It's about time to get a good night's sleep. The past few nights I have been up about 4am and cannot fall back asleep. I watched hockey two of those mornings and worked a bit before going to the office the 3rd. When up at 4am and online some of the Ottawa office people are still working so we can catch up on goings-on since the start of their business day.
Another day of dynamic meetings with the India staff all day Thursday. Three of them headed back home last night and the rest of us went for dinner. We actually went to two places first, did not like them, then ended up at a deli around the corner from did-not-like-place two. We had Indian fare of course and I was caught by the smoked cashews. What a combination. I also had my first two rides in rickshaws yesterday. One of the locals who works with me insisted "Michael" go by car but I persisted and got to take the smaller mode of transportation. It was a roller coaster ride as I expected as we weaved in and out of traffic with the horn blaring a lot to announce the urgency of our voyage to the rabble.
After dinner we walked back to the hotel the locals were staying at then one of them escorted me back to a landmark he knew I recognized so I could find my way back to Katriya hotel on my own. What gentlemen these people are. While driving to lunch yesterday, there were five of us in the car and I mentioned how appreciative I was that they were speaking English, suspecting it was driven by courtesy to keep me in the conversation. On the contrary, my fellow travelers spoke so many different languages that English was the only one they had in common. Chandra expressed his thanks anyways for my comment.
The commentator on the Sens game this morning proudly reminded me and the rest of the world of a famous Paul Newman line "who are these guys", in reference to the surging Ottawa Senators. They got their first shutout of the season, beating the best team in the east at that. Tonight will be low key. I have two meetings, the first at 7pm and the second around 8:30pm. I need to adapt and adjust my schedule to accommodate the 10.5 hour time difference with HQ for a handful of days.
I am getting a driver and a list of things to do this weekend in Hyderabad. Chandra or others will craft that list. I surfed the web looking for things to do in this burg a few weeks ago and there appeared not to be a shortage of sites. Wherever I end up, I need traditional this and traditional that. I scored my return flight to Bangalore next weekend, a whopping $104 all total if I read the itinerary and did the conversion of currency properly. Reminds me of our $82 fare from Saigon to Da Nang then on to Hanoi five days later in Vietnam in November 2010.
Again I needed two tries to get my coffee this morning and I am just poised to ask for a refill; wish me luck. Off to work shortly for an action-packed day. The other India people are gone so there will be about six of us in the Hyderabad office for the balance of my stay.
Then there is that popular/familiar assumption that if one switches to a Mac, all one's computer woes will end. Well my 1TB backup drive for my Pro had lost two partitions AGAIN. All my Misc and Pro backups ... gone; kaput; dayd! I now tell people the Mac is the same as the Windows machines just with a different-looking set of nonsense. I will admit programs load faster and I do not see the Mac equivalent of the Windows mouse-hourglass. I see what Ben J refers to as the "spinning beach ball of death"; not as much as I was treated to the hourglass, but enough to remind me of Windows.
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