Imablog

Back in April my wife, Connie, went to Rome for 3 weeks for Easter and the canonization of two popes.

Four months later, she’s “live” blogging each day of her trip. For her, it was a pretty amazing trip. She got to experience a lot of Rome, and visit a lot of places with historic and Catholic significance. There are also lots of neat pictures too.

She’s half-way through her trip now. Head on over and follow her along on her journey.

• My Rome Trip Report, 4 months later — Day 0
• Lido di Ostia — Rome Day 1
• Moving from the Beach into Rome — Rome Day 2
• Pantheon, Protests, and a Papal Basilica — Rome Day 3
• Defeated by Jet Lag — Rome Day 4
• A Tour of St. Paul’s Outside the Walls — Rome Day 5
• A Peek at St. Peter’s, Hail, and Italian Food Cliches — Rome Day 6
• Wednesday General Audience with Pope Francis — Rome Day 7
• The Spanish Steps and Holy Thursday in Rome — Rome Day 8
• Scala Santa, Pharmacies in Rome, and the Way of the Cross with Pope Francis — Rome Day 9
• A Sick Day with Severe Weather: Holy Saturday in Rome — Rome Day 10
• Easter Sunday Mass with Pope Francis — Rome Day 11
• San Giovanni in Laterano, Trastevere, Basilica Santa Cecilia — Rome Day 12
• Back to the Beach, St. Peter in Chains, and Rome Feels Like Home — Rome Day 13
• Campo de’ Fiori, Piazza Navona, and Wandering through Rome — Rome Day 14
• The Vatican Grottoes, the Vatican Necropolis, and the Tomb of St. Peter — Rome Day 15
• A Rest Day before the Canonization Weekend — Rome Day 16
• The Day Before the Canonizations of John XXIII and John Paul II — Rome Day 17
• The Canonizations of Pope Saint John XXIII and Pope Saint John Paul the Great — Rome Day 18
• Last Day in Rome before Going to Vienna — Rome Day 19
• Bonus Day in Vienna, Austria — Rome Trip Day 20
• Going Home after an Amazing Trip — Rome Trip Day 21

A few months ago, around the end of May, I decided to put in my application to become a US citizen. There’s a big long form you have to fill out, but it exists as a fillable PDF, which makes things a lot easier.

My path to becoming a US citizen was through having had permanent resident status for at least 5 years.

Based on my permanent resident application experience, I expected to have to wait at least a few months after sending in my application before hearing anything. The whole process of me becoming a permanent resident took almost 2.5 years, so I wasn’t expecting the citizenship process to be a short one.

Much to my surprise, a couple weeks later I received a letter notifying me that my biometrics appointment (fingerprinting and photographing) would be in early July, a little over a month after sending in my application. Fortunately, I was able to get the biometrics stuff done here in Charleston instead of having to travel to Charlotte like last time.

I was even more surprised when just a couple of weeks after the biometrics appointment, I received a notice telling me I would have my interview today. Compared to my permanent resident application, this citizenship thing was moving at lightning speed.

Part of the process includes having to answer a number of civics questions. You have to answer 6 out of 10 questions correctly to pass. The questions aren’t that difficult, but some of them are the kind that if you know too much, you might get them wrong.

I arrived at the USCIS office in plenty of time for my interview appointment. After going through security, I had a seat in a very crowded waiting room. It was much more crowded today than when I was there for my biometrics appointment. Turned out most of the people were there for their naturalization oath ceremony. There were about a dozen or so people plus their families there to take their oath to become a US citizen. It was a bit of a sneak preview for me.

After waiting for a little while, I was called back for my interview pretty much on time. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the interview process, so I was a little bit nervous. After putting me under oath, the interview started with verifying my identity and then the civics test. The first question caught me a little off guard and took me a little bit to dig the answer out of my head, but after that I was good. After getting the first 6 questions correct, the test was over (no point in continuing if you only have to get 6/10 to pass).

After that, the rest of the interview consisted of going through the application form and being asked questions from the form, while I was under oath. A few questions about the various parts of the Oath of Allegiance and if I understood what it meant, and that was the interview. I signed a bunch of forms, got a sheet of paper telling me I passed (Form N-652 Naturalization Interview Results) and went back out to the waiting area.

The people who had gone back for the naturalization oath ceremony were just starting to come out, and I saw them carrying their naturalization certificates and a little American flag. After a few minutes, I was given a sheet of paper telling me when to come back for my own naturalization oath ceremony.

So, in 6 weeks, on September 30, I will become a US citizen. We’ll be going out that evening to celebrate somewhere, and you’re welcome to join in. I’ll be posting those plans later.

I’ve been using My Backup Pro for a while now, on my Galaxy S2 and now the Nexus 5. Lets me schedule regularly occuring backups, and it’s done a good job at saving me from intentional and unintended hardware resets.

With the S2, I can have My Backup save the backup files to the SD card which is pretty handy. I configured the camera app to store photos to the SD card as well, and got into the habit of copying other files to the SD card on a quasi-regular basis for backup. Every now and then I’d pop the card out and copy the contents of the SD card onto my desktop for “off-site” backup.

Since the SD card stays untouched during a hardware reset, restoring the phone is relatively simple. Just reinstall apps from the Play store and restore data from the SD card.

The Nexus 5 doesn’t have external SD card storage, so I’m going to have to change my habits a bit. WIthout the safety net of the SD card, if the Nexus 5 needs to be wiped, the backups go along with it (which I ran into yesterday). My Backup Pro can also backup to “the cloud”, but I’m not terribly interested in putting my backups there.

Fortunately, the Nexus 5 connects to the desktop more reliably than my S2 when I plug in the USB cable, so I’ll just have to get into the habit of copying data off the Nexus 5 onto my desktop whenever I plug it in.

I was in the middle of playing some Ingress out on Folly Beach today when my Nexus 5 suddenly started acting crazy with random phantom touches on the screen. Things were moving, menus were activating and all kinds of weird things going on without me touching the screen at all. Very strange, making me wonder what the heck was going on. I wiped off the screen to make sure it wasn’t drops of water or sweat messing things up, but no luck. The phone was pretty much useless and I didn’t want to stand around outside in the hot trying to troubleshoot, so I headed back home.

After getting back home and going through some routine troubleshooting steps (power down, cold boot, a couple of hard resets, all of which aren’t that easy to accomplish when your phone is going nuts and not responding to screen touches), I decided that perhaps some kind of hardware corruption had occurred.

I put in a call to the Google Support line and after waiting on hold for a few minutes, was connected to a very pleasant sounding lady. I described the problem and my own troubleshooting steps, and one of the things she asked was if I had a screen protector on the phone. I told her there was one, but it had been working just fine with the screen protector on earlier and didn’t think that would be the cause of the problem. Since her troubleshooting steps were pretty much the same as what I had already done, she put me on hold to process a replacement order and exchange.

While on hold, I started messing with the screen protector to get some small annoying dust bits out, and figured I might as well take off the screen protector just to see what would happen. I wasn’t expecting that taking it off would make any difference at all. Much to my surprise, the phone started working again and responding to my screen touches.

Upon closer inspection of the screen protector, it looked like a tiny bit of moisture (probably from my sweaty fingers on the phone while playing Ingress) had wicked into one of the small dust bubbles near the edge of the screen. That was apparently enough to cause the phone to read all kinds of random screen touch activity. Once that little bit of trapped moisture was gone, everything was just fine.

So with that, I think I learned a bit of a troubleshooting lesson, which I should have already known: never discount even the seemingly trivial possibilities.

Now for the laborious process of restoring the phone.