Carl Tyler's Blog

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Actually I haven't, but according to my spamjam (which works great by the way) folder I have won a few hundred times. Here are a few things, these spammers should know, British Citizens are not entitled to enter the Diversity Lottery (aka Greencard lottery), although just to rub things in a little bit the US allows people from Northern Ireland to enter, somehow they are not considered part of the UK? (I think the same people that funded the IRA pushed for this exclusion). Every other country in the EU can enter the lottery but not us Brits.

The reason why these mails are most interesting to me right now, is that I am in the situation where my residency expires December 31st 2004. So I have to leave the country for a while until my new visa is sorted out, unless I find a bride in the next four weeks, which is highly unlikely, as my attorney said, I should only marry for a greencard if it's the one, and as I have yet to meet Lara Croft or Jewel 4 weeks is cutting it fine.

So what happens towards the end of the year? Well I am pretty sure that I have decided to live in Paris with a friend for a little bit until the new visa is approved, this will help my French should I ever decide to move to Canada, plus I can take the dog with me, as no quarantine rules like England. The thing that's most interesting will be how in todays world I will be able to do much of my work as if I was still sitting here in the US. With Vonage, no one has ever known where my phone is, and with Sametime and other IM systems I can chat with our developers and customers with no problems. All my email is accessible remotely, I can pay my bills online, there is really very little different about sitting in Paris to sitting in New Hampshire. The hardest thing will be the brainstorming that often happens in the office around products and how to improve our existing ones.

Although IM, Online Meetings and conference calls are great, there are times when you can't beat a physical meeting, body language is such an important part of communication, that sometimes to just need to see it. It's like people that work in remote offices, no matter how hard they try, there are still things discussed in corridors that are never discussed in forums, IMs or conference calls, so trips to the head office are always useful. It has long been a concern of mine that companies like IBM are heading towards a point where they have too many people working from home and ideas are not exchanged, and hot issues aren't as easily acknowledged, as a big advocate of IM I still can't help but feel that human interaction is still really important.