a pound! Christine and I bought two, one of which cost $4, so it weighs 23 pounds or over 10 kilos! We're heading over to Kim's place tonight for a night of pumpkin carving, which should be both messy and highly amusing!
This is just one of four aisles in the supermarket dedicated to Halloween-themed goodies. From all your trick-or-treat candy supplies, to costumes for kids and adults alike, to cheesy and unnecessary toys, to ridiculously overblown outdoor display pieces - it's all here for you to purchase. Just as Christmas light displays are now de rigueur both here and in Sydney, so too are Halloween displays here, complete with giant inflatable ghosts, pumpkins, spiders and spooky castles. One-upmanship over your neighbours' displays is, of course, mandatory.
On an aside, perusing these aisles led me to discover that what we call Mars Bars are known as Milky Way bars in America, and what we know as Milky Ways are called something else again... weird!!
Here's some pumpkin beer! Honest! It's on special already, before Halloween, so it may not be such a big hit. And in case you're thinking that this is the strangest Halloween beverage, you'd be wrong:
Burgerville is offering Pumpkin milkshakes! By all reports, it's actually quite delicious, sweetened with cinnamon and nutmeg, but the concept by itself is a little mind-boggling!
So, pumpkin carving tonight... I'll let you know how my masterpiece goes!
Posted in: chaosboy, united states, weirdness on October 18, 2007 at at 12:34:00 PM 1 comments
So my appointment today at the Portland Office of the USCIS turned out to be fairly pointless. While the nice lady behind the counter could sympathise with my situation (I seem to get a lot of that!), there was nothing she could do. The power to issue interim employment documents has recently been stripped from the local offices, meaning that now only the four big processing centres have that ability. The local centres can fax a request further up the line, but only if an I-765 application is currently in progress... which mine isn't.
So there's nothing for it but to refile a new I-765 at the new ridiculous price of $340 (compared to the old $180) and then sit back and wait. The only new bit of advice that I got was to include a covering letter with my application that asks for "expedited processing" based on the financial hardship that not being able to work causes. It doesn't guarantee anything, but if the supervisor on duty that day is in a really, really nice mood, it could bring the processing time down from three months to perhaps one and a half. Maybe.
Anyway, I completed my new application this evening and it's ready to be mailed off to the man and the monkey in Nebraska tomorrow... I wonder which one is the supervisor?
If it's even a half-decent day tomorrow, I just want to go on a big long bike ride somewhere and get all this frustration out of my system.
Posted in: chaosboy, immigration, portland, united states on October 15, 2007 at at 6:16:00 PM 0 comments
My decision letter from USCIS arrived in the mail yesterday. I had been expecting the worst since reading on an on-line forum that the phrase, "we mailed you a decision" is a euphemism for "application denied". If an application is approved, they generally just tell you that your application has been accepted - there's no need to let you down gently.
True to these expectations, my application was denied. But the reason for the denial turned out to be something that completely beggars belief. Let me present you with an excerpt from the denial letter:
8 CFR 274a.12(a)(6) provides for the issuance of employment authorization to: An alien admitted to the United States as a nonimmigrant fiance or fiancée of a United States citizen... for the period of admission to the United States.
Employment authorization under category (a)(6) may only be granted for the period of admission to the United States. The evidence submitted indicates you entered the United States on May 15, 2007. You were admitted for a period of 90 days.
Because your period of admission to the United States has therefore expired, you no longer qualify to receive employment authorization pursuant to 8 CFR 274a.12(a)(6). Therefore, upon consideration, it is ordered that this application be denied. There is no appeal to this decision.
So, have you got this?
Because my application was not processed within this 90 day period, my application was denied. However, there were 120 days between USCIS's receipt of my I-765 and the issuance of my decision. This, of course, means that there was never any chance of my application being successful. I believe that any application should be decided on its merits, not on how long it takes USCIS to get around to opening each case. If there's only a 90 day window for fiance visa EAD applications, then USCIS should take all reasonable steps to ensure that such applications are processed within those 90 days.
I feel that I've been completely shafted by bureacracy here: that I have done everything right - I have entered the country legally, I have filled in all the correct forms and submitted them in a timely fashion - and have gotten nothing in return. And they wonder why there's such a problem with illegal workers in this country...
This morning, I had calmed down enough to call the USCIS Information Center for advice. I outlined my case to the operator, and he seemed to think that the decision was irregular: the fact that I had married within the 90 day period should stand in my favour. However, as they are only an Information Center, there is no one there authorized to act on cases: he could only offer me alternative courses of action.
The first was to open a new I-765 based on my I-485 case, but this would require another $180 fee and - almost certainly - another 4 month wait. The second option, one that he thought would be better, was to make an appointment at the Portland USCIS office to discuss my situation personally with an officer.
The only way to make an appointment is via USCIS' online "InfoPass" system, which I have never had any luck with to up until this point, so I wasn't particularly hopeful when I logged in to it... I expected the usual "there are no appointments available at this time, please try again later" message. Fortunately - and completely unexpectedly - there was an appointment available on Monday, October 15, so I quickly snagged it. Hopefully, some common sense can be applied to my case, because the "service" I have got from USCIS regarding my work authorization has been nothing short of disastrous so far.
Posted in: chaosboy, immigration, united states on October 2, 2007 at at 12:55:00 PM 1 comments
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