Six days away from the office certainly took a toll. I still haven't quite caught up, but finally have a little time to blog again.

The trip back East was nice, but Ness and I returned with wicked colds. The AMC meetings were extremely interesting. I've always had a lot of respect for that group, but meeting them in person deepens that conviction. I was able to meet a lot of the names I've seen in AMC circles for years, like David Wells and Elgin Johnston, as well as see old friends like Harold Reiter, Doug Faires, and Susan Schwartz Wildstrom, and some new friends like Steve Dunbar, Ravi Vakil, and Dave Savitt. More on the AMC meeting later.

For now, I have a fresh rant close to mind.

About a year ago, we decided to look for someone to join us at AoPS. While poking around the web, I found XXXX's website, so I wrote him and asked if he was interested in joining us. He wasn't, since he was heading to a financial firm in New York City for a career in finance. As you all know, we ended up finding Dave Patrick a little later (the folks at SET sent an email to their alumni list and Dave responded).

A few weeks ago, we decided to look for another person to join us. I hadn't yet started looking avidly, but was thinking about pinging XXXX and seeing if he was considering leaving finance. But before I wrote him, he wrote me indicating that he was leaving finance and interested in joining us. So, after talking with him, looking at his work, and receiving glowing recommendations (including one from the aforementioned Ravi Vakil), we offered XXXX a position. (I've replaced the name with XXXX since he hasn't left his current job yet, and I don't know if they know he's leaving.)

So, we're excited about having XXXX join us. Now for the rant. XXXX is not an American citizen. So, we'll have to go through the visa process. We also have to do this with Valentin, who will join us in CA next year. Unfortunately, in the US, while we have zillions of people coming in every day, it is extremely hard to get an intelligent, highly qualified person into the country to work. There's this visa called an H1B visa, but there are very few of them. They start giving out H1B's every year in October and run out of them within a few weeks now (maybe a couple months).

I became painfully aware of the H1B issue back in 1998 when three of the four people working for me at Shaw were deported to our London office because our HR department didn't take care of their H1Bs, but all the H1Bs were gone for that Oct-Oct year. So, I had to wait from May or so until October to get those people back. One of them decided to go back to grad school (mainly for unrelated reasons). As an aside, my fourth report took six months off to party on the beaches of Spain (good move, Seager - that was a rough six months), so I was pretty swamped that year.

So in a couple days I start up with this visa garbage again. More work for the lawyers, sigh. I'm optimistic that it won't be too hard to get XXXX here because he's already working in the US. Valentin is another story, but it's good that we start working on his visa over a year in advance.

Yet another sign of the brilliance of US government - making it exceedingly hard for intelligent people with technical experience to come to this country. Of course, after a couple weeks of being flooded with news of Bush's/Congress's involvement in the Schiavo case and Congressional hearings on steroids in baseball hardly need yet another example of foolishness in government.

(Sidebar rant: After a few days in a house with cable TV, I came away *very* happy that we don't have it at our house. As the TV ran and ran more and more garbage about Schiavo case, I could hear brain cells dying all over the country. It even caused my parents, who are Fox News 24/7 type people, to turn the TV off. At least until the tournament started.)