Wednesday, December 03, 2003

pretty much happened and i have not been writing for a while
but then i met DK ( krishnan Duraiswamy ) who hasbecome my chess partner .so these says evenings are spent playing chess with DK and sometime i sleep over at Dk's place .. in due course this sometime frequency has gone up a lot
anway evenings are what i look forward to ina day . putting on weight slowly . the junk food attack .
has to start doing yoga that i have alomost forgotten now
Week 2 in USA
well the second week was very different form first ,.During the weekend I had found a house
and I moved in all Indians in the house. 2 are from satyam one is from AT & T . The name are abhishek, mangesh . moorty and ashok
Mangesh you know right then slowly life is getting greener in USA . The last weekend we went to Seattle walked around and we went To a pub and generally hangs around . Sunday I went out and bought a sleeping bag . The rest of the days were busy with work .The work is quite challenging and exciting here they have a lot of meeting and They are active discussion forum for idea
and what I noticed here is testing team unlike the ones we have in India actively contributes to the betterment of the design from the design phase itself sharing valuable insights so that we get it right the first time itself and then I had developed a proof of concept of how the GUI will look like and the all tore it apart /. Everyone had their own idea.. on how it should look like but they all like the base design most of them wanted minor enhancements which I said I will update once we freeze it..
then this week there was a mail about home made delivery of Indian food on campus .
anyway me and Mangesh joined for it .so from next week we are supposed to get some good food.
for lunch or else were were mostly at mercy of pizzas and I being vegetarian was a problem .
but once you start cooking living in US is no problem at all for vegetarians..
here vegetables are affordable but Spices are very costly .. i found that out . when i brought some seasoning for 5$.
well i am not trying to convert here.
the week endede with me finishing assigned work and just before i was about to leave I got a lot more work ..to be done..
anyway it is saturday her today i went to bank after getting up late and found that it just closed
so had a long walk back after buyng stuff from safeway .
made some dal and rotis and had.
so yet another week .. passes in usa
that is it for now..
Sept 23
USA - first weeek

I got down at seattel airport after a rather long journey , I was tired ,I went through immmigration and then i went through customs where they foud ot that I di not take a stamp fromthe immigration on the customs clearence form and they sent me back to immigration anywa it unnecessaril delaed the whole process by around another half an hor the imigration officer was all apologetic about his fault.. hm..
anyway checked outmy luggage , I wanted a troley but i di not have any change with me..only a 100 $ in bills and there we no currency converters nearby . well i decided to pull it all together pulling 3 piece of liggage is rather a difficlt job.. hm..
this would go as a travel tip next time ou tracel carry spare change..
hmm . now I wanted to make a phone call home..
i managed get my 100 $ converted into 20 $bills ,i put money into the phone ard machin and damn..the phone card machins had some problem
it was not able to give me the card..

not such a great welcome to us after all . before making even one dollar i had already lost 20 $ , felt like kicking the dumb machine . did some calculation and found out .. i lost 100 RS into a dumb machine. anywa tried tpacifymyself it is just 20 bucks,, anywa i moved found a taxi and checkedinto a hotel . the room rent was 79.99 did some bargaining and brought it down to 59.99 . I was feeling happy now 20 $ saved per day..
had a long nice hot sower and slept ...
next day took a cab to my friends place and from there with him to office. microsoft was not at all like wat i expected it was a developers paradise or so to say. people are very friendl and business like. after getting introductions over i went to get my SSN and bank account . at the ssn office they told me it will take two to three weeks to get an acknowlwdgement
hm.. anywa went to the bank . there was a guy who came ther who wanted to close his brother's account becasue he passed away e was ust 14 .
I felt sorr for him .I did not ask him what hapened .the lad a the bank was quite nice.. she started complimenting me on my eglish anyway we cahtted a long time. i wanted o buy a map ad I asked her. she tried to give me iredctions but i was no able to follow . she gave me a cop she had. well anyway bid good bye and went to office .
Rams my Project managerintoduced me to the rest of the people in the team and that was it for the day came home . bought some food from the stoe and came home and slept ...