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2002-05-21 Entry: "Progress (Of A Sort)"

Just under two weeks ago (it'll be two weeks tomorrow), I filled out the online questionnaire necessary for my Visa application. I filled all the required boxes; I appended the required documents (or reasonable facsimilies thereof) in the required (jpeg) format; I pushed the "Submit" button, expecting action. It was then supposed to take two weeks-ish to process.

Well, today I received the notice that they'd been given the go ahead and were starting to process the application! So, two weeks to process, but two weeks to get lost in the system before they even start processing first! I was getting slightly concerned that I hadn't heard anything, so this at least puts that fear to rest, but it does mean I'm likely to be here for another two weeks (meaning the June 3rd start date is out).

This week is pretty much a write-off for productive work though - the guy I'm taking over from is over from eastern Europe and demonstrating the code. We allocated three days for the handover. Once I understood precisely how the code is put together (which is really, really, really clean object oriented C - these guys have followed their object oriented design principles to the letter), I found there wasn't actually all that much of it. So little in fact that we'd pretty much gone through it all by early afternoon.

This leaves me two (and a bit of Friday) days to sit and play with it and ask any obvious glaring questions that I have. This'll probably lead to me not actually asking too many, as, unlike the current code I'm maintaining, this actually is a one man job. The current code is a six-man job given to one man (well, it's about 50 thousand lines of code, and not nice neat tidy bug free lines of code either). The code I'm acquiring is much smaller. So I'll probably be bored within a week, but at least I'll be bored in Dallas!