Moved to Australia with a Permanent Resident Visa

I did not mention on my blog as to what was going to happen after I moved back to Sri Lanka from Japan. Now you know. I decided to move to Australia.

Why? I have my own reasons, which I do not wish to talk in this post. I will address that topic on a later day. More than anything else, I need to convince myself that I made the right decision.

This post is about the whole story of applying and getting the PR. It is quite a bit of a long read though.

The start

We, obviously, applied for the Australian Permanent Residency while we were in Japan. We applied through Skilled Migration. The whole process started in April 2014, not too long after my kid was born.

I was first going to go through an agent, because I did not want to mess it up. My friend Saman referred me to the agent he used. I talked with him, but there were some issues that I was afraid of which might pop up half way through. The main problem with using an agent is that as he does everything on behalf of us, we have to send him money to his account using some way. We cannot pay him via a credit card, and Japanese banks aren't that easy to deal with. Heck, sending money back to Sri Lanka is a pain, and there are large bank charges to deal with. I could send money to my dad using my NRFC account, and then give him LKR, but it is too much work. But that was probably the way to do it.

But that's when I contacted one of my senior colleagues who had also moved to Australia. She told me that there was no reason to use an agent; everything can be done online, and she had documented the whole process; which was almost identical to mine. Almost, because she did not have to take her family as she was single. However, this not only could saved me some time & money, but I could actually use my credit card to pay for everything. So I decided to drop the agent. He was not too happy about it, as he had to devote some of his precious time to discuss matters with me, and I was not paying him for his time. Well, it was unfortunate and I wish it did not have to happen that way. If he could have suggested me a reasonable way to send the money, I would have still gone with the agent. I hope I did not cause too much of a loss to him anyway.

Skill Evaluation

The first thing I did next was to apply for Skill evaluation. As I had work experience in the field of Software Engineering, I decided to apply as a Software Engineer. To get the skills evaluated, I had to apply to the Australian Computer Society or ACS. They didn't reduce any points for my education as I have an IT degree as well. Even then, the Engineering degree from the University of Moratuwa probably would have qualified fully, as it had many modules in the ICT field. It took about 3 months to receive their evaluation results. This cost me about JPY 50,000. Sadly, they only approved me as skilled for 4 years. You get 5 points for 3 years, 10 points for 5 years and 15 points for 8 years. So I got only 5 points for my skills.

What happened to Logitech Z623 speakers

Remember that I had the Logitech Z623 speaker set when I was in Japan. Do you want to know what happened to them? Its fate was decided the same way I decided the fate of a lot of hardware, whenever I wanted to upgrade: Auction!

Bringing them along with me to Sri Lanka was not feasible for the following reasons.

• It was huge and heavy. There was no way I could have brought it back with me without using sea cargo. We decided not to use sea cargo, because it was cheaper to replace everything with new items than to ship used parts, especially considering the complexities that would arise early this year, which you will learn in the near future I suppose.
• The speakers only supported 100V power from the mains. I could have used a step down transformer, but it is not an elegant solution. It adds more cost.
• It has that issue with the power button. The culprit appears to be the inconsistent contact between the leads in the power switch. Sadly, access to the power switch is difficult, but I am sure I would be able to fix it with the help of my dad. Still, there was a little doubt that it would completely resolve the issue.
• This was I get to try out something new in the coming months. I hate rotting with the same gear for too long. This was that opportunity to upgrade.

I had it listed up on

Rakuten Auction for a while, but nobody wanted to buy it.Perhaps, Japanese people are more interested in smaller, Japanese made speakers. So I had to drop the price all the way down to JPY 2,500 but I made the buyer pay for shipping. Finally someone placed a bit. I had made up my mind to give it away to a friend, if nobody wanted to bid for it. Luckily, I didn't have to go there.

The sad thing is though, the speakers are very good and strong. And it would cost a fortune to own those speakers in Sri Lanka. In fact, the prices of it in Japan has also gone up by 50% or so since I bought it. It could be due to the drop of value of Japanese currency, but it is quite an old product. I had it for 3 years too.

Luckily, the SoundPEATS QY7 was not a Humpty Dumpty

On last Friday, when I was about to leave the house for work, a tragic accident occurred. I had my SoundPEATS QY7 earbuds in one hand and they got entangled with my right shoe when I bent down to tie my shoes, and the right earbud got snapped. It broke into several pieces. I picked up what I could see and put them in my backpack and left the house because it was getting too late. (Gah, I forgot to take photos again!!!)

In the bus, I got a seat and I assessed the situation. Luckily the wire connections were intact; however, there were some pieces missing. And I wasn't sure if I would be able to put it back together. To make things even worse, a woman in her middle age demanded my seat and since I know how ugly their mouths can get, I gave it away reluctantly. I had to stand the whole way for 90 minutes.

It was a horrible day. I had nothing to do while commuting. That's about 4 hrs total without nothing to do, thanks to our super road system. I could have surfed the Internet on my phone, but looking at the screen makes me nauseous, this time due to the ride being so rough: braking and switching tracks frequently.

I actually found out that I could play Real Racing 3, which I installed to check how good the work of devs of Fire Monkeys Studios was, but it didn't go well again due to the rough ride - I cannot how a steady line on the track, not to mention sticking to the racing line. So I just looked outside the shutters thinking about various things.