I've already had one enquiry, so I guess I'd better get writing.

Despite the lawyers being really down on using this Consulate, I have to say that from my experience, it's been the easiest so far. Or I'm just getting used to the rigmarole.

The one screw up was I didn't read the instructions thoroughly enough, and we rocked up to the Scotia Bank branch to deposit the visa application fee in their bank account, and I thought the fee was quoted in Canadian dollars. Turns out, it was quoted in US dollars. It wasn't the end of the world that we didn't have cash, they could sell us US dollars on a credit card, except the bank would only accept Visa card, not Mastercard. I haven't had to deal with such bullshit since the great Cabcharge/Visa card war in Australia in the late 90's.

Moral of that story: read the instructions multiple times. Carry one of each flavour of credit card when traveling internationally, just in case.

That minor transactional hiccup aside, everything went fine. The Consulate itself does all of the pre-interview shenanigans on one floor (the bulk of the waiting around, the fingerprinting and photographing) and then they shoot you up to another floor for the "interview". Annoyingly, they run you through the metal detectors again on the higher floor.

The interview was basically "So you work for Google? How about the food?" and then he told us to come back the next day to pick up the passports. I think we were in and out in about three, three and a half hours.

I have to say, the ability to collect the passports from the Consulate later is a real boon. When you're in a foreign country, the last thing you want to deal with is any glitches in the postal system, or trying to get mail delivered to a hotel. This alone makes me like the Vancouver Consulate the best.

We went back at the 2:15pm allotted "passport pick up time", and they came down to the security checkpoint on the ground floor and you show your receipt and they give you your passports back. They tell you to step outside and check it, and come back if there's any problems, so I presume you can at least talk to a human at that point if there are any problems.

This is my third E-3 visa. They did not ask to see any of my supporting paperwork showing ties with Australia or anything else that I had in my giant wad of paperwork, just the approved Labor Condition Application, which they kept and returned with the passport the next day.

I'm in the market for a new laptop. I've got almost 4 years out of my Dell D610 (which I've been despising from not long after purchasing) and decided that I'll never buy from Dell again.

I used to be very down on ThinkPads because of the placement of the Escape key, but since I've been using one at work for the last 3.5 years, I've gotten used to the Escape key location, and found the laptops themselves to otherwise be very solid and well supported by Linux.

So Lenovo it is.

Next question: T400 or X301? I've seen both, and the X301 is very sexy in terms of thickness, weight, and having all the latest bells and whistles, but boy, is it expensive.

I did a side-by-side comparison between a T400 decked out the way I wanted, and an X301 decked out the best I could choose, and I've opted for the T400.

The main problems I had with the X301 were that there was no choice of processor, and the processor available seemed significantly slower than what I could get in the T400, and of course the cost. I seemed to be paying nearly $1000 more for a slower processor, just to get something extra thin and light, with LED backlighting and an SSD disk.

What finally swayed me to spending less money and getting an arguably "better" laptop was if I paid less now, I'd be more comfortable possibly getting something in less than 4 years time down the track. So if it came down to the X301 for 4 years or the T400 for 2 years, the T400 seemed like a better deal.

What will hopefully end up happening is I'll end up using the T400 for four years and not end up hating it by the end of that time.

Here's what I ended up going with:

• Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor P8600 (2.40GHz 1066MHz 3MBL2) 25W
• 14.1 WXGA+ TFT, w/ CCFL Backlight, Camera
• Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD with vPro
• 2 GB PC3-8500 DDR3 SDRAM 1067MHz SODIMM Memory (2 DIMM)
• UltraNav (TrackPoint and TouchPad) with Fingerprint Reader
• 160 GB Hard Disk Drive, 7200rpm
• DVD Recordable 8x Max Dual Layer, Ultrabay Slim (Serial ATA)
• Intel WiFi Link 5100 (AGN) with My WiFi Technology
• 9 cell Li-Ion Battery

All of that plus a 2 year warranty and an additional 90W AC adapter came out at $1,240 (they have a 15% off discount code thing running until tomorrow, which brought the price down a bit)

I'm particularly excited about not having a proprietary graphics chipset. I'm particularly unexcited about it including Windows Vista Home Basic.

Drat, enumerating all of the options made me just realise that I seem to have omitted the 5-in-1 media reader from the final order. Oh well. That was largely just a nice-to-have anyway. Sarah tends to do all of the photo management on her laptop.

I doubt this will get to me before Thursday, so I should have it waiting for me by the time I get back from Barcelona.

We got back from our brief visit to Canada last night. We had a great time, Vancouver and Victoria were both very nice.

YVR (Vancouver Airport)

This airport has to win the award for nicest airport I've seen. Clearly they pulled out all the stops in preparation for the Winter Olympics next year. The airport is very bright, airy and open. Before you even hit the immigration line, you pass through a couple of water features, some indigenous art, all of that jazz. Immigration is done in the open in a huge hall, instead of in the dark bowels of the airport, which was a pleasant change from the usual US airport immigration experience. (That said, Houston airport had a pretty nice immigration experience). Oh, and it was blanketed with free WiFi, which was a nice touch.

Ferry to Victoria

The brief geography lesson I got was that Victoria is on Vancouver Island, and Vancouver (the city) is not on Vancouver (the island). Go figure. Getting to Victoria from the airport via BC Ferries was a very seamless experience. You board a bus from the side of the airport terminal, and it drives to Tsawwassen, drives onto the ferry, and then you get off the bus and go sit on one of the passenger levels of the ferry.

BC Ferries

BC Ferries deserves special mention. The ferry itself is huge - 7 decks (three of them for vehicles). It's a veritable shopping mall on water. It's got some stores, buffets, exclusive $10 entry lounges, video arcades, cellular payphones, the works.

The trip to Victoria

The ferry ride took about 1.5 hours, and was very scenic. We passed by a few smaller islands, and I had an instant flashback to the TV show The Beachcombers that I used to watch as a kid, particularly the opening sequence.

Victoria

Victoria is a beautiful city. It's the capital of the province of British Columbia, and I likened it to Canberra in a lot of ways. It had more modern conveniences than a town with a population of its size would otherwise normally have. It was a government and university town. Nice houses, very green in general, and being an island, there was water everywhere. It seemed to have lots of bays, and harbours and rivers. It was very nice.

Flight back to Vancouver

We took a Harbour Air seaplane back to Vancouver on Sunday afternoon. That was fun. I've never been on a seaplane before. It took about 35 minutes.

Vancouver

First order of business in Vancouver was the purpose of the whole trip: renewing our visas. That went fine, I'll write a separate post about the process. Afterwards, we bought tickets for the Big Bus, and toured the city for the remainder of Monday and Tuesday.

Drive to Whistler

For Wednesday and Thursday, we hired a car, and went a bit further afield. On Wednesday, we drove up to Whistler to check it out. The drive up took about 5 hours, because we stopped at every scenic spot we came by. Waterfalls abounded. There was a lot of work being done on the roads between Vancouver and Whistler, upgrading them for the Olympics. Whistler itself was pretty spectacular. Some crazy looking ski runs. The village looked like Squaw Village on steroids. The drive back only took about 2 hours.

Cleveland Dam, Lynn Canyon suspension bridge

For the last day, we drove to Cleveland Dam, where there was a salmon hatchery, and checked out the dam, hatchery and surrounding area. It was lovely and green. After that, we drove to Lynn Canyon to check out the suspension bridge there (unlike the Capilano Suspension Bridge, which costs $26 a pop, the Lynn Canyon one is free).

That was all we had time for really. The weather wasn't fantastic during our stay, but it didn't really prevent us from doing anything either. I'd have liked to have checked out Stanley Park if we had more time, and Sarah wanted to go to Grouse Mountain.

We had a near-100% success rate at being picked as Australians, unlike when we're in the US, where more often than not, people ask us if we're British. Apparently this is mainly attributed to the fact that Australians run all of the ski lifts at Whistler. We certainly heard a lot of Australian accents while we were getting around.

I'd also never seen such a saturation of Starbucks before. In Vancouver, there were literally Starbucks across the road from Starbucks, and around the corner from another one. Whistler village had two.

The Canadian accent is cute. They really do tack "eh?" on the end of everything, although it's phonetically more like "ay?". "House" and "about" are also pronounced distinctively differently.

Overall, Vancouver wasn't what I'd call bursting at the seams with tourist attractions, but seemed like a nice city. It was fairly flat. The beggars were well dressed. Everyone was very friendly. A lot of the taxis were Priuses. It seemed pretty clean. I could handle living there. Not sure how bad it gets in winter.

Apparently Comcast is planning on axing its analog cables at some undetermined point in the future.

That will make my MythTV setup more complicated, and no doubt require a more expensive cable plan and yet more equipment. My setup is already a tad ridiculous.

It's time for the obligatory two-year E-3 visa renewal (well reapplication, technically), and this time we thought we'd stay local and do it in Vancouver.

We flew up this morning, and we're going to get a ferry to Victoria and stay the night with my cousin and meet his wife and kids, then take a seaplane back to Vancouver on Sunday night.

We've got an appointment at the US Embassy on Monday morning. If everything goes to plan, we'll fly back on Thursday evening.

I'm looking forward to a bit of down time. The timing is unfortunate, given this H1N1 flu outbreak, but our visas expire at the end of the month, and consular appointments aren't particularly easy to come by (or flexible).