Roblog

I've been really busy at work recently, and it seems that the rest of my life is just flowing by me. It's a rather disconcerting feeling. So here's some catch-up notes.

April Fool's This is apparently a global phenomenon. I was geared up to explain April Fool's Day to my colleagues from India that are visiting here, but they knew all about it. That was a surprise. It had taken me a while to explain Girl Scout Cookies to them.

India Trip My India trip has been confirmed, and I have tickets reserved. I'll be going at the end of this month. The precise agenda hasn't been set yet, but I'll likely be helping introduce the detailed processes we'll be using for define how our day-to-day activities will flow between offshore, onshore, and our client. I'll also probably be giving some SAS training, since that's something I know pretty well, and most all of our mainframe support staff will need to know it to some extent. The training I gave here in Houston went well, so I'll just give the same class there.

I still need to get my visa for India (which is supposedly not a big deal) and see if I need any shots before I go.

I plan on keeping a daily journal of my trip. I have only been outside of the US twice, both times just a few miles into Canada (Vancouver and Niagra), so essentially this will be my first trip out of the country. I have also been admonished to make sure I take some time for sightseeing. My schedule will be pretty tight, and I won't have any free days to explore, but I'm sure I can manage to spend a few hours here and there.

Sicknesses The whole family has been sick recently. Both girls took turns having colds last week (Elena actually spent one night throwing up). I was sick Sunday night (and missed work yesterday), just as Donna was recovering from her own illness. Maybe this week we'll all be healthy. That would be nice.

I was just informed (by a non-Rice gradutate) that it's a tradition for students to sit in the lap of the William Marsh Rice statue. She heard this from a tour guide when she was visiting the campus one day.

As a Rice graduate, I have never heard mention of such a tradition. Did I miss out on some valuable part of the Rice experience? If so, I could rush over to the campus during lunch and take care of that. Well, maybe tomorrow - it's been raining here quite a bit.

Amanda has typically been very unhappy about getting her hair washed because she doesn't like to get water or shampoo in her eyes. I don't blame her. So we try to be very careful about keeping the water out of her eyes when we rinse the shampoo out.

The way we do this requires two people: one person to support her as she leans back, face-up in the water, and the other to take a cup of water and rinse her hair. We call this "tippy" because we have to tip her back into the water so that when we pour the water on her hair it runs away from her face into the tub. Donna holds her while I pour the water.

This has been very successful. Almost too much so, because now we have to make sure we don't say it's time for "tippy" before we're ready, else Amanda might lean back right away into the tub. She'll even ask for "tippy" before we start the shampoo.

We do the same thing with Elena, but she typically is not as sensitive to water in her eyes.

I have no idea who these people are or who "mac_daddy_kaz" is:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/mystic_wonder/9085.html
It doesn't bother me that they copied the picture, but they're using deep-linking to refer to my website directly. I could block that if I wanted to. Maybe I will...

I guess Elena's picture showed up in a search for "pot head"? The funny thing is, I can't find any evidence that those terms were used to search my website. It's possible that someone used a search engine that the program that tracks hits on my web page was not able to discern, but all the popular ones show up in a list of search terms. Very odd.

I can see that the world is flat. I have never seen the curvature of the Earth that I know is there.

But I'm about to leave for India. That's about at the opposite end of the world (by longitude, not latitude). I'll have flown 20 hours in the air, and I'll end up 11 time zones away. My Monday will be shortened by 10.5 hours.

Wish me luck!

I just sat down in my seat on flight 441 on Lufthansa from Houston to Frankfurt. It's drizzling, but the sun is shining - Houston.

We are now traveling NNE at 26,000 feet and 560 mph. I know this because that's what the video monitor shows me.

We took off at 5:30, one hour and forty minutes after my ticket said we were supposed to depart. But as Frankfurt is only 7 hours ahead of Houston, our scheduled arrival time of 8:50 AM would make it a 10 hour flight (I miscalculated earlier). I'm pretty sure they announced that this is a 9 hour flight, though, so maybe we'll only be 40 minutes late. Perhaps they build an hour delay into the flight times just in case.

Oops! Dinner is getting prepared! Maybe I can sleep after the meal.

I just finished breakfast - a tomato frittata. It was fine, but the sliced fruit (honeydew, watermelon, and pineapple) was better.

We just passed over Great Britain and are headed toward the Netherlands as we clip the North Sea.

I got maybe 2 hours of sleep. I think maybe the eye mask I was wearing was keeping me up. I feel a little slow, but I should be fine getting on our connecting flight in Frankfurt. I already have my boarding pass.

Our connecting flight is scheduled to leave at 10:55. That seems like it will give us about an hour between landing and taking off again. That could cut things pretty close, depending on what sorts of customs processing we have to go through and how far away our connection is.

I'm sitting on the Bangalore flight now. Our connecting flight was almost 2 hours late, but we were very efficiently taken off the plane (on the tarmac!), loaded onto a bus, and taken to Terminal 1. Our gate (B44) was a short walk away.

I just did some more work on my Thursday presentation - now I think I can finish it off in one hour. Which is good, because I'm having a hard time keeping my eyes open. I'll take a little nap, which hopefully will not be so long to make it hard to go to sleep when we get to the hotel

I got another two hours of sleep I would guess, and now we are about 40 minutes away from landing. I feel pretty good, considering I've spent over 20 hours in a plane while getting about 4 hours of sleep.

I am now in my spacious hotel room (1712) at the Taj West End.

I am feeling very refreshed. I'm sure that's part of the effects of the jet lag, since this would just be a late night in Houston after a good 5 hour nap.

I'm back at the hotel after a long day at the Accenture office. It wasn't a hard day - just long. I made it through the day without feeling seriously groggy, but I can feel my body needing some sleep.

I am exhausted. I don't think it's jet lag; rather, it was just a busy day. That's good, though. An expensive trip like this ought to be busy and productive.

Another busy day draws to a close. I actually realized that I'll miss leaving the team today. I always figured that the time away from my family would make me eager to get home (which I am), but it's been great to be a part of the India team for a week.

We have an early start to the day tomorrow, so it will be a challenge to make sure I wake up in time to complete my packing and take some pictures of the hotel grounds.

There is no work agenda for me today. We have a big team lunch from 12:00 to 3:00, and we'll be leaving from lunch to do some quick shopping and then leave for the airport. I mostly plan on taking pictures of the team and building in the morning.

Here's a quick rundown of the items I bought:

Wow! I knew I was tired, but I didn't realize I'd sleep six hours straight on the plane!