All is still well in Dublin. Julie is back after 2 long months away in Canada and I'm happy about that.
I had a nice trip to Porto, Portugal. It was a bit boring all by myself though. Sometimes it's nice to be by yourself if you are trying to get some good thinking done, but I didn't have 3 days worth of stuff the think about. It was a beautiful city and the weather was perfect. I posted all the pictures on Facebook here. I didn't do a whole lot mostly just wandered around the city. The vegetarian options were terrible though so I spent far too much time looking at menus and not enough time eating. I ended up eating at a lot of overpriced hotel restaurants because they often had at least 1 vegetarian option. I spent a lot of time along the river side enjoying the weather, watching people, and drinking local beers. The view was just so pretty it kept me entertained for hours just looking at it:
While in Canada, Julie was able to secure a large zero interest loan for her studies from her native band. This was very important because international tuition at Oxford is pretty expensive. We are very grateful for the money from Julie's band. Julie has a former classmate who was accepted to Cambridge who has nearly exhausted all scholarship opportunities and may have to turn down the offer purely for financial reasons. I was looking at an interesting chart by the US department of labor and education still pays off. I'm not too worried about any long term debt burden from this.
I have made a few more apps since my last post. I made an Italian app and a Spanish app. Right now I'm only making about 10$ a week but the windows phone market is still small relative to android and iPhone. I really do think the market will change because windows phone is just a better product than both of those. So hopefully once the market share increases, so will my revenue. I have also started to port my apps over to Android. I am starting with German and I am about 75% through developing my first android app. The android development software is not nearly as good as the windows phone software. However, there is a much larger support community for android so any time I hit any snags, I can often quickly find the answer online. In the end, I have actually flew through development largely because I have not run into any tough problems that someone else on the internet hasn't already had :).
I really want to get an android app done here soon so that I can put it on my resume. It really makes your CV stand out nicely and I think will be an interesting conversation piece during the interviews. I have been holding back a bit in applying for jobs because the move was so far away. My plan is to start aggressively searching for jobs starting early July. I am actually very confident in my chances of getting a job quickly. The software market is one of the hottest industries right now and my resume is very strong. I was reading than in the USA and Ireland the unemployment rate for software people is half that of the respective national unemployment. Just for fun I sent me resume to about 20 positions and got 5 responses back and many voice mails and emails back.
We are going in for our visa appointment on Thursday. I think I have all the documentation ready to go and I really hope it all goes smoothly. I have been reading about the process and I think it will but I am still nervous because they hold so much power over me. Wish me luck!
I have been doing a bit of website work for max and making some extra cash from it. He is looking to make an android app for his business. I am going to help him with that android work. Should be interesting.
The summer here in Dublin has been pretty grey. Lots of overcast days and rain. Everyone, including myself, are not too happy about it. Luckily we just had a nice warm weekend which was a nice change. I hope we get more of that. The length of the days is just amazing though. It really didn't get pitch black today until about 11. Last night we went out for drinks at about 9pm and it was still very bright out.
We are still very excited about the move to the UK. It does create a ton of extra work that needs to be done like selling a bunch of stuff, getting visas, finding a new place before we go, etc. It looks like renting a car from Dublin and then dropping it off in the UK will be too expensive so we will likely take the ferry instead as a foot passenger. This means that we need to get all of our belongings into just a few suitcases. We did this 3 years ago so theoretically it's possible, but we have also acquired lots of new stuff since then :)
Anyhow, it's getting late and I think that's about all I have.
Cya
