3 Months… And More to Come!

Its been a while since I’ve posted (crap nearly a month) on my blog - so what have I been upto and what’s happening ?
For starters, work, work, work, more work - did I mention work ? There’s just 2 people here in Austin for the project I’m with and as we hit the project go live date, there’s tons of work to be doing - and the 2 of us are just about struggling. My colleague being the Business Analyst & Implementer -means that he’s got to report to his managers about what’s going on and and analysis of bug reports, calls resolved etc. That leaves him busy - and leaves me with a frikkin' huge set of things to do - test the test conditions in advance and report any bugs found.

That’s just a start - a day prior to the actual testing, I have to setup the required data and conditions - that means setting up multiple policies, associated claims et al. Then there’s filing in of bugs as reported by the client, data migration and data migration testing, preparing training manuals, assisting the users in getting a hang of the application.

To make things worse the business users doing the testing are free only at mornings from 7 -8 that means I’ve to leave my place at 6:30. Though I reach back by about 5:30 or 6, there’d be lot of leftover work which keeps me occupied till 8-8:30pm, after which I prepare dinner and then (generally) calls from Chennai, or someother work which means I get to sleep by only 12:00 or 1. *phew*!

Work aside, well there’s nothing much happening - like I said been too engrossed in work. My I-94 expired on Feb 20 - and an extension has been filed - I’d probably be in Austin till April, even beyond that, maybe. That depends on coming weeks ahead, which are pretty critical.

It just struck me that I’ve been in Austin for 3 months  - quarter of a year. Hard to believe - time has flown by so fast. And soon as I left Chennai all the interesting things magically happened - couple of tweetups(read up about them here - a little mini project by Narayanan, Ashish and Me) , tweople featured on media, Foodwalk, RTFF [Rooftop Film Festival] etc. How much do you want to bet on the fact that I moment I reach back nothing interesting would be there?

The other thing I’m going to miss terribly is Barcamp Bangalore 8 - BCB7 was the first Barcamp I’d been to - and I met all the fantastic people - Ashwin, Daaku [yes I know his real name, nobody would recognise if I mention it 😛 ], Arun, Saurabh, Suksy, Prashanth, Ashish, Laxman, Santosh, Viral - and *so* many other awesome people  - damn I’m gonna miss not being there!

The good thing is that Barcamp Austin 4 will be on March 13-15, about the same time as SXSW. I *hope* I can attend either (preferably both) these events.

Another little thing - being I’ve *actually* learn to cook. Something which I never thought I’d do in a million years.

And yes finally - I guess I can make this statement - “official” - I’ve quit smoking. I’d been smoking at almost 1 pack(10 cigs) a day, overtime I reduced it to 8, 5 - but still couldn’t give it up totally. Have been smoke free for 3 months now - haven’t smoked after coming to US . Something to feel good about 🙂 guess Manan’s post made me go towards it. I suppose that’s about it for now - gotta get up early tomorrow (as usual). More posts soon, I hope.