Big Brother and Lethargy

So, the first bit of news is that US Immigration (USCIS) has received my application for Permanent Residency and have given me a Biometrics appointment for early April. It's in Boston so I'll have to get a ride in with my father-in-law and then wait around until he can get away from work to take me home again. I had a look on a map at how far the Boston Museum of Fine Arts is from the USCIS office is - 20 minutes by bus or about an hour walking - because I've wanted to go there since my first visit here in 2010. That museum lent a collection of Monet paintings to the New Zealand National Museum in Wellington called Te Papa and I had the pleasure of seeing them with my Mum and little sister a few years ago so I think that's what's really tempted me because I've had a taste of their collection and I want some more! I'll get there eventually. I need to study the road rules here so I can get a learner's permit. It's frustrating for me, being so used to independence in most matters, to be reliant on others for transportation.

Speaking of cars; there has been a navy blue car with black tinted windows acting suspiciously-like the driver inside it is spying on our house. We live at the corner of two quiet suburban streets with a col-de-sac off the intersection of them and so there isn't much traffic from people other than residents and their guests. But this car I saw one morning when I went out to check the mail and let the dog relieve himself. It was just sitting on the col-de-sac with the right side of the car parallel to our house and it stayed there while I got the mail in and waited for the dog to do his business. Then when I went back inside I told hubby about it and he peered out the window at the car which then drove off as though uncomfortable with the scrutiny. That would have been strange enough but the car came back another day soon after that! This time we had just come home from the grocery store and hubby said he saw the car drive slowly down the street past our house and then, once the car had passed our house and turned into the next street so the driver no longer had a good view of it, it sped up and drove off. It definitely looked like the driver was trying to get a good look at us.

Now, I would brush this off as paranoia from watching too many crime dramas but apparently it is very common practice for insurance companies here to hire private investigators to video tape and photograph clients who have made insurance claims with them to try to find evidence that they are not actually injured or physically disabled. It's actually happened here, at this very house, before. My later mother-in-law was physically disabled for at least 20 years with terrible back injuries and pain. The insurance company followed her with P.I.s for a long time before finally giving up since they couldn't find her doing more than she had claimed to be able. Apparently this is all legal but heck if it isn't creepy. It's possible that the Social Security Administration (US equivalent of Work and Income for my NZ readers) has hired a P.I. to investigate hubby since he is on disability payments with them due to his mental health problems but it's also possible that it's a hired goon of the Immigration department making sure that I am living here and having a genuine relationship with hubby. The latter is a little more creepy to me as it makes me wonder what type of evidence they would need to gather. Both scenarios disturb me in the fact that it would be US tax-payer money paying for these spying operations and hopefully it's not standard practice. Then again perhaps it saves the government more money in immigration/benefit fraud than it costs to hire the P.I.s. Who knows! The US is actually, in some ways, more kooky than the portrayals of it I've seen on TV.

And I've been watching a lot of TV lately. Back in NZ I barely ever, if ever, watched TV because I was terrible at being available/remembering when a show I wanted to watch was on. I also had no interest in watching whatever prime time had to offer unless I actually liked it and lacked paid/cable TV along with the means to conveniently record it for later viewing. Here I have use of a Tivo and a TV in our bedroom (always a bad idea but we do what we can with the space we have) so it's disturbingly easy to consume TV in a convenient way. I have found, though, that I've quickly caught up with programs that I only saw a little of in NZ and tired of them already. The majority, and I am not exaggerating when I say this, of television in the US is made up of reality shows. There are trashy ones like Jersey Shore, 16 and Pregnant and Toddlers in Tiaras but also shows about Hoarders dealing with their problems and even reality shows on the history channel. I'll admit that some of these shows are watch-able (hubby likes Myth Busters for example) but the majority are atrocious. There are plenty of House Wives of [Insert Affluent Suburb Here] and even a show about a psychic from Long Island. Her accent from the ad for it is very grating to me. It really is that there are so many channels and nothing on.

But I've become very wasteful with my time. Not that playing Skyrim is a waste of time, banish the thought, but it is a little unbalanced if I play that for 12 hours in one day. Oops. It's just that I have so much time now that it's become a valueless commodity. I am aware that my days of time abundance will come to an end once I have my visa so I can start looking for work but the thought makes me less inclined spend my time wisely and more inclined to squander it. Damn you, brain! Do what I tell you! Be motivated to write and clean and cook and organise. Then again I can't really blame myself for feeling a bit burnt out. Back and forth between NZ and the US 3 times (2 return trips and a final one-way trip) in the space of 10 months while completing an IT Diploma and moving my entire life over to the other side of the world then getting married and dealing with US immigration at the same time would be taxing on anyone. I've never been very patient with myself, though. I guess this is a good opportunity to practice. I feel like now that I've been allow to slow down that I've come to a halt. I need to get outside and exercise more. It's getting too hot for me to be out during the middle of the day now that Spring has arrived but the evenings aren't too bad so I'm sure the dog would appreciate more walks. That's enough rambling for now. I might go play Skyrim after I get hubby some breakfast. Then walk the dog tonight.

Technology of Convenience

I last left New Zealand on 31 August 2011 which was 1 day before the new legislation "Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act 2011" came into effect.  Copyright holders could use information collected as of 12 August 2011 to prosecute, however.  Still, my name has never been on an ISP account and I wasn't a fan of using peer-to-peer file sharing software which is what the law targeted.  I wasn't immune to the concern about the law, though, so it was something of a relief to be leaving the country when I was (avoiding the Rugby World Cup was also a huge bonus).  I wasn't glad because I thought I could go to a place with more lax copyright law, not at all, but because I was heading somewhere that has all the services that I need without having to break the law.

In the USA I can watch House M.D. and new episodes of The Simpsons on Fox's websites.  I can watch free content directly from the copyright holder themselves; all legally.  Sure, the copyright holder chooses which episodes to make available to me at which time, each site has about 5 episodes available at any given time and they rotate them, but it's still incredibly convenient.  In NZ the closest I came was TV 3's "TV on Demand" which usually just made available a few episodes from earlier in the day or week.  Usually the shows were NZ made shows too, not the property of big US copyright holders, so there was a limited variety from what I recall.  So, to sum up: in the USA I don't need to break copyright law (even if I wanted to) because my needs are met with free media directly and legally from the source.

Now, NZ readers out there might think: "But wait a minute, what about your monthly bandwidth limit?  If you're watching so much online then you'll be downgraded to dial-up speed or charged a mint for exceeding your limit!"  My answer to that: bandwidth limits don't exist here.  Fiancé told me that some of the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) tried to introduce limits, individually, and it would just cause their customers to migrate en mass to another ISP.  Basically, unless all ISPs introduced limits at once then it could never happen because the ISP that does loses too large a portion of their customers.  Sweet deal, huh?

Cable television here is a lot better than in NZ, too, in my opinion.  I've been in a household where we had Sky TV but, with the exception of a few cartoons that were repeats of repeats of repeats, I found that there was never anything to watch.  Or I would turn the TV on at the end of a movie that I really wanted to see or end up watching half a movie because I only caught the end of it.  I know TiVo has come to NZ now, and other recording devices of a similiar nature, but there's still not as much good and recent content as in the US.  And, because a lot of the good content is owned by US copyright holders, there likely never will be.  In this household there are 3 TiVo machines, 3 widescreen TVs and 3 people.  Excessive, I know.  By hey, fiancé and I at least share 1 TiVo while the man paying for it all (bless his soul) monopolizes the other 2.  Far be it from me to complain; fiancé and I watch many of the same shows and we're both happy with this arrangement.  Fiancé was already recording Futurama (a rare show in NZ), The Daily Show, Colbert Report and he set it up to record House M.D. for me.  There is, sadly, a lack of British shows available.  There's BBC America but when I tried watching that once it was during a marathon weekend of Top Gear.  Hmm, no thanks.  I shall investigate and see if the TiVo can't pick out a few gems for me, however.

Not all is sunshine and cupcakes in terms of US technology, however.  In the US it's normal practice (and they all do it) for Mobile Service Providers to charge customers to receive text messages.  When I found this out, since I had previously thought that this only applied to when International text messages were received, I was flabbergasted.  I can get unlimited text plans here for around $20 US but otherwise texts are $0.20 each way so, effectively, $0.40 per text!  In NZ my phone company charged me $0.09 NZ ($0.07 US at today's exchange rate) per text message sent - nationally or internationally - and nothing to receive text messages even if they were international.  They would also give me a number of free national texts each time I topped up my pre-paid account and, because I was mostly sending international texts to fiancé, I can honestly say that I never used all of the free national texts that I got.  I usually had about 700-900 free texts just sitting there waiting to be used, though they did expire after 30 days, so all I had to do was pay for the international texts.  To be honest, that company was an anomaly because most other phone companies charged $0.20 NZ per text send, nothing for receiving texts and $0.30 NZ for international or Pxt (picture) messages.

Another sore point with me about US phone companies is that they don't have to unlock a phone when a customer leaves them.  Say I purchase a phone from a company and, since it's their hardware, they make me sign a contract.  I have to pay to leave them if I want to go before the contract is up which is pretty standard (though scummy) and is done in NZ also.  If I then want to move to another company with the phone I purchased from the last one then I have to ask the first company to unlock my phone so that it can be used on the other company's network and plan.  Legally, they are under no obligation to do so.  I've never come across this in NZ.  Perhaps they do it with smart phones but I've never bothered to own one so I wouldn't know.  I like to give my old handset away or have it spare when I upgrade so this would be a major pain in the backside.  Fortunately, I still really like the phone that I got in NZ and since it's not locked I can get a sim card from a US phone company here and pop that in without even signing a contract since they can just add my phone to fiancé's contract with them.  I could go pre-paid but I figure this way is less hassle and there's just 1 bill to deal with each month.  It seems to work out a bit cheaper too, from what research I've done, so it's probably the way to go.

Games are ridiculously cheap here too.  Even if you factor in the exchange rate, console and PC games (especially pre-owned) are incredibly cheap when compared to NZ prices.  A game that would retail in NZ for $80 I can get a pre-owned copy of for $10 US.  And the beautiful thing about my main console of choice is that I don't have to deal with any region lock issues.  Lack of bandwidth limits also makes purchasing music and games online to download much more manageable.  Supposedly, electronics are much more affordable here than in NZ but I have yet to find evidence of this.  I was (window) shopping online for a netbook and found that the prices seems comparable to what I recall from NZ.  Then again, I didn't compare specific models so fiancé may be correct in his claim that PCs and their parts are much less expensive here.