AgentK: My near future

As I had posted some days ago already: My wife Diane and myself have been granted with the status of permanent residents in New Zealand.

We’ve got a bunch of good wishes and congratulations for this via this blog or by email directly and the big question was what’s going to happen in the future.

Well, let’s start with some basic observations:

1. Permanent resident means: to live somewhere permanently 😉

Pretty easy, hmmm? Obviously we’re going to move down to New Zealand. In theory we would have a timespan of about 6 months from now on to do that (better said: to enter the country on the PR visa for the first time), but we’re supposed to leave Germany on December 4th, 2005. That will result in a date of arrival in New Zealand of December 6th, 2005 due to some very strange timezone issues… Our routing is to fly via the USA – the travel takes a bit longer but one is allowed to check 2 pieces of luggage 32kg each instead of 1 piece of 20 kg via Asia.

BTW: Being a permanent resident doesn’t mean to quit the German citizenship and to take the New Zealand citizenship. That’s a totally different issue/process and we couldn’t do that within the next 5 years anyway – even if we wanted.

2. Living in New Zealand means to quit jobs

I’ve given notice with my current employer already some while ago, because Diane and I got a one year work permit already some months ago. So we would have gone to NZ anyway for at least that particular one year. My last day at work with msg at.NET will be November 24th, 2005.

This is somewhat strage, I mean – I’ve been with them for nearly 5 years and a pretty important part of my life is going to end quite soon. We’ve done a bunch of really good projects and achieved a lot of stuff together in the Macromedian hemisphere, thanks for that guys!

3. Living in New Zealand means to start a new job

What would I be without the possibility to work with Macromedia technologies 😉 ?

Given that, I’m going to start with the guys at Zero One Ltd. in Wellington, the wonderful capital of New Zealand as a digital solutions architect. ZeroOne is a Macromedia Alliance Partner delivering great work all over New Zealand. By now, they had focussed on CF, Flash and Microsoft technologies and we’re going to extend this way further into the areas of Flex, Macromedia training and consulting business.

Guys, I’m really looking forward to join your team pretty soon and to get an idea of how the internet business works in Asia-Pacific!

4. Living in New Zealand doesn’t mean to stop blogging

As Agent M and Agent K we’ve decided not to change anything in terms of blogging. M promised to increase his efforts posting stuff a bit 😉 and besides that nothing is gonna change. Oh no, that’s not true: there is a new category “New Zealand” which I’ll use to write a bit about NZ, my new work etc.

As the both of us tried to keep really business-related stuff about our employer etc. out of this blog, we don’t expect issues with that in the future.

5. Why all that?

That’s pretty easy: New Zealand is a wonderful country with wonderful people. Loving both Australia and New Zealand and having enjoyed them several times, the decision was not to hard to try to get down there for at least a while. After some investigation (which would go way too far to explain here) we decided to give it a try with New Zealand which – from today’s perspective – seemed to be a great decision, as at least the visa stuff and getting a job worked out very well. Both my wife and myself didn’t enjoy living in Germany that much anymore, so we needed to try something new urgently.

6. What about mailing lists, conferences etc? 😉

We’re working in the internet business, right? That means we’re having skype and email and IMs to stay in touch. NZ is not the end of the world (well….. technically it is pretty much antipodian from a European point of view, but…) – so you could be sure that you’re going to continue hearing from me. I’ll probably be around a bit more on the cfaussie mailing list and my presence on cf-discussion might decrease due to the time lag, but that’s just a guess right now…

I’m going to be at next years webDU (the former MXDU) conference in Sydney – so whoever is travelling over there from Europe please make sure to make a stop at the house of Dianes dad to pick up some of our belongings to bring there 😉

And that’s it for now. Expect some more posts about all that in the future – probably in December when we’re going to be in NZ already and have settled down a bit.