India 2012

Started: 2012-06-14 10:18:12

Submitted: 2012-06-14 10:57:44

Visibility: World-readable

In which the intrepid narrator prepares for a second trip to India

In the middle of March, while Kiesa was off in Washington, DC for a conference, my San Diego-based lead called me to ask if I could send someone on my team to the office in Hyderabad, India for a week or two to brief an engineer there on the care and feeding of the UART driver so we could transfer support of some of our older chips to the remote office. I barely resisted the urge to jump up and scream, "Pick me! Pick me! Pick me!" and allowed that I would find this interesting but other team members know more about the UART hardware and driver than I do, so they might be a better choice from that perspective. I talked to the next most obvious choice, would go wherever I sent him but was not especially enthusiastic about the idea. Upon further consultation with my lead over the next few weeks, he said he'd rather have me go (much to the relief of my team-mate), so I got a one-year, multiple-entry business visa, made my travel arrangements, and pivoted back to India to learn as much as I could before returning to the subcontinent. I started with a history of Hyderabad, read an interesting piece of travel writing on the monsoon, and consulted various guidebooks.

Before leaving, I bought an expensive pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones for the plane flight; and on the last day before I left, faced with the prospect of using either the lousy bag that I was provided with the loaner laptop, or carrying my regular backpack, I drove to REI and bought a Timbuk2 Command Messenger 2012 (size medium, flavor "oxford nylon algae green") with the remains of my annual dividend. I'm especially enthralled by the TSA-complaint loophole that puts the computer pocket in a separate space in back, so I can unzip the pocket, and lay the bag flat on the x-ray belt without ever removing it from the bag.