Kim has passed her PMP exam !

In all the excitement I forgot to post that Kim has managed to pass her PMP exam with flying colors ! She studied hard to get her PMP diploma and she is now in possession of a strong arsenal of Project Management certificates. Together with her Prince2 and Itil certifications, this new PMP certificate will no doubt prove very valuable when she starts up her own consultancy business in Australia. I'm very happy and I am very proud of her.

The big question : Which city to move to ?

So, here's a question that we have been asking ourselves for a while : Which city do we move to ? Both Kim and me are quite sure we want a change in our life. Also we want a nicer ( read : more sunny ) lifestyle than we have had in Europe. We understand that the sun always shines, the problem is the clouds, and in The Netherlands there are plenty of clouds. Escaping from the cloudy, gloomy weather pattern is thus a must and I have come up with two cities that tick most of our boxes.

Perth :



Brisbane :



Overall, I think it's clear that both of these cities have a lot of sunshine all year round. Perth can get hotter than Brisbane in the summer but then again Perth is dryer ( and a bit more windy ) than Brisbane, so people say Perth 'feels' different than Brisbane. So overall Perth seems to win the climate side of things ( only marginally though ). The downside of Perth is that the city is the most remote city in the world, the closest 'real city' nearby is something like 5 hours flying.
People say that Perth is a nice , clean city, organized and there is not a lot of traffic ( obviously due to the fact that the nearest town is located at 5 hours flight ). Brisbane on the other hand is located near the Sunshine Coast and the Gold Coast, very lively area's of Australia ( also very popular tourist area's -- and those are the ones we want to get away from ).

Here's a guy with a clear opinion about Perth :

"My name is Jumbo Celcius. I fell asleep on a plane and woke up in 1973. Was I mad, or in a coma or just in Perth?"

We got our Visa grant letter !

Dear Mr xxxx,
I am pleased to advise that your application for a Class VE, subclass 175 Skilled - Independent
visa was approved on xxxxxx April 2009 and visas granted to the following applicants:

WOW !.. Couldn't believe it when the mail came in. The complete letter is quite big and although the title said "grant" I made sure to read the whole letter before I told Kim. Tears of happiness !
So this is really it : We're now Australian permanent residents ! We can finally start moving forwards again ! Our lives have been on hold ( well... we both got loads of certificates in the meantime ) for about a year now. We don't see it as a lost year but it certainly feels good to be able to plan ahead again. We stopped buying clothes, stopped subscriptions etc because we would end up having to throw them out when we would go to Australia.

One-way ticket to Brisbane ?... or Perth ?... Sydney perhaps ?... We're not sure yet, but our visa allows us to settle wherever we want ! One thing is for sure : We want a change, we want nice weather : No more clouds. We will visit some towns when we arrive in Australia and make our decision where to settle on our gut feelings. My gut feeling (and my research) says we'll end up either in Perth or in Brisbane, but I have been wrong before. For all we know we might end up in Cairns / Darwin or Sydney !

I found a nifty little device called a Campbell-Stokes recorder. On this page you can find a LOT of information about Australian weather. It even includes 'sunshine maps' ! Ofcourse the yearly average is pretty useless, but the monthly averages are helpful. You can see that Brisbane has a lot of sun all over, and Perth has a lot of sun too but maybe a little bit too much in January / February. It seems that Brisbane is more 'temperately warm all over'. You guessed it : I did a lot of research , and Brisbane is my #1 , Perth my #2. For work conditions we would be better off in Melbourne / Sydney but we pretty much concluded that if we move , we really want a change : This includes climate. If we move to Melbourne we might as well stay in Europe.

But like I said before nothing has been decided and the decision is not only mine to make, and perhaps when we get physically there we might hate the place ( this happened to us before when we visited San Diego ).

First CCVP exam completed !

And with a whopping score of 976/1000 it's a another pass ! This exam dealed with the concepts of Quality of Service ( QoS ). QoS provides guaranteed bandwidth to delay-sensitive traffic such as Voice at the expense of other less sensitive traffic. Now this might seem like an easy concept , and quite honestly : I agree ! It's pure logic and this is where I excel. 1+1 = 2 : I like logic. Most people think this is the hardest exam of the whole CCVP path, so I feel happy to have passed the exam with such relative ease. Next module is called CVoice and handles most of the hardware part of VoIP.
I need to keep the pace up because Australia is just around the corner. Before we know it we'll be over there !

EDIT : Just an edit to say that Lex ( soon to be known as Alex ) has passed all the remaining CCVP exams and thus is now CCVP Certified !

Thinking about where to settle

Kim and I have been thinking about where we would like to settle in Australia. There are many places to go to and every place has it's charms and it's perks. Currently Brisbane looks favorable. We initially planned to go to Sydney but most of the IT jobs there have been outsourced to cheaper countries and reading on forums has made us realize that although Sydney is big and has a lot of jobs, it also has a lot of people applying for these jobs. Brissie seems to become a
'technology centre' which would mean loads of work for us techies.

Luckily we found a map that might help us make the right choice :