An Aussie geek stuck in Texas

I am currently between jobs vacationing with family in Sydney, Australia but am currently looking for employment back in Houston. I am an Australian citizen and am planning to work for a US based company via the E-3 Visa, under this Visa the only requirement for the US based company is:

the employer must obtain a Labor Condition Application (LCA), ETA Form 9035 or ETA Form 9035E, from the Department of Labor.

My resume in PDF format is available here and also through Dice.

I would like to continue working in the area of Health, Safety and Environment Software Implementation and Consulting but am open to working in other industries and/or positions. My main strengths are to listen to clients to understand their needs, then designing a system that will provide them with the most benefit and proceeding to configure and implement this new system as per the agreed upon specifications. I am most comfortable working with applications built upon an Oracle database backend as I prefer Oracle’s syntax but also have considerable SQL Server experience.

If you are aware of any suitable Houston based positions or a position that will allow me to telecommute from Houston please let me know (contact details in my resume or just leave me a comment here), likewise if you have a suitable position available and are interesting in hiring me then please contact me at your earliest convenience!

Tags: Consultant, CV, Houston, HSE, Job, Resume

Happy Thanksgiving y’all! Just testing out iBlogger on the iPhone while waiting for the festivities to begin!

Tags: Thanksgiving

If you are wondering where the sudden spurt of old posts came from it is because I was trying out using a Tumblr account instead of my Wordpress blog but decided to move back here so I moved my posts from there to here.

Tags: tumblr

Shaving is something I have never enjoyed, no matter what technique I would use with what blade and what shaving cream I would always end up looking like my face had been attacked with the bayonets of a platoon of toy soldiers! For a while I tried an electric shaver of the foil variety but that never gave me a close shave and I eventually ended up leaving the power cord in an Indonesian hotel so it became a paperweight as I wasn’t able to find a replacement cord.

Fast forward to yesterday when I was out and about at shopping with Kimberly when I saw a rotary Norelco shaver on the cheap so my girlfriend being as awesome as she is bought it for me!

So far so good! It doesn’t irritate my skin at all and gives a pretty close shave, although I think I will need to use it for a few weeks to get the best use out of it so my face has a chance to get used to it.

Tags: shaving

I had used Remember the Milk (RTM) in the past but had recently switched to Toodledo mainly for the native iPhone support (through Appigo’s ToDo and then Toodledo’s own iPhone app) plus to try out a different web interface, however RTM just also released a native iPhone application so I have now switched back as their app is by far the best I’ve used on the iPhone!

Tags: iPhone

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about all sorts of different things, one of which is what the future holds for me and where I would like my life to lead. This lead to the development of my new 5 year goal, actually it may actually be the first 5 year goal I have ever set. The goal is:

To be able to do my work while I sit in my porch swing in my house in the mountains.

I say “my porch swing” and “my house” in the goal to emphasize the ownership of my own goal but I actually mean “our porch swing” and “our house” as in Kimberly and I’s.

I’m just tired of working in a cubicle farm and being such a slave to corporations, where your every move is open to scrutiny and where there are so many rules imposed on you. Like why should I feel bad if one of my dogs is sick and I need to take time off work to take them to the vet? I want freedom to use my time as I see fit, which means either working for myself doing freelance work, creating my own startup or working for a company that has similar ideals to my own.

I first started forming this goal while I was displaced in Dallas by Hurricane Ike and was sitting in Kimberly’s mum’s porch swing in her house in Mesquite listening to the soothing sound of the wind chimes while I worked remotely on my laptop. It just felt so right to be swinging gently in the swing as I worked on a document detailing the steps of a production migration for a client so that led me to think why can’t every day be like that?

The “in the mountains” part of the goal comes from a life long dream of mine to live in the mountains as to me that seems like the ideal lifestyle, living in a scenic area surrounded by nature with an abundance of fresh air and being able to see the stars at night!

Tags: goals

Lately at work I’ve been using an iPhone application named Ambiance to provide me with some ambient sounds while I work on critical tasks and I must say it has worked wonders with my productivity! Of course you don’t need an iPhone app to play ambient sounds like rain falling with wind in the background or waves gently hitting the beach but Ambiance just makes it handy.

Tags: iPhone

These days I find myself more & more tired, I just have zero to no energy with it seeming like my only reason to exist is to put in my hours at work and even then often that isn’t enough for the powers that be & I get asked to work even more hours… It didn’t used to be this bad did it? I don’t remember being such a slave to work before and I don’t remember feeling the need for so many happy hours after work either.

So what went wrong? I blame part of it on Houston’s less than favorable climate and it being such an urban area, where in the past I’ve lived in areas much more favorable to recreational activties.

Back in my hometown of Helensburgh, NSW Australia we literally had bushland (forest to my American friends) within a couple of blocks of our house so that was an endless source of recreational activities - hiking, biking & even swimming amongst other things so I was always outside enjoying life.

Then during my stint in Perth, WA Australia there was the beautiful Swan River and lots of surrounding parkland that made it a joy to either cycle or go inline skating. Plus in both areas the climate was much more friendly to outdoor activities, sure it got damn hot during summer at times and the winters were colder for longer but the life sucking humidity wasn’t there, which makes all the difference in the world!

So how to rectify the situation? First step is to eliminate so many happy hours and in that regard I have been doing better lately, we have also been eating at home more often recently with me doing a lot of the cooking, just need to work on making the cooking more healthy in nature. What I haven’t been doing so good on is the exercising, I just can’t seem to find the time or the energy to get to the gym or out on the bike.

I need to come up with some motivational measures to help me get out there again and get back into shape, maybe I should look at joining a mountain bike racing team again? Any other ideas? Maybe even a bootcamp just so I have a reponsibility to be somewhere at a certain time?

The other day I stumbled across the site Bush Fail and that inspired me to do the same for the very “photogenic” Hillary Rodham Clinton so I just finished setting up Bucket loads of Hillary Fail. So please check it out and let me know what you think!

I fully expect the site to hit the front page of Digg before long given how fanatical the Obama supports are there so the site is setup with WP Super Cache and all images are stored on Amazon S3 so it should be able to survive the Digg effect and even a Slashdot effect at the same time!

Tags: fail, hillary

moar funny pictures

One of my dogs Trixi in a perfect Loldog pose!

Tags: Dogs