The Flag's a Plus

My adventures in bureaucracy, continued ... While I was contacting various agencies and embassies, Laura reached out to the appropriate people at her office and got yet another contradictory set of information. It also caused a spotlight to be shined on us from the great heights of an international corporate legal department. It turns out that Our visa renewal was not directly tied to the criminal background check. It was just a case of both needing to be redone at the same time, so all of the letters went out the same day. We received our new visa with an expiration date of... April 2018, which was a problem. It turned out to be nothing more than a typo. Someone entered the wrong date into a form somewhere. We visited the Kreisburo on Friday and they were apologetic and embarrassed. It's uncommon to see those things here, especially from the normally quite competent government officials. Apparently, the problem had already been detected and new visas were on the way. The cor...

Musical score for this post: I've been in Switzerland for nearly two years, and my visa expires next month. I have to get a different kind of visa, which basically means doing all of the paperwork over again. The big problem: US bureaucracy. To renew my visa, I need to provide a letter from my government showing that I'm not a criminal. In most countries, that's a relatively simple process. But in the US: The FBI website says that I have two options: I can submit a paper form, or I can apply online. The website for applying online doesn't work. It gives an error as soon as I try to connect. Both the paper form and the electronic form require a copy of your fingerprints on an FBI fingerprint card. How do you get fingerprints? Just drop by your local FBI field office. Where's the nearest field office? Boston. After contacting the US embassy, they told me that the Swiss police can make fingerprints for me, but I need to bring a printout of the FBI fingerpri...

One of the key concepts behind network security is segmentation. In short, if two devices don't need to talk to each other, they shouldn't be allowed to talk to each other. That way, if one device causes problems, you can contain it and keep the problem from spreading to other devices. These days, many home WiFi routers include a "Guest WiFi" network. To use this, you create a separate WiFi network with a separate password, and your guests use that. There are a few reasons to do this: You can create a really good, really long password for your "real" network, and a short password that you change every time you have company over. Most routers keep the devices on the guest network separate not just from the main network, but from each other. This means that if one of your guests has a phone or laptop with a virus on it, everyone else is (relatively) safe. I realized, though, that there's a different, and perhaps better way to use this guest netw...