Passport/Visa Rant

I've been listening to the news and then looking at the web after reading flyingsauce's post yesterday about US immigration rules.

I was under the impression that they wanted us all to have machine readable passports - which most people will have now, as its what the little red ones mostly are. I got a new one last year so that, I thought was that.

Now I find out that they want passports with a machine readable picture and fingerprints, something the UK will not be able to issue until after the deadline.

*sigh*

Does this special relationship work anything other than one way?

I can see a trip to the US embassy in my future and that's not something I would want to do often. If it does happen I'll be needing liquid support soon after.

In other news...

The problem with the car looks almost certain to be a broken cooling fan. I just hope that the rain water I had to use for the cooling system doesn't do anything lasting.

Machine Readable Passports

Hmmm... the plot thickens, I've been looking into this.

Checking the BA site, the US government site and a couple of others, they define a Machine Readable Passport as one which is in a standard international format with 2 lines of OCR data on the picture page.

This is essentially what has been issued in the UK for quite a while. So I'm not sure what the BBC are making a fuss about. Checking the airline sites, they make it clear that a modern passport issued in the last couple of years will surfice.

The question is, will they start fingerprinting Visa Waiver passengers too.

Answer: Probably.

It might just be easier to get a Visa.

Things that make you go hmmm?

Watch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy last night, or rather M watched it and I played on the PC.

They introduced this radical "French Press" coffee machine. Oh, I thought its a Cafetiere.

Why oh why change the name???