A few days ago I posted how much I love my Mac. Well, the next day the power supply to my laptop literal fried. A replacement is waiting for me in Miami right now and Miami-Box should deliver on Friday so all will be good in the world again.

The good thing about having this happen on a Mac is that I have a .mac (www.mac.com) account. My laptop continuously and automatically backed up my contacts, calendar, passwords, to-dos, etc. All I had to do was log into my Mac mini, enter my .mac info, and I was up and running again. I did have to install some software on the mini that I didn’t have on the laptop but that’s just a minor inconvenience. If I didn’t have my .mac account being without my laptop for two weeks would have been absolute hell.

I few days before my laptop went on a much earned vacation I was in the process of removing Entourage (Microsoft’s Mac version of Outlook) from my computer. Somehow in the transfer a bunch of my Yahoo! email was lost so if anyone’s written me to any of my other emails (other than ibmikey@mac.com) and I haven’t respond it’s probably because either Yahoo! and/or Entourage ate your message or it’s sitting in one of the folders on my laptop that I didn’t transfer via .mac. Anyway, I I owe you a response please write again.

Kind of related to this whole technology transition / mishap . . . A gringa who lives an hour east of Montevideo had emailed me. I don’t like to use people’s names on my blog without their express permission so let’s just call her TT. When I didn’t respond to her email after a couple of days she tried again. I’m glad she did! TT lives with a friend, VV, in an adorable old cottage. Last night they invited JP and me over for some wine and good conversation. It was a great time! TT, thank you for being persistent and not thinking that I was blowing you off by not responding to your first email (which I still can’t find anywhere!). TT and VV are both such wonderful people. Being able to make friends such as them through this blog is an incredible thing.

As far as posting photos . . . I’m falling behind. My photo processing software is on my laptop along with some photos that I want to post here. The rest are still in my camera. Once my laptop is back from its vacation I’ll get caught up with some photo posts.

When I left the motherland I had no set plans for working when I arrived in Uruguay. This may sound strange to some for an atheist to say but I felt that something would find me. I’ve been working on a project that I believe is the thing that found me. By starting this blog I got interested in other technologies that are available on the Internet. The Open-Source community is huge and the amount of quality programs available is mind blowing. Over the past month or so I’ve been doing hours and hours of research. I’m working on a Web project (with JP’s assistance as he’s studying for philosophy exams and doesn’t have as much free time as I do).

I’m going to keep the project details a bit of a mystery for now. I will say that I’ve narrowed down most of the technology that I’ll be using and I’ve bought my domain names. In the next five or six weeks I’m going to be working overtime getting the skeleton of my creation in place. When I start fleshing it out with content I’ll share more details on here my blog. One thing I will say is that I’ll be moving off of Blogger. If anybody has this page bookmarked as amavericko.blogspot.com please update your bookmarks to www.amavericko.com.

One last hint about my project. It is not Uruguay-specific. The best sources of information on Uruguay are Uruguay Living and a couple of the other blogs I have in my links section in the right column of this page. If you want some financial advice mixed in with some outrageously funny stories read FuBarrio’s blog.

Some people have asked me for an update on my visa situation. Nothing much to report. I’m here legally (thankfully) and am waiting on two things. The first was the civil registry wouldn’t accept the copy of my birth certificate since it did not list my parents’ names. I sent for another official copy from the mother land and that has arrived so we just have to have it translated and submit it to the civil registry so they can issue my Uruguayan birth certificate.

The second paperwork we’re waiting on is my FBI statement of no criminal record. I had it done before I left the motherland (went to the local Seattle police, got fingerprinted, and sent the request to the FBI). What I didn’t do was have the Uruguayan consulate legalize it before leaving the USA. That’s being done now. Once these two minor issues are taken care of I will receive my official cedula, or national ID card.

I posted the following as a reply to a comment on one of my earlier posts. I’m including it here since others may be interested.

Sorry for taking so long to respond to your comment. There is a different class of visa for investors (anyone who invests over US$100,000 either in real estate or by opening an account at the Bank of the Republic). I believe there are benefits to that class of visa but I’m not sure what they are exactly. One thing I’ve heard is that you’re able to import a car tax free which with my type of visa, rentista, (income from outside of the country) I’d have to pay some huge tax on the import of a car. Plus with the investor’s visa there are restrictions on what you can do with that $100,000 for x number of years. The rentista visa process here isn’t really too complicated and the government doesn’t deny visas arbitrarily. They do want all of the paperwork to be in order which is why I used a visa consultant (highly recommended if you are not fluent in Spanish).