[OFF] Settling down in the UK (England) from India

It was quite a whirlwind ride for me to get settled finally in the UK after being offered to do so around in late November 2021. My employer, Apple, helped me a lot and frankly it has been so smooth for me so far since the 4 months that I landed here. The VISA process took around 1 month and after coming here I was able to get a rented apartment, bought a car on finance, got a credit card, setup my apartment and got my booster COVID-19 shot!

Some of the absolute essentials that folks who have moved to the UK with a job must have and are different from how it works in India -

1. Renting an apartment. The process of renting here is very transparent and the deposit is held with a Deposit Protection Service, so it's never a unilateral decision of not paying back the deposit held. I'm looking at you Bangalore land-lords!

2. SIM card - Of course, one of the first things you need to survive in the UK is phone number. You can get one from the airport, unlike in India, you don't need to provide your Adhaar or Voter ID card for this (or any form of ID, you can get it in a vending machine)! Any provider is fine, do check if they have 5G.

share keyboard mouse across 2 or more laptops

 In my last work place - ClearedIn, I had a strange problem of having too many laptops. Initially I started off working on a beautiful Acer Laptop (Aspire 5) with Windows 10 installed but then soon realized the laptop is of no use when doing a lot of computation tasks, i.e., joining a video call on teams when chatting on slack and simultaneously working on code. So I got another laptop - hp Pavilion this time, which was way better than the Acer one. However now I had a problem, I had 2 laptops and I wanted to use both at the same time.

I was using 2 keyboards and 2 mice. It was a pretty messy situation, but I did feel very important! Now when I had to take a break on my personal laptop, which is by the way a Lenovo Thinkpad p52 running Windows, I had another set of keyboard and mouse. Now don't forget the monitors too. I was in a mess.

[OFF] 2022 - for good or for worse

It's 2022, two years since the outbreak of COVID-19 global pandemic, which has now subsided into an endemic in various countries.

There is a lot that happened in the last 2 years that hasn't happened in a 100 years, and there's something else that we thought would never happen in a long long time, especially after World War II and the massive repercussion that had on the world. Well, Russia, one of the super-powers of the world, invaded Ukraine - a neighbouring country that was created after USSR was broken down in 1991. The term that Russia uses as a replacement of invasion is "Military Operation".

Amidst all of the terrible news going around the world, 2021 / 2022 hasn't been too bad for me personally. After a brief period of joblessness post COVID in 2020 I got a job with an US based startup, ClearedIn, such that I was able to work from home for the next couple of years.