Things have settled down and I’ve finally gotten some sleep so I’m a lot more relaxed so let me tell what happened with the whole Seattle fiasco.

I took the plane to Vancouver on Wednesday and then took the bus to Seattle. Now when I went across the border the guy asked what was I going to do in the US and I say ‘a business trip’. A fatal mistake. Then he starts asking me all those questions and gets really aggressive and finally decided that I needed a work visa to get in the States. But I’m going as a company, I have my own risk-management, I’m self employed, I mean WTF!

Anyways now I was stuck in the middle of nowhere at the US border and couldn’t get on a bus or anything to get back cause I lost my ticket . So I ended walking back and forth between the border and the nearest pay phone which is about a mile away and finally decided to get internet access so I could print my credentials so I could try to get the work visa real quick by the end of the day. So I hitched a ride to this rich town called White Rock and must have walked for three hours asking random people on the street where I could find internet access. Now the place is on the ocean side and it was really sunny so for most people I talked to the whole notion of going out of the sun to work on a computer must have been strange indeed. There is no café in White Rock which offers internet access. You can read that again. We’re talking about 30k people living there. Pay phones are hard to come by too. Funny thing ’cause in Montreal every second café offers internet access and you can get to a pay phone at every street corner… that would have helped a lot.

Anyways they have the most beautiful beach over there so I sat down a little and saw the ocean for the first time, man that was sweet. They have a ton of cute girls in that place too, so it wasn’t all that bad. I just wish I had slept Tuesday night instead of going drinking out with some friends, I was totally knocked, ended up sleeping on a park bench until I got a hold of the guys in Seattle.

So the guy who’s hiring me drove up from Seattle (a 2-3 hour ride) to pick me up and we tried to get in a second time, with the intention of getting a TN visa. Well the people over there wouldn’t even hear our request and wanted a whole bunch of official docs and all that crap, and apparently didn’t sound overly confident about my chances of getting through even if I did have them. Now in Seattle part of the job was working on the AMFPHP core, so you’d think I’d make a pretty strong case that there wouldn’t be a single programmer in the US who knows AMFPHP that well AND is available. But as others have mentioned trying to get a visa is NOT like trying to get a job, they have extremely rigid guidelines and all the experience in the world isn’t going to get you anywhere if you don’t have “official documents”. Now I usually fax all my NDAs and contracts but apparently they don’t accept faxes either because it’s not ‘official’ enough. Well f* you too.

Anyways we drove back to Vancouver and couldn’t find a cheap place to stay so we ended up at Hotel Vancouver which is this 4 star place downtown that charges 420$ per night… Luckily Will was able to weasel his way into paying half price (he sure has talent with the ladies). He had to drive back to Seattle before all hell breaks loose back at the office. Anyways after trying a couple of places we were able to get his debit card working so that the whole money is all right now. You see before I left Montreal I paid next month’s rent and my tuition so everything would be all right once I was in Seattle. That left me broke but I was expecting a wire transfer for 2 grand the next day, so I figured this wouldn’t be for long. Plus I had these two checks in my wallet that had been there for a while for a couple of hundred bucks so I figured I’d be safe. Well the wire transfer didn’t come through because I didn’t give the right account number and then the two checks bounced, leaving me with 100$ in my bank account. But anyways I should be all right now.

Still I was stuck in Vancouver and didn’t have a place to stay or work and my inbox was piling up with client emails with the usual keywords.. “Deadline”, “Panic”, “ASAFP”, and so on. Thankfully I was offered a place to crash with an office and everything in Abbotsford, which is where I am now. I can’t thank enough Andrew at K1marketing who saved my ass on this one. Also thanks to all the people who offered cash and tips on how to get by in Vancouver, that was awesome. Reminds me of that song by Clapton ‘Nobody knows you when you’re down and out’… apparently some peeps still knew me.

Anyways I’ll try to get everything I can by Monday to go through the border and if I can’t then I’m not going back to Montreal yet as I’m only taking possession of my new apartment on July 1st, so in the meantime I’m homeless. I’ll probably be heading towards Calgary where an absolutely gorgeous girl by the name of Amber lives (met in her in a gay bar in Montreal, don’t ask). I’m thinking maybe I should just sneak across the border, a lot less paperwork, although I’m not sure that’s such a good idea ;) Might as well bring some drugs or firearms with me while I’m at it, at least it’ll be worth the trouble.

We worked on AMFPHP this week and pageable recordsets are working and we found out what the trouble was with SSL so I’ll probably release 1.0 beta 2 this weekend, that’ll be my compensation for the recent off topic posts, eheh.