There is fresh news today about mine and Nian's plans for the future. First, our second "Notice of Action" came in the mail yesterday, the one for Nian's K3 Visa. According to the website we should expect a 60-90 period before it is processed. I had taken this to mean Nian would likely get her visa in about 3 months. She feels it will be at least seven months based on the experiences of others who post to a forum about Chinese/US immigration.

I had promised her if she wasn't here by August when my lease runs out, I would find some job overseas where we could be together for six months or so while we await her Visa to be issued (she can get non-US visas much more easily). These things are hard to time however, so we agreed I should start looking now. I polished up my Resume today in anticipation of sending it to a job prospect in South Korea; an SAIC job opening so I wouldn't have to worry about various 401K and insurance matters. I discussed things with my immediate manager and he felt a departure from the DEMACO/SAIC office could be accommodated for upto a year without great difficulty. So off into the internet ether went my resume. The automated response indicated I should get an answer or at least some kind of additional inquiry request within two weeks. I placed my availability at May 1st, 2006, so maybe Nian and I will be together much sooner than we originally planned.

Nian hooked up a new webcam to her computer back in Guangzhou. I was really surprised how crisp the picture looked. We evidently had a good connection last night as the images updated very quickly also. I will find some way to take a screen snapshot of our next video chat session. It had been a long time since I had last seen her face live, as her old camera had become balky and hard to use. I was surprised how emotional it made me to see her live, since we talk for about 2 hours almost every night, and had exchanged some pictures in the last couple of months, but her face held an angelic quality when it popped into view that is hard to describe, and something about the way her hair fell about her shoulders made her look like a teenager. How I deserve such a wife is beyond me -- should the South Korean job materialize, taking it would be one small step towards being worthy.

Well it's been a long time since my last Blog posting. I'm not sure why my life has become so uninteresting to write about, probably just the dreariness of waiting for the USICS (formerly the INS) to approve Nian's K3 visa so she can join me here in America. There is some good news on this front, after an initial rejection of our I-130 filing, a resubmission with the correct filing amount has been accepted (so we are on the waiting list). I have also filed the I-129F which is part two of this 3 step process -- 3 steps on Nian and my part, 6 steps on the USICS part (3 notices of action, 3 final confirmations). We have one notice of action. Hopefully things will speed up a little from this point, but Nian is more pessimistic than I.

So since Nian and I are not being reunited here State side quickly, I have bought tickets for another visit to China at the end of April, and if nothing is happening by the June, I'll be going back again in July, and possible again in November if the USICS is still dragging it's feet.

For whatever reason I've been thinking about my father a bit lately; I had mentioned to Nian that my good health, relative lucky job choices, and having finally found a true soul mate made me feel a bit guilty compared to my dad's relative hard life -- crippled with rheumatoid arthritis in his early 50s, loosing his chosen occupation at the same time and being widowed twice don't make for a truly happy life. Ironically my dad always seemed to remain of good cheer, fueled in large part by his born-again Christian faith. I myself am an Agnostic, but I appreciate the comfort my dad's religion gave him in the face of his adversities.

OK, something like 2 weeks has passed since that last paragraph, hopefully our "Notice of Action" will come on our I-129F application today, which should start a likely 4 month waiting period (as best as I can determine from the USCIS website) before the final step in Nian joining me here in America. It the mean time we have decided it would be best to look for a job overseas for a six month period while we await the final USCIS paper work to arrive.

I ran into an old friend from a couple of "Rocky Horror Picture Show" performances I was in a couple of years ago. Kiah had dropped a line on my blog when it looked like I was dealing with Lung Cancer (which turned out to be a false scare). Kiah had been dealing with cervical cancer. Anyway I ran into her and her fiancé (I hope I have that relationship correct) at the Gym and she looked healthy and in good spirits, even planning on still eventually having kids, so I wish her all the best, and apologize for not making a better attempt at answer to her post (I couldn't find an active E-Mail for her, but now believe I have a correct one).

I am leaving off four paragraphs from the post I previously started, they rightly belong in an essay I should put in my DumbSwede Journal at Slashdot.org (and are the main reason this post bogged down and ground to a halt). I am already running way too long as it is. There is more to write about some recent discussion Nian and I have had about religion, but that will have to wait until next time.

I'm sure it this were an Essay for school I would loose at least two grade points for tardiness, so I guess at best I get a D+ for today's posting.

Important news first: Nian's notice of action arrived from the INS on Tuesday -- REJECTED. What??? OK calm down, upon reading further it seems my check of $185 was five dollars short, so they spent two dollars mailing everything back to me to tell me so. The "K3 Kit" instructions we paid for had said to send $185, but I guess they were written sometime ago well before the new fee went into effect, which as stated in the rejection notice, October 15, 2005. Nian has a friend that got a notice of action reply in 11 days. I'm hoping to get something back by the end of next week. The rejection did say to include the rejection notice upon resubmission to expedite processing. I'm hoping all the work is already don and the extra $5 dollars is just a formality. Today marks 3 weeks 3 days since we first mailed in the K3 application.

OK, more than a week has passed since I started to write this. Nian finally got her Valentine's day gift; it arrived in Guangzhou on time, but took another four or five days to make it to her door. Still it was well received -- a heart shaped locket that we plan to put a family picture in on my next visit to China, which will be at the end of April. I had hoped Nian would be here with me by then, but it seems unlikely now. Still maybe she will accompany me back in April. In the mean time Nian has finally come around to the idea that perhaps we should contact a lawyer about how to proceed with the immigration process, so tomorrow I'll burn up the phone lines to find one that specializes in immigration law.

Nian was upset with me Saturday morning because I wasn't being attentive enough. I didn't quite realize it at the time, but I was becoming sick and after I got off the phone with Nian I got sicker. Trouble is I don't know whether we argued because I was sick, or whether I got sick because we argued. At first I thought it might just be in my head, but by Saturday night I was really feeling bad. I slept most of Saturday away, and by this Sunday morning I felt pretty good. A strange sickness that came on quickly and disappeared quickly and one I can't help but wonder if I made myself sick in someway. Nian and I talked again Saturday night, and with me being sick she took to being overly apologetic and sorry for not being patient and understanding enough. I wonder if somehow I unconsciously made myself sick in order to make Nian feel guilty for being upset with me. I guess I will never really know. I really did have a low-grade fever, sweats, and a heightened sensitivity to cold, mild diarrhea, and a painful sinus headache. I'm inclined to think it wasn't just "all in my head", but my guilt and stress could have led to a lowered immune system response to something that shouldn't have even gotten a toehold.

I've had Monkey Typewriter working for a week or two, at least in a crude rudimentary fashion. It has turned into a self teach project in learning JavaScript. I won't spend a lot of time explaining what it is doing this time around. It isn't in its final form yet which would be in pure JavaScript and runs on the client machine. What I have now is a hybrid program that runs on the server creating the evolutionary set of sentences, then a JavaScript viewer that displays them. The point is the program takes too much time and CPU power to risk having it run by visitors. For now I am just show the results of a Monkey Typewriter run on some sample sentences I have chosen, which in today's cases are the headlines from CNN.com.

It may seem like an obvious insight, but one thing Monkey Typewriter has taught me is that the more evolutionary constraints you have operating in parallel the faster the program will home in a an optimal solution. I suspect this holds true in the real world with real organisms as well. From what I've observed from past genetic algorithmic experiments there is a certain threshold of complexity and viability that must be crossed at which point evolution finds optimal solutions easily.

For awhile Monkey Typewriter was quite an obsession, I'm not quite sure why I put so much effort into it. To be honest what it does seems quite unimpressive if you knew the complexity and machinations it goes through to arrive at what it does, but sometimes you get an idea to do something and finding a solution is more important than putting the solution to any practical use. Next up, convert Monkey Typewriter into a pure JavaScript program.