Kids do grow fast

A few pictures you may like: http://picasaweb.google.com/biswapesh/Anika

Mountain View

Came back last week from the Mountain View trip. This time, the jet lag has really hit us bad - I was awake from 3 AM most days there, and now I can't seem to sleep before 3 AM after coming back here! The baby's making it worse - she took the entire week in California getting used to PST, and now that we're back, she's taking even longer to get back to GMT. of course, the fact that UK went to BST last weekend doesn't help :-(

About the trip, pretty mixed feelings on the whole: the Google office is definitely pretty impressive - huge, loads of interesting work being done all the time, great food, etc. I was less than impressed with bay area as a place to live though. The whole layout seems weird and not really built for convenience. There is no public transport to speak of, so you have to drive everywhere and the sight of five thousand people driving to work on 5000 individual cars somehow bothers the hell out of me - how difficult is it to have a decent public transport system and save the huge amounts of fuel that is being burnt everyday just on the commute to work?

I've been less than ecstatic with the weather too - the sun is simply too relentlessly bright! I'm sure it is great for many people who live in cold climates, but having spent the first 21 years of my life in India, I would have a bit of cloud and rain any day. I got severely sunburnt during my stay and it felt hot and uncomfortable whenever I took a walk.

Which brings me to the really weird part - it seems no-one actually *walks* in the bay area! I went out for walks pretty regularly and could see people giving me strange looks from their cars as they whizzed past me - as if driving is the natural means of transportation and walking is some kind of abnormality!

Anyway, I gotta say that I'm not looking forward to the prospect of moving there quite as much as I was before.

US visa

So I am supposed to travel to US for a week to attend a few meetings and had to get a US visa. I must say I'm appalled at the mismanagement of the whole visa issue process in the US embassy in London.

We were given an appointment for 12:30 so we arrived at about 12, only to see about 150 people queuing before us. Apparently, they give appointments at the same time to about 50 people but can realistically process about 25-30 through the security system and whatnot, so the queue keeps building up. We had to queue outside the embassy for over two hours in the cold and drizzle, with the baby too.

When we finally got inside, we were all cold, wet and hungry, but, again, you are not allowed to bring any food or drinks inside the embassy, so the only option was a tiny joint inside the embassy building selling cold and musty sandwiches at ridiculous prices
. We had to wait another hour for the visa interview.

Thankfully, the interview itself lasted only about 2 minutes, but then came the part about getting your passports back. Apparently, they deliver your passport only through a particular courier service, which charged me about 40 pounds to deliver the passports from the embassy to my place , which is about 20 minutes away. The breakdown was: 15 pounds for normal delivery, 25 extra for delivery before 9AM, which, of course, most people have to take, because you need to go to work - right?.

I don't know if this is the same in other places - if it is, the US visa people really need to get their act together. One also cannot help but wonder if this is a deliberate ploy to discourage people from applying? It would seem to me though, that, this is exactly the sort of thing that discourages regular guys from going through the process, and encourages illegal immigration!

The knack

This tops everything: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmYDgncMhXw

In Bangalore

So this my first trip to Bangalore and I really like it - great weather, the food in the office in fantastastic, and the guest house awesome! I must say I had some apprehensions about this trip but they have been proven totally unfounded so far (fingers crossed!) - on the whole, a much better experience than the initial move to London.

I was also a bit apprehensive about how my daughter will take my absence but it seems she is so thrilled to be with her "Didu" that she doesn't mind at all - that ungrateful wench ;-)

Work wise, things are getting really interesting - sadly I can't blog about it :-( I should say, though, that there is a curently unfulfilled need in the OSS world for software that does generic transformations on really large data volumes.

Been trying to get in touch with some old friends who are supposed to be here - but not very successful so far :-( Well - you can't have everything!

TODO List

Whenever my TODO list becomes way too long, I spend more time thinking about and prioritizing it than actually doing something about it, so it becomes longer.

Wondering if others face the same problem?

Gotta work.

Durga Puja etc.

The Pujas went really great - not so much for the pandal hopping but because the Swindon folks came for a visit and we had a gala time (if you guys are reading this - big thanks, and let's do it again soon ;-) As always, post-alcohol singing session was a big hit, especially with the guitar (yes, I did finally manage to buy one - pretty nice sound too!)

Interesting things happening at work as well - finally beginning to get a handle on things, though there is still so much more to know it's scary :-(