Ready, set...

In a few days, I'm off to India...

I'll be staying in an apartment in Bangalore, a city in the south part of India. It is the high-tech capital of the country; in addition to many Indian high-tech businesses, many many US companies have operations there including my own, HP. I am excited about this trip. I have made a lot of trips for DEC/Compaq/HP as well as on vacations. I've even been in India for nearly a month (21 years ago!) but this is the first time I will have had a chance to stay in one place overseas for a long time...long enough to get to know a place at least somewhat.

I just spent my last day at work before leaving. While I am gone, a new section of offices (just being built now) will be finished, and we all need to move. Of course I won't be there, so I had to spend some time today packing. Clair (my project leader) was nice enough to say that he would get people to help move since I really did not have time to get everything in shape for the commercial moving crew that will be doing most of the work.

Usually I don't feel so odd about leaving, but with the office change and even more importantly the fact that there are a number of people who are leaving the company while I am gone means that I will not be returning to the same place every again.

I found out today that I will have a number of "visitors" while I am in Bangalore: 3 of my fellow engineers will be there for some of the time, and toward the end of my stay, our vice president (who lives around the corner from me by chance), and the manager of Indian operations will be coming. That will be nice.

That's it for the preliminaries...the next post will likely be from Bangalore.