VISA interview, Kingfisher flight and dental floss

Last Wednesday I was in Delhi for a VISA interview at the US consulate. After going through the whole process it felt like an anti-climax..do they call you all the way from your city of residence to the consulate just to ask you banal questions like "Where do you work?", "Why are you travelling?", "How much do you earn each year?" etc and taking two finger prints? Agreed that I was applying under the BEP program that makes it a bit easy for the applicants to go through the process but then if you can make it so easy then why not just call for my documents and passport. Why do they need me to travel personally for all this. The whole process is just stupid and wastes productive time.

Anyways, while in Delhi I took the opportunity to meet with Chirag and Prateek. I saw Webaroo's Delhi office and it looked much better than what we had when we all used to work for firstRain :-)

On the way back the stupid flight was delayed and it was pretty sad for me in the meantime see the Indian team going down in a heap. The real fun however started when I boarded the flight. There was gentleman next to me who was according to my breathe analyzer a bit drunk. Well nothing wrong with that..I am drunk too quite a few times..infact on international flights they like you to get drunk..but that's not the point. What was surprising was that this person kept on eating some sort of mouth freshner all through the 3 hrs of the flight :o And not just that, he occasionally also spat out the remnants of his freshner in the air sickness bag..arrggghh.. but the worse was yet to come..at the end of the flight out came a floss and the mouth freshness freak flossed his teeth right next to me..aaarrrghh aaaarrgh aaarrgh..and then very coldly stuffed the used floss in the seat pocket.. so much for being suited booted and all that..

PS: BTW I took the Jet Airways flight from Bangalore to Delhi and they have pretty cool touch screen in-flight entertainment systems with nice content.

Still a quitter

For Prajakt's satisfaction, I hereby ascertain explicitly that I am still a quitter :-)
And news from the Google joining front is that I would be traveling to Mountain View late January if the VISA gods bless me favourably. Most of my time nowadays is spent reading through piles and piles of documentation which is great since I am learning a lot of new and really interesting stuff..I won't be able to reveal about what though :-) but you can take reasonable guesses! Life is pretty cool here..there's a pick up and drop service and there's breakfast, lunch and Subway sandwiches in the evening..and lots of snacks and drinks for the intermediate times not covered by the above three :-) That's all for now..more updates later..

From the inside

I joined Google yesterday. From the inside the first impression is "AWESOME"!!! The place is lively , the colors are bright and the people are great...and ya the food and drink stuff has been keeping me quite busy :-) Of course its a small world nowadays..so I ran into a team member who has worked at Webaroo and another one who comes from Trilogy and was talking about a tool that Megha had worked on in SQATech..I think the days to come will be quite exciting.

You and I, in this beautiful world..

The Hutch campaign with the pug following the kid is back on air. Its a nice ad, little boy, cute dog, nice jingle but the truth is that the "our network follows" claim is utter bullshit. I think it is so very bullshit because in my office on Airport road right in the heart of Bangalore city where all other networks follow you without explicitly saying so, people with Hutch connections have plenty to cry about! And its not as if we are in a deep cave of something..shame on you Hutch..your network symbolizing omnipresent wrinkly toy doggy just cannot get past the access control in our office..
Update: And of course here is some trivia about the dog.