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...

I'm living in a place that's known for it's cheese. There are hundreds of kinds of cheese at my local grocery store. I try something different every time I go shopping, and I've still barely scratched the surface of what's available. There's one kind of cheese that deserves special mention: Raclette . Raclette is strange for a few different reasons. Most notably, it's almost always served cooked, and there's a bit of a ritual around cooking it. You will never be offered raw raclette. Why? Raw raclette is pungent stuff. It's hard to describe the smell, but I've heard it described as a cross between sweat socks, vomit, and curdled milk. To say that it stinks is a polite understatement. So, why on earth would anyone eat it? Because when you cook it, you somehow cook the stink out of it, and what's left is sublime. It's a sort of oily cheese, and you get something like the best pizza or nacho cheese you've ever had. I've hea...

Last year was our first year in Switzerland. Christmas fell on a Sunday. Everything closed early on Saturday (Christmas Eve) and everything was closed on Monday, but I assumed that they were just giving people an alternate day off. This year, Christmas fell on Monday, and everything was closed on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Hmm. It turns out that some parts of Switzerland, including Zürich, celebrate Saint Stephen's Day (Stephanstag) on the day after Christmas. It's a bit odd for a Protestant Canton to be celebrating a saint's day, but Saint Stephen was a bit of an odd saint. I suspect that it's celebrated more as an extension to Christmas than as its own holiday, but a day off is a day off.

People who work in security, particularly in computer security, get a bad reputation for paranoia and for always saying no. Some of those reasons are deserved, and some aren't. Security people tend to be more aware than most of the people around them of the potential consequences of omitting some security controls. They also tend to be more aware of how often security problems cause bigger problems like lost money, lost customer information, etc. But, the accusations against security people are also often true. Security people do have a paranoid streak. Sometimes, they get so caught up in what could go wrong that they neglect the advantages if things go right. "This could cost us a million dollars!" is a concern, but if it's something that will make billions of dollars, that might just be okay. To deal with this conflict, most organizations have come to rely on some sort of threat modeling. I've talked about it before, but in a nutshell, you think about way...

So, the US Congress is talking about taxes again, and as always, everybody's trying to cut taxes for their donors without pissing off everyone else too much. I was curious about the effects on the bottom line of a tax increase, so I went looking for some data. I should be clear here. I'm not an expert in any of the relevant subjects: economics, statistics, policy, etc. I just wanted to understand what it means when they talk about cutting taxes for one group by a few percent. How much does that affect everyone else. We know that poor people don't have money to spare. Rich people do. On the other hand, there are a lot more poor people than there are rich people. Put another way, 1% of Bill Gates' income could pay off a lot of debt, but there's only one of him. 1% of an ordinary person's income wouldn't pay off much debt, but there are lots more normal people. So, how does it balance out? I found this really useful Wikipedia link showing the number of ...