I had a mere 12 minutes until my laptop, running Ubuntu 7.10, finished upgrading to the newest release, so it seemed like the perfect time to share a few updates from my life. The last few weeks have been chaotic, to say the least. I found my own place at last! I am now in Pendle Hills. The commute to work isn’t much different, and taking the bus may even be a little faster. Living in a house again, rather than an apartment, is nice. I am quickly warming to the idea and generally enjoying the house.

I had arrived in Sydney! The flight wasn’t too bad, but shortly after landing I realised I hadn’t fully organised my transport or accommodation. I bought a phone card at the airport, where it cost $10 instead of $2 downtown, and jumped on a bus into the city. When I arrived, I stepped off the bus into steady rain and a cold breeze. After travelling through tropical countries for the previous two months, I was thoroughly unprepared for the Sydney winter, however mild it might be.

We woke at the ripe hour of 5:00am and were at the airport by 5:30. By 10:00 we were in Hong Kong, and by noon we were at the visa office on the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border. I had travelled this route before, so I knew getting a visa should not be a problem. However, to our dismay, the visa office closed for “lunch” from noon until 2:30pm every day. Luckily, the staff member returned around 1:00pm and processed my visa. We crossed the border by 2:30pm and went in search of funds. A Bank of China ATM, hidden in an apartment building a few blocks away, provided what we needed. Two thousand RMB later, we were at the train station buying tickets to Guangzhou, and by 4:30pm we were on the train. We arrived …

Alas, it is finally time for me to say goodbye to Taiwan. Yesterday I spent a few hours cutting and pasting my “Unlonely Planet guide,” a collection of freely available information in English and Chinese. I even designed a little cover logo; I find parodies quite humorous. Last night, after sending some rather important emails, I packed my laptop. I didn’t go to bed until 3:00 a.m., even though I had basically finished packing last week. I woke up at 7:30 a.m. and started taking the boxes to the local post office, which isn’t particularly close. I borrowed a dolly from the breakfast place, but I still had to carry four 20 kg boxes down five flights of stairs, in the Taipei heat no less. …

For the last 16 months I had been living in Taiwan (if it wasn’t obvious). Within the next month, that chapter will come to an end. Over the next few weeks I will continue studying for the GMAT and hopefully finishing my MCSE; any words of encouragement will be warmly welcomed. Meanwhile, I will try to avoid distractions, which seem to be coming in the form of Python. Django has been one of the most fun things I’ve ever played with. Recently I wrote and contributed some code to access both Alexa Web Search and Alexa Site Thumbnails via Python.

Nailed it: 869, with about 740 needed to pass. It wasn’t too difficult, although some questions seemed technically questionable. For example: to stop an attacker from sniffing a network, what is the correct action? The intended answer was “implement a switch.” That ranked just ahead of another questionable answer: “implement WEP to secure your wireless router.”

I’m about to take my Security+ exam, and I don’t quite know how I feel. I think I am prepared; I don’t know what else I would study. Almost everything seems like common sense, and I am beginning to recognise the idiosyncrasies in how the questions are phrased. I hope.