Guerre civile en Belgique...

New edition out!

The third edition of the DIY Expat Guide is out, with a significant number of updates on laws that have changed over the past couple of months. We'll be putting out another update at the end of December with details on how various European countries are implementing the EU's Permanent Residency Directive. In practical terms, this is the legislation which allows permit holders to move around most of the European Union with a minimum of paperwork and hassle.

I thought summer was supposed to be hot

Where has July gone? It's been so rainy and cold that it seems like later in the year.

Bad weather or no, there are more immigration reforms in the works. Belgium has added some beneficial regulations, Sweden is talking about some reforms and even France is fleshing out regulations passed last year. I'll be putting together a separate publication that should go up quite soon with some of the legal changes that we've noticed or that are slated to come up in the near future.

I've spent most of the month straightening out some of the writing wrinkles in the DIYExpat Guide and a couple of the other publications which we have. Those changes go up this weekend.

... and don't forget that subscribers can download these new editions for free! (It's one of the benefits of the subscription model that we use.)

We quietly changed a number of the country pages, adding more info...

Major Update

We've been busy at work on the website and behind the scenes, and a major update is in the works.

If you haven't read about the HP zd8000 laptop, it's a great machine, but some have said that it runs hot.... so hot that some of its innerds actually melt. Currently I have a dead one, and it seems to have suffered exactly this fate.

Readers have been telling us that there's nothing out there like this, but that some passages need clarifying or an additional bit of explaining. Why mention this on the weblog? Because it's one of the reasons why we chose for a business model that allows our readers to download later versions too.

Sarko v Bat Boy

Putting the final touches on the commercial side of DIY Expat this weekend, I managed to unwittingly take everything offline for 36 hours with a badly configured access file. Ah fun fun.

Speaking of fun, Nicholas Sarkozy has won the presidential elections in France. Sarkozy pushed through immigration reforms which favor talented non-EU citizens, and one of his electoral promises is to lower taxes.

Definitely keep an eye on the electoral coverage there if you're thinking of movig to Europe.

The French paper Canard Echaine (cartoon above) makes him (the new French president) look a bit like Bat Boy of Weekly World News fame.