Katy Dickinson

Getting Ready to Work from India

We will be running a SEED mentoring term application period while I am working from Bangalore, India 1-14 March. Tanya Jankot has been testing the web application forms and I am reviewing SEED's Application FAQ this afternoon.

We have also set up times for two phone-in meetings for Sun applicants from all four target Engineering sites: Prague, Beijing, St. Petersburg, and Bangalore. The World Clock Meeting Planner has been of great help. There is no time which is convenient for everyone and most of the USA is going through a daylight savings time shift on 11 March, so schedules are particularly complex. I am thinking of setting up SEED question and answer calls for:

• 6 March (Tuesday) 10 a.m. Bangalore time
  (=8:30 p.m. California, =12:30 p.m. Beijing, =5:30 a.m. Prague, =7:30 a.m. St.Petersburg)
• 13 March (Tuesday) 9:30 p.m. Bangalore time
  (=9 a.m. California time, =midnight Beijing time, =5 p.m. Prague, =7 p.m. St.Petersburg)

My husband, John Plocher, who manages the process and tools for Sun's Architectural Review Committees will also be working from Sun's India Engineering Center. We got our visas, hotel reservations and plane tickets, and are both setting up our secondary electronic accounts, requesting Sun Bangalore building access upgrades, arranging for office assignments during our stay, and otherwise trying to make the transition to working in India easier. In addition to work, John and I plan to go railfanning while in India and we hope to visit some model train clubs and layouts as well. We are in an interesting email discussion with IRFCA (Indian Railways Fan Club) members now.

John and I visited the Travel Medicine department at our clinic several weeks ago and got punctuated. That is, we brought our immunizations up to date. Our clinic has a very helpful online service which provides summaries of visits and tests and lets us request appointments and renew prescriptions online. I can chart life events by looking at the dates of my immunizations: Typhoid and Hepatitis B to go to India in 2004, Tetanus, Diphtheria, Pertussis (Tdap) after the Whooping Cough outbreak at my son's school this year, etc.

We are also reading travel and background books. The best train travel web site we have found is The Man in Seat Sixty-One. The India page of that site recommended reading the Lonely Planet guide, Rudyard Kipling's Kim, and Peter Hopkirk's Quest for Kim. I think I have read Kim at least a dozen times so I am having a lovely time reading Quest for Kim (which describes the people, places, and history of that most famous adventure novel).

I have my little wooden pillar of Ashoka on my desk to remind me of India itself as I manage my way through the details of getting there. Soon, we actually start to pack!

Posted at 06:01PM Feb 16, 2007 by katysblog in Mentoring & Other Business  |  Comments[1]