Woke up thinking “I get to go home today.” Of course, I need to get through from now (7am) to when my plane leaves (11:10pm). Fifteen hours after that, it’ll be 4:45am in New York, and my plane will land. Tanned, rested, and lively – I will bounce off the plane, catch a puddle jumper to Boston, and meet Jen at approximately 8:10am on Saturday. Perhaps then I will go to Judo, catch up on housework, and then go to her boss’s holiday party in the evening.
I feel good enough right now that this actually seems like a reasonable sort of schedule for a “day.”
Yesterday was pretty much as expected. My Kingfisher flight got me to Delhi around 11:45 on Wed, and I got to the hotel around 1 in the morning. The Delhi Hyatt Regency is, perhaps, more palatial than the one in Kolkata. As mentioned on Facebook, my room is smaller and contains (among other things):
* A switch next to the bed to make the curtains open
* A square bathtub. I was filled with the urge to bathe, just to see how it worked. Turns out that it’s deep enough to sit up comfortably. Simple as that.
Not to gush about the hotel some more, but this place is massive. Breakfast is quite the production. Indian, Western, Asian foods … a juice bar that amounts to huge piles of fruit and a blender. When I have a few more minutes I’ll post pictures.
Yesterday’s session was good, but frustrating at the end. About 30 people showed up from all over India – various Apple resellers and partners – to listen to me hold forth on compute clusters and so forth. I talked fairly free-form for about four hours. During the last hour they rolled in a pair of Mac Pros. I’m still talking, keep in mind. They put operating systems on the machines and rig some cables. I’m still talking. Then one of the guys is like “Chris, can I switch over the video?” I’m like “why?”
“So you can do your demo.”
Demo? Oh yeah, right. There’s a demo. On which computers? Those? My software doesn’t run on Mac Pros. It runs on Xserves. And, um, could we take a coffee break so I could look at this frankencomputer you’ve built? Right. You folks go get coffee, I’ll just be a sec.
I wound up saying “no.” It was too much. I flailed in front of the audience, on live video, for about half an hour and then just called it. “We’ll get this set up tonight, come back for tomorrow’s session.”
Then the big boss and I went for dinner. Southern Indian food this time. They keep pushing KFC on me and I’m like (a) vegetarian, and (b) I am in INDIA. I want to eat INDIAN food. I want it to be VEGETARIAN and SPICY. I even tried real butter-milk.
So: One more day. Class until 4pm. Meeting with potential customer at 5:30pm. Then to the airport.
Oh yeah, and trinkets have been obtained. Woot.
