Life is so good, it gets better every day

Final Days In Bangalore

Had a pretty quiet weekend, all in all. Went out to a place called 1912 with Bala, Hema and her husband, Venky. It was a pretty exclusive place, with some sister of a famous woman singing a retro/jazz set. It was a nice place, very moody, sitting beneath the bangalore skies. All the food and drink was free, after an initial entrance fee..and we made good use of that. I’m not sure if I thought the same the morning after – the hangover was pretty bad. Excellent night, and I think I remember most of it.

I had arranged with Ram to take me to MG road for some shopping, and decided that I should probably try and do a little bit more. We headed off to the Botanic Gardens [Lal Bagh], which proved to be a good ‘clearing the head’ style of walk, by way of Cubbon Park. Afterwards we finally headed to the mobs of MG and Brigade road, by way of a temple with a large bull in it. I didn’t do much shopping, apart from trying to answer the requests of my housemates. Today we headed off to the wildlife reserve up in Bannerghatta and also managed to find myself at the ISKCON temple. For a place apparently so spiritual, it had an amazing number of neon signs, donation boxes, restaurants, book shops and people hassling you. I respect someone’s religion and spirituality, but I have to say I was glad to see the ‘exit’ signs around the place.

The wildlife reserve, by contrast, was wonderful although a little sad to see some of the animals in the zoo part being so enclosed. Interestingly enough they have a ‘tourist’ entrance fee which is about 4 or 5 times the normal fee. As it turns out, I didn’t mind paying this because I got to jump the 50+ person queue and got to sit in the front seat of the bus [and the best camera view] as we went through the various lion and tiger country.

Getting back to the hotel was nice, and the swimming pool was too inviting to refuse. I think I’ll miss this place a little, but glad to get home.

What A Week

This week has been one of the best I’ve had for some time. Okay, so I’ve been involved with meetings and some presentations for most of the time, but unlike the usual Sun ones, there’s been lots of positive discussion and open feedback coming from them. All very productive. My hosts, Wipro, have been fantastic – I’ve had a lot of fun being in the office, and out and about at the various pubs in Bangalore. I have Hema, the social secretary, Kalpesh and Arvind ‘Fruit Punch’ Samptur to thank for that.

We’ve been looking at the various processes that Sun has pushed into the partnership, and where they’ve been breaking down. I’ve always thought that the Wipro guys have had to deal with a lot of uneccessary crap and it’s nice to see that in reality. I’m very much hoping that the relevant people in Sun take notice of my trip reports and that some solutions to the various issues are forthcoming – there’s a hell of a lot of low hanging fruit, aside from the huge ‘Let’s use one bug tracker’ obstacles. Yesterday I gave a talk on JDS – lots of interest, especially in the Looking Glass stuff. It’s pretty staggering to think of the amount of work we still have to do in JDS though, just based on the endless list of future plans in the slides I created.

Mysore was a pretty cool place – my first trip outside Bangalore. Bala, Arvind, Anand and Kalpesh took me around the various temples, palaces, and gardens. Hoping to get down to MG Road at the weekend and see a few more sights before I leave on Monday evening. The traffic still scares me, especially at night. It’s been a wonderful trip. Wipro dudes, thank you.

Travelling The Globe

This week has me in Bangalore visiting the Wipro folks. It’s good to be here, and the trip has been full of wonderfully vivid sights and sounds. The journey didn’t drag as much as I expected [Christchurch > Auckland > Sydney > Singapore > Bangalore], although I’ll admit it was nice to be able to split up the journey with a night over in Singapore.

Singapore didn’t really live up to my expectations, although I was only there for about 24 hours. The heat, humidity and crowds were overwhelming and I probably didn’t catch the best parts of the place. I’ll head back there for about 16 hours on the way back, so it will be a good opportunity to change my mind.

By contrast, Bangalore has been amazing so far, even if I haven’t stepped much outside the hotel since I arrived. I stepped off the plane to a pretty quiet badly lit airport with very little concern over security. It was a refreshing change. Outside the building, things changed rapidly and I was confronted with a huge whirlwind of sights, sounds and smells – a gallery of taxi drivers all waiting on their passengers, people brushing the dust off the pavements, a woman begging, children playing, rickshaws dodging pedestrians with a constant blur of various horns. The traffic is insane here – it seems like there is some sort of spatial tetris game being played, while respecting the fact that some vehicles are bigger than others.

Tommorrow is an early start at about 6am to go down to Mysore for the day – looking forward to meeting old and new faces.

^5’ing With Bastien

I think I know how Bastien feels about trying to keep up with GNOME. I work on it full time, and I’m still blown away. I have no clue how so many other people do it. They are all my heroes.

Useless

The VISA for India finally arrived this morning, which I’m pretty pleased about. I wasn’t really looking forward to telling my manager that I didn’t get on the flights because I didn’t have my passport. I feel so amazingly unprepared for the trip. Yesterday I went into town to have a brief look at the India Lonely Planet – I didn’t really see the need to buy the thing, given that it was $69 and it contained about 10 pages for Bangalore. Fortunately Arvind has been great and has offered to be around while I’m over there. It’s fun travelling to new places, but that sometimes wears out when you don’t have connections at that end. I’m looking forward to meeting the Wipro guys and hanging out with them – I just wonder whether my trip will be of any noticeable benefit to them or not.

Justin, a guy over on holiday from Oz that we met down in Greymouth, took us up on the offer of some floor space. We headed out to a Mexican for some burittos and frozen Margarittas. Washed down with a few pints of Guinness, it proved to be a pretty enjoyable night. Nathan and Rachel come back for a night this week before heading off, and how knows who will be the next visitor to arrive at our door. Next weekend is Watangi weekend, a public holiday in New Zealand. Patrick and Maeve are planning to head up to Nelson to catch up with Kristen, and maybe check out a bit of climbing at Payne’s Ford.

Work has been ultra-frustrating this week, and looks set to continue. I’m slightly glad that I can leave some of it behind while in India, but really quite disappointed in the little progress we’ve made over the last month or so. I’m not sure what I can do to change things, and that’s the most frustrating bit about it. I just feel so fucking useless.

Pissing On The Matai Tree

Although the weather was completely miserable for the most part, we had a pretty fun weekend out west, staying in the Global Village hostel in Greymouth. The drive across the south island wasn’t very long, and when the rain occassionally lifted up we got to see some amazing scenery as we headed through Arthur’s pass. On Saturday we headed the 80km up north to find Pancake Rocks, an area of limestone and mudstone that had been layered up by the effects of erosion. Looked like there might have been some nice climbing there. From there we headed out to see New Zealand’s longest swing bridge which proved to be a rather uninteresting detour out of our way, except for the large matai tree that Patrick promptly pissed upon during the jungle walk.

Orkut

Jeff sent me a mail asking if I would be his friend. Not wanting to dissappoint the guy, I agreed and managed to find myself in orkut.com. I have still no idea what I’m doing there – I figure it’s the weird mixture of some college fraternity, a key signing party and a tama-gotchi. I guess it’s the new hip thing. I added some people and then got bored. It will probably take me some time to adjust.

That Mark Guy

Thank god Mark finally left Sun – couldn’t stand the bugger. Seriously, hope Mark has a rocking time with Red Hat. Sad to see him go, but glad that he’s still on the GNOME scene. Seemingly there is an open job posting available now in Sun Ireland working on GNOME.

Everything But The Kitchen Sink

It’s been a busy couple of days as I start to prepare for my trip to India. I rang the VISA office today wondering where my application had got to, since I have less than a week before I go. They told me that since I had a non-NZ VISA, they had to get some sort of approval [presumably from Ireland somewhere]. They said they’d get back to me soon, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I really should get a second passport – it would have made things much easier, and I could have sent it away before I went to Adelaide. I’m still due to stay at the Windsor and Sheraton, despite its price, unless the Wipro folks get back that they’ve found another hotel. Seems there is a concert on in Bangalore making good accommodation scarce.

This week we found another local crag to climb on, providing a much lower set of grades which has been good for Maeve’s confidence. We spent one long evening blitzing the crag, with the hardest route being 19. It was short and sweet, and we’ll probably head back there again for another evenings entertainment.

There was a pretty excellent All Hands today in the US, with me watching over a slightly disjointed video stream. There seems to be lots of momentum inside Sun with lots of awesome deals and deployments happening. It’s all amazingly encouraging as a developer that Sun seems to be really focused for the first time in quite a while. I got a mail today from Curtis thanking me for doing a good job – it’s nice to know that a VP knows who you are and values the importance of saying ‘thanks’ just like in OSS. Sun is an incredibly frustrating place to work, and you doubt yourself into feeling that you can never make a difference. I guess it’s that frustration that’s really driving me to keep doing what I’m doing, so that someday it’ll be easy to look back and see what huge steps we’ve all made. What is it I do? Hrm, good question.

I’ve had a veritable feast of dreams this week. This Lariam is good stuff.

Love Is Blind

I got an email out of the blue that managed to get past my highly advanced ‘That looks like SPAM’ filters. The email refered back to my photojournal days, and in particular the June 17th entry. Since everyone else seems to be plugging their own Cafe Press adventures on Planet GNOME, I figure this guy/girl deserves a chance. I haven’t yet replied, or ordered anything, but I think I will. I do wonder what effect a heart tshirt will have on my tough climber guy street credibility though.

I guess it goes to show that directed marketing is the way to go. Know your target before you try to sell them stuff.