Skip to main content

More Things To Be Mad About

There is no US Embassy in Minsk, Belarus. As a result, people who need to go through an interview for a green card, like my mother, need to go to the nearest city which has one. In good old communist times it would be Moscow, the capital of the whole USSR. The trip there would entail overnight train Minsk-Moscow, spending a day in a city, and overnight train back. No visa required, naturally.
Today, despite the fact that old Soviet Union fell apart and old Soviet Republics are separate states, the trip to Moscow would go pretty much the same way.
But the wizards at National Visa Center came up with a different plan. Everything my mom needs is done in Warsaw, Poland. Why?
NO IDEA.
May be it's closer.
So my mother had to pay for Polish visa, go through the medical exam they require, wait for ten days to get the visa, go to Warsaw, and all this just to find out that the medical form for her green card is not in a correct format (which was never specified, by the way), and—this is my favorite—THEY DO NOT HAVE A PROOF OF MY US CITIZENSHIP.
I called them a month ago, as soon as my mother was scheduled for an interview to check if they have everything, and they said yes.
This whole case is based on the fact that I am a US citizen, otherwise it would never get approved.
Now I need to send my mom a copy of my naturalization certificate, and she has to go through this idiocy again.

I haven't been this pissed since the 2004 presidential election.

Popular posts from this blog

{position:fixed} in iOS 6

I stumbled upon this oddity when upgrading to iOS 6 while working on a mobile advertising project, and it took me a better part of the day to figure out what is going on: all of a sudden an element {position:fixed} stopped working in a correct manner (which is staying put, while the page is scrolling), and started "sticking" to the scrolling page, moving out of the viewport, and then just "jumping" back to the correct location after the scrolling was finished.If you scroll this page , you will see it—hint: that's the one labeled "broken"—assuming that you have a correct device/browser combination. Mine was iPhone4 and iOS 6.0 (6.0.1-6.1.3 behaves just the same). On the original page, where I first encountered the problem, all of my elements were created dynamically using JavaScript, but at the end of the day (literally) it become clear, that the glitch is in the iOS 6 CSS implementation.Here is what happens: if you have an element {position:fixed} whic

May 1st Reboot 2016

My main site gets a facelift (about half-a-decade overdue). Due to a chronic caching issues with iPage, I have to model everything on CodePen , and then FTP files to iPage, where, for some mysterious reason, html gets updated instantly, but CSS and Javascripts marinate somewhere for at least half an hour, before starting to render, which makes it impossible to model anything in real time. Annoying. Oh, well. At least I finally got to re-doing the site. I still do not have a concept for the galleries, though, and a main navigation menu is really primitive, but the new site is HTML5, CSS3 and what not, and I am not ashamed to refer people to it anymore. Yay. P.S. Resolved the cache issue with .htaccess file: FileETag None Header unset ETag Header set Cache-Control "max-age=0, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate" Header set Pragma "no-cache" Header set Expires "Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT"  everything now works a lot livelier. P.P.S. Why is Blo

I Am Starting To Worry...

...generally, when the amount of money in my savings exceeds a certain number (and that's not a large number), mainly, because I expect various unpleasant events to take place. Usually, the car breaks down. Sometimes I hit something, but sometimes it breaks by itself just as well. This Tuesday I came to work, parked my Jeep, spent 9 hours at the office, went back to my Jeep and turned the ignition key. Nothing. The lights are on, though, radio works, too - I have power. So it's a fuse, or starter. I checked the fuses (found two which claimed responsibility for the starter operation), one was all right, the other one I couldn't pull out without pliers, so I decided, that it's all right, too. It looked nice from the outside. So I called AAA and asked for the tow to the dealership. The truck came in about half an hour and the driver checked my battery, confirmed that it's not it, and offered me to start my Jeep with a help of two seemingly undocumented individuals, who