Immigration Woes
Sat, 01 Oct 2011 05:39:24 -0400
Howdy, folks; if it's been a while it's because I've been on a strange journey through halls of paperwork.
Early last month I signed a contract to work at a fine company I'll write more about later. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to start work yet due to my visa situation in the country.
Visas work a bit differently in every country, and Japanese visas are quite different from what you'd expect in America. For one thing, what's generally thought of as a visa - the stamp in your passport - counts primarily as a landing permit and is not strictly related to your Status of Residence, which determines what you're allowed to do in the country (like work, own property, or vote). Thus, since I'm already in Japan, getting a visa isn't actually important - I want a change of my Status of Residence. Unfortunately, this requires special circumstances if you're inside the country.
The normal procedure for getting a Status of Residence that allows work is to apply for a Certificate of Eligibility from outside Japan and come in on a visa (landing permit) appropriate to your desired Status of Residence. It's not officially documented, but a Certificate of Eligibility may be used in lieu of special circumstances to apply for a change of Status of Residence inside the country - this is not some crazy loophole, it's just standard operating procedure at Immigration, despite not being mentioned on their site or in relevant laws (so far as I know).
The downside to this is that the application for the Certificate of Eligibility involves a background check to verify you have a four year degree appropriate to your field and that you are not a felon, which means it takes roughly six weeks for it to be issued, during which period your visa is not automatically extended.
What all this means for me is I get to be funemployed until the middle of Novemeber and I have to figure out a way to extend my current Status of Residence (short stay - tourist) before Halloween. Shouldn't be hard, and should actually result in a nice vacation, but three months is a long time to be unemployed.
Most of the information in this post I gleaned from this thread at the Gaijinpot forums; lots of the links to forms and laws are dead, but the correct ones aren't hard to find. A lot of this isn't documented outside government sources in Japanese because, well, Japanese people don't have to worry about Japanese visas.
In the meantime, since I'm done with paperwork for at least a month, hopefully I'll manage to be productive in any case. Watch this space for updates. Ψ
Costume Manuals
Thu, 01 Sep 2011 22:18:17 JST
While working on Monsieur Mieux I compensated for my lack of ability to draw by sourcing nineteenth-century engravings from Google Books. The best sources I came across some costume books. They illustrate many, but not all of the costumes; some of the ideas are... remarkable:
Champagne Bottle: Make a cap to simulate the cork of a champagne bottle, tied across to represent the wiring, and covered with gold foil; the nape of the neck should also be covered with gold foil, which can be done by lengthening the back piece of the cap and joining it to the robe. Wear a close-fitting black robe with the label of any champagne brand worked on the back and front.
Anyway, pictures:
Characters Suitable for Fancy Costume Balls
Do enjoy. Ψ
RVM on Arch Linux
Fri, 26 Aug 2011 14:29:11 JST
I've been using Arch Linux as my primary operating system for four or five years now, and generally I'm pretty happy with it. I can't say I have no complaints - about once a year a kernel upgrade causes my system to not boot without some babying due to initrd image problems, but the flexibility of pacman (or rather yaourt) and minimal nature of the system make it attractive.
Recently I've started using Ruby for some toy projects - it's an interesting language, and has some points to recommend it, though it also has some odd quirks and a mixed user base. It also has versioning problems that make Python's look rather well-managed.
RVM seems to solve this problem by allowing you to install whatever version of Ruby you want and switch between them rather easily. Unfortunately, it doesn't install some of the standard Ruby distributions properly on Arch. Specifically, 1.8.7 is quite broken.
First problem: the source for the default RVM version of 1.8.7 doesn't link properly on Arch Linux because it expects an older version of openssl. You can get around that by building not 1.8.7 but 1.8.7-p299, as mentioned on the Arch Wiki page.
The next problem, not on the Arch Wiki when I went to it originally, is not Arch-specific. A part of the Ruby build process can fail and spit out unhelpful errors from gcc - data definition has no type or storage class - because somewhere a file got truncated. This was originally noticed on StackOverflow with Fedora, and has been noticed in different contexts on Arch even without RVM involved. The fix amounts to doing this after your install fails:
cd src/ruby-1.8.7-p299/ext/dl
rm callback.func
touch callback.func
ruby mkcallback.rb >> callback.func
rm cbtable.func
touch cbtable.func
ruby mkcbtable.rb >> cbtable.func
Of course use the patch number and path appropriate to your install. Resume the build and things should go fine. Ψ
Pleasant Dinner Conversation
Wed, 24 Aug 2011 20:45:46 JST
From Golden Age Comic Book Stories, which you should be reading. Ψ
A Stroll in Ueno
Thu, 18 Aug 2011 22:27:45 JST
Howdy, folks! I had a nasty case of something over the weekend and a bit of time before some more interviews, so I figured today I'd go by Ameyoko, a big open-air market in Ueno. I got a bit turned around coming out of the station, though, and spotted this sea of green from a few blocks away and went to investigate...
This is a giant lotus pond in Ueno Park. How big is giant? Please look at it on Google Maps.
No Fishing. When I saw this I laughed because I assumed it must have been years since anyway tried to fish there, but how wrong I was - I saw a guy fishing about fifty feet down the path, though I didn't get a picture of him. I'm honestly surprised there's any fish...
One of two temples in the center of that part of the park.
After strolling around in the park for a while, I did make it to Ameyoko, though since I wasn't really shopping it wasn't quite as nice as the park. I did find a treat for all of you back in Providence, though:
Still hot, though it's letting up some. Ψ