Of Thanksgiving Trip, Gadget Overloads, Cancelled Christmas Trip & Back To India – Sathya's World
This page looks best with JavaScript enabled

Of Thanksgiving Trip, Gadget Overloads, Cancelled Christmas Trip & Back To India

 ·   ·  ☕ 4 min read  ·  ✍️ Sathyajith Bhat · 👀... views

I’ve been absent in posting here - more because there’s hardly anything interesting going on. Well, there’s laziness as well. So here’s a recap.

****

For the past couple of months, my colleague had returned back to India, which meant me having no company. With Thanksgiving around the corner, I decided to pay a trip to my cousin sis’ place in Allen, TX. With no car with me & bus service from Austin to Allen non-existent – I decided to rent a car from Enterprise.

With no International OR a US driving license, I was worried if they’d reject the rental ( the Texas DMV, however, says you can drive with a valid license – doesn’t have to be International or US) – but thankfully, Enterprise didn’t reject it. The other worry I had was that Enterprise requires a valid credit card to be presented while renting. Now I didn’t have a US credit card. Then I realized that I did have my Indian credit card which was a valid International credit card – so I presented it – and voilà  - it was accepted. I also enquired if if the final payment could be done with my Bank Of America debit card – they said that would be fine – so USD <-> INR exchange rate problems.

Since I was the only one driving and in the car – I opted for the lowest tier of available cars – the economy tier(the weekend special rate was about $12.99 a day). I was expecting some low-end crap hatchback – but the cars offered to me were the Kia Forte or the Toyota Corolla. Wow. I opted for the Toyota. Now apart from driving around in parking lots for a brief time, I had never done any “real” driving in the US ( just a reminder – they drive on the wrong side of the roadWinking smile ) – but I was confident but driving – and lo – didn’t have any problems. ( Honestly: if you can drive in India without a scratch – you can drive anywhere – well, except for Vietnam -.- ).

The actual drive from Austin to Allen was pretty smooth. The distance was about 216 miles, and I covered it it in about 3and half hours – of which about an hour was spent crawling through Dallas downtown traffic at peak time. Driving on the freeway was an exhilarating and scary experience – especially when you’re driving at a constant 70 MPH ( cruise control: God Bless Thee) and have big rig trucks overtaking you –.- ( seriously! The ratio number of vehicles I’ve overtaken to number of vehicles that have overtaken me was like 1:4)

It was great catching up with my cousin – was meeting her after nearly 2 years ( guess the last time met her was when I was in Austin the last time). Had a good time with general talk, chit-chat, and of course, the Turkey dinner.

Yeah, that's a big-ass Turkey

****

Unlike my last Thanksgiving & Black Friday in Austin, this time, I didn’t do any purchases – there was hardly any item which was worth purchasing. Now that doesn’t mean I haven’t gotten any new gadgets – I do have some new gadgets – some purchased, some acquired.

First up: HP Envy 14 which was a replacement for my Dell Inspiron 1520 I had purchased 3 years ago.

That velvet pouch is going to trouble me in India.

Yes, it's dotted and ribbed. No, it's not a condom.

Next is the D-Link “Gamers Lounge” DGL-4500 Wireless-N router, sent to me by Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame for recommending him a new router – which replaced my previous Netgear WGT 624.

Oooo shinyY!!!!!

 

those be them antenna

The Samsung-Google Nexus S, replacement for my iPhone 3G

And the most recent addition: The Google Cr-48

Also pending to be received is a Kingston SSD, but I’m not sure if it’ll arrive in time. I’m trying to get in touch with Kingston, let’s see what happens.

****

It’s Christmas time. I had some nice plans for Christmas – first back to Allen to say bye to my cousin before I head back to India. Then head down to San Antonio. Unfortunately I had to cancel all these plans since I was told day before yesterday that my tickets for India had been booked. I’ll be travelling back on Tuesday – the 28th. The flight will be going from ABIA (Austin) to JFK(NY) via American & then from there to Chennai via Jet. So this will be my last post from Austin. After spending about just over a year, to head back in this fashion with a scrapped project is disappointing, I’d stuck with my current company just to ensure that I see through the full phase of the project. But it did not happen. Such a shame, though on the bright side – the onsite experience has been a real eye opener and the things I’ve learned, is quite honestly something which no school/college, no matter where, will teach you. Real Life Experience trumps everything.

I’ll be taking a week or two off,(can’t wait to meet Shriya again) then will be back to Chennai. Let’s see what new projects come up.

Share on

Sathyajith Bhat
WRITTEN BY
Sathyajith Bhat
Author, AWS Container Hero and DevOps Specialist

What's on this Page