Renting in London

It's absolutely crazy over here - I have finally found something half-decent but having to pay over 300 GBP per week! The area is very nice though - I'll try and post some pictures once we move in (likely to be 30th August)

In hiding??

Someone accused me today of being in hiding - so, in response, I took the somewhat extreme step of putting my mobile number in her scrapbook - I'll probably regret it later, but in the meantime, it should be an intersting test of how spam-proof Orkut is.

Water, water everywhere ...

Seventy two hours and three engineer visits later, we now have lukewarm water - hurrah! (Yes, I'm a bitter, bitter man)

Still, I have 2 20" TFT monitors in beautiful dual display setup to compensate for the lousy acco (and loads of free food to boot) Unfortunately, they have loaded Windows in it which sucks big time - need to raise a ticket to reformat it and install Linux instead first thing Monday.

So far so good ..

Things seem to be going reasonably as per plan. The flight was fairly uneventful - which says a lot these days! managed to join office yesterday - Google is way cool!

But let's talk about Wednesday first. As usual, the company who was supposed to make the transition smooth screwed up big time. I was supposed to call them after landing - which I did, only to get to the answerphone. I then decided to just take a cab to the address, only to find that it's locked; which left me, my wife and the baby stranded on the road with not even a phone booth in sight (like an idiot, I had not activated roaming before flying). I finally decided to haul my luggage to the nearest pub and asked the managed for assistance. The second call also got me the answerphone. Then, about an hour later, somebody turned up - apparantly, they expect you to wait on the road and do periodic checks to see if you are there - if you are not, they simply disappear for another hour!

So, finally, got in, only to find that the hot water does not work, so no bath! Lodged a complaint, but it still hasn't been fixed - god knows when it will be!

Anyway, first day at work was quite interesting, if a bit chaotic. I was pulled into a couple of staff meetings - most of which was OHT to me, but on the bright side, the people seem really nice, and the atmosphere is quite casual.

I desperately need to start looking for an apartment to stay though since I can only stay at this place for a couple of weeks. Anyone want to give me pointers?

Plans for the week

OK - so here's the plan:

Sunday 13th -> Cleanup flat - completed. Was a complete mess after the move!
Monday 14th -> Last minute shopping, packing
Tuesday 15th -> Packing, packing
Wednesday 16th -> BA 0146 to London - reaching 2 PM BST. The kind folks at Google have booked a serviced apartment for me for the first two weeks - so hopefully, it should be fairly easy to settle down and start looking for something more permanent later.
Thursday 17th -> Google joining
Friday 18th -> Hopefully start real work

So, pretty packed schedule.

Note to self: Need to know Python and Java better.

Orkut

I decided to update my Orkut profile bu adding a few more details, after a sudden upsurge in scrapbook entries and friend requests. I have a feeling that this has something to do my me leaving TCS since most requests/entries are from people from my ex-project ;-) SAJ people, if you are reading this, thanks for your efforts to keep contact - I promise to reciprocate.

While I'm on this topic, I have a feeling that Orkut is more popular with Indians than MySpace - why this is so? I may be completely off the mark of course.

It also looks like a lot of TCS people are Orkut members - it so happens that I did not make the effort to find them out before. Of course, now that I've left TCS, there is a bigger incentive to keep in touch and so on, and Orkut is definitely proving to be quite good at it.

It's quite amazing how your network grows really - last month, I caught up with Shivani, who was my class mate in Cambrian Hall, Dehradun in the late 80's and early 90's!

Farewell gift

My project people gave me an iPod Nano as a farewell gift - wow!

You guys rock!

Changes, changes ...

The last couple of months have been really hectic, and looks like the next few are going to be as well. The big change is that I'm finally moving on. Last Tuesday was my last day in TCS, which means that I failed to collect the 10 year long service award by 5 days!

Moving to Google is quite exciting, but a bit scary as well - not so much job wise but mainly because of the move to London, especially with the baby being just ten months old.

Must admit though that I'm a bit disappointed with the level of support provided so far, not so much with the Google people but more with the agencies they have outsourced these things to. Hopefully, things will improve once I land up there.

let's keep our fingers crossed and take things as they come ...