Back in December Cheryl and I applied for an unmarried partner visa so Cheryl could continue to stay in the UK, keep her job, live in her house, and continue our relationship sensibly.

The main requirements were that we’d lived together in a serious and committed relationship for 2 years. We have lived together for almost 3 years now. Sadly, the proof required by the UK Border Agency basically only included letters from utilities companies or the government. When we first moved in together I had my own house. I was on all of the bills there, so I didn’t get myself added to Cheryl’s too.

The application letter said that it was advisable to get letters from people we lived with, or people who knew we lived together to cover any months we couldn’t account for ourselves. We got Rik to write us a letter because he introduced us and has known us both longer than we have known each other. We also got Tsomo to write us a letter because we lived with her at Ropewalk Court in Nottingham over 2 years ago.

When we got the reply from the UKBA it said that Cheryl’s visa application was rejected because they didn’t believe we met the definition of partners and we hadn’t been living together for long enough.

It’s infuriating to have some organisation make a decision about your entire future based on whether E-On can say you were living together or not.

We’ve requested an oral appeal, and submitted nearly 50 pages of Facebook relationship data to support that we’ve been together for more than long enough.

If they still say we weren’t together I’m not sure how we can prove it. It seems a lot like we’re being assumed guilty until we can prove we’re innocent here.

Just wanted to post another entry to point out that as of today I’ve been blogging for a decade.

Man I feel old.

Just the other day I realised that I will have been writing and maintaining this blog, or some version of it, for 10 years on January 6th. That’s a decade of my life spent writing the occasional post about whatever takes my fancy. Most of it is pointless to most people, but all of it continues to be interesting, helpful, and enjoyable to me when I come back to read it.

So, here are some statistics I’ve come up with for the timespan of this blog:

I have moved house somewhere in the region of 12 times, not counting some very brief stays in temporary places, and perhaps forgetting some.

I’ve worked for 5 companies (6 if you count Amazon and LOVEFiLM separately).

I’ve made lots of new friends, and completely stopped speaking to some of the ones I was friends with when this blog began. There’s even a small subset of friends that I’ve both made and stopped speaking to during the last 10 years.

I’ve lived in America, I’ve visited Canada, Germany, Romania, Poland, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Spain (and Tenerife), France, Singapore, Indonesia, and Australia.

I try to write updates on my blog while I’m doing these big life events, but in the end I tend to give up half way through because I’m busy writing updates on Facebook or Google+ instead. I find it kind of a shame that my post rate has dropped on here so dramatically because of social networks. It makes me wonder how much longer I’ll continue writing updates on a blog. It would be a bit of a shame to stop completely after 10 years though.

How come when we’re talking about the time, and it’s obvious we’re talking about the time we still feel the need to include the T on the end of the timezone?

“12PM GMT.”

“Oh, 12PM in TIME! I thought you were talking about 12PM in area…” o_O

Right now I am sitting at home and writing this blog update from a Kindle Fire 2. I have it at home to do some testing and stuff.

I can’t really say anything about it, but I like it.

I haven’t posted on here for a really long time now, and there’s no particular reason why not. I guess it’s a combination of being busy at work, and having a variety of social networks to post my inane ramblings on instead.

I’m typing this on my phone whole I sit in seat 21C of Ryanair flight FR8166 from Stanstead to Tenerife (south). I forgot to bring headphones with me and I’m too lazy to get my Kindle out of my case in the overhead storage compartment.

Cheryl and I met up with Len and Christine at St. Pancras yesterday evening and then headed home and met JonP along the way. We had a couple of drinks and then had to go to sleep so we could be up in time for our taxi at 03:45.

We went outside and I rang the taxi company after a couple of minutes. It turned out that the taxi driver was already across the road, sleeping in the back. We got in 5 minutes later than planned after the driver decided to knock over Christine’s case and just leave it on the floor.

Once we were all in the car the driver got out, went to the back of the taxi and started to pray. 10 minutes later he got back in and we finally set off.

His satnav was telling him to go through the Rotherhithe tunnel, but a sign said it was closed. I pointed it out before we got there but he didn’t understand, so went around.the roundabout only to be surprised that the tunnel was closed. I repeated for the third time that he’d have to go over Tower Bridge, and he still didn’t get it. Then Cheryl said it a bit more sternly and the penny dropped.

We had a horrible journey to the airport because either the driver was falling asleep or the car was constantly pulling to the left and he was constantly correcting it.

Once we’d reached the airport Cheryl had to get her visa checked and stamped despite online check-in because she’s from outside the EU. We queued for a while and then I went to ask about going through the fast-track. The guy there told me there was no need to queue for just a visa check, so I went back and told Cheryl. She asked another employee who was.nearby and he took her out of the big queue and over to a much shorter one. It saved us about 20 minutes of waiting, if not more.

We grabbed some breakfast at the Wetherspoons, but had to be quick so we didn’t miss the flight. Gate 58 is a long way from the rest of the airport.

We were quite far back in the queue at the gate, so we’re not really sitting together very much, but oh well. I mostly just want to sleep, but can’t get comfortable enough to make it last.

Well, that’s everything that’s happened up to now. It’s really got me looking.forward to the Singapore flight on a non-budget airline.

Just another 3 hours of this flight to go…

I’m writing this post on my Transformer Prime from Google’s campus near Liverpool Street. It’s a really cool place and I’m glad I came here for this Google TV event.

My work was contacted by the organiser, and it seemed like nobody else was interested in taking part, so I offered to help out anyone who was going to use the API. Sadly our public API is currently closed, but I came along to speak about the future of connected televisions and things like that. It was only a very brief thing in front of a bunch of Android developers, but I was so nervous leading up to it.

It turned out that there was no need to be. It’s been a really cool experience, and it’s been cool to meet quite a few people who work in interesting places around London.

Some of the crowd I spoke to as viewed from the back where I was hiding.

It felt weird being one of the people that others looked to as if I know the whole idea inside out, but I guess through my work I have kind of just got used to the whole concept, and how it could be used, and what some potential issues might be.

I do like the Google TV idea, and I think the execution is pretty good so far. I would like to see quite a few changes to things though. It seems there’s no concept of user profiles, much like on a phone or a tablet. That means you can sign your TV into your Facebook account, leave the room, and quickly get Facebook raped by your nearest and dearest.

It’s good that Google are doing more with the interface guidelines and being a bit more prescriptive with how things should really work. One speaker suggested there’s a bit more stringent process involved in getting a TV app onto the market. I think that’s a good thing, mostly. As long as it doesn’t turn into an Apple-like situation.

Anyway, I think I’ve spent enough time talking crap on my blog. I should probably take a wander around the place and see what people are doing. It’s crazy seeing how quickly the apps get developed. It’s how I used to love doing things before working on big corporate projects. It’s nice to be free of the whole management side of things. You just have an idea and start coding it. Ordinarily we’d just be scheduling in the meeting to determine when the sprint planning would begin, and when the stand-ups would be.