Weekly notes 08/2023

What’s been happening #

• This week was spent entirely in Singapore. The Trade Desk flew most of their employees to Singapore for their annual week long event called Palooza. The week was quite interesting - I met a lot of my colleagues/team mates from my org, cross-org as well as people from the business side of things, trying to understand what they’ve been up to. It’s been about 7 months with The Trade Desk and working with internal developer team means that you often tend to lose sight of what’s happening at the bigger company level direction, this was a great way to figure out and make sense of what’s upcoming.

  • My flight to Singapore and back was via Qantas. My onward flight seemed to be a newer airplane and each seat had their own iPad that you could attach to the headrest. I carry my iPad for inflight stuff, so being able to attach my iPad to the back of the headrest was a nice feature. The return flight did not have the iPad.

  • I got to stay in Marina Bay Sands! The hotel/resort is pretty massive and gives me the same vibes as the Venetian at Las Vegas, albeit at a much smaller scale. The food court had some awesome shops at quite reasonable rates.

  • The best part about staying in Marina Bay Sands is the access to the infinity pool. I don’t swim but was nice to sit but the pool and relax at night, enjoying the cool breeze which is a rare thing in Singapore.

  • I didn’t explore a lot of Singapore as our days were jam packed with sessions/talks and there were other events in the evening. That said, I did get to check out Gardens by the Bay on the day that I arrived. Check out the pics on my pixelfed. The Gardens are quite expansive and have thematic sections spread out. The Gardens have a great sound and light show, I would highly recommend heading over there to check it out.

  • On one of the days, we went out for dinner to Jumbo seafood for some awesome fish/crab/lobsters. While heading back, we met few other folks from The Trade Desk and the next thing you know, we’re in a karaoke bar and I’ve got the mic on my hand. I figured what the hell anyway and started singing! Was great fun!

  • When checking in, I asked if the hotel could arrange for late checkout since my flight was much, much later than checkout. Sadly I couldn’t secure it, the staff told me the rooms were booked out. I thought of heading to the airport early (soon after checkout), do a bag drop and then I would be free to check out Changi airport. When I reached the airport at the airline counter, I was told the bag drop would only open 3 hours prior to departure. I didn’t want to lug my bag around (it’s a small suitcase, nevertheless pushing it around is annoying) but had no choice. I went over to Jewel and spotted an early check-in and bag drop counter, and thankfully I was able to do a bag drop early! The indoor waterfall is pretty nice but was just too crowded. After an entire week of talking and meeting, I wanted to some timeoff from talking (lol) and went over to the lounge and spent time there watching Drive To Survive.

• Speaking of which, the new season of Formula 1 starts next week and I’m curious to see how this will pan out. Being down under, I expect to miss many of the races due to timezone and will mostly catch the highlights.

  • F1 TV Pro is available in India on a subscription basis at a rate of Rs 3000 per year. One of the side effects of this is that Hotstar will no longer stream F1 in India, neither will any channel so leaving Indians with the only way to watch F1 by means of F1 TV subscription. Not sure how many will subscribe given that the rate is fairly high compared to the other providers that have a much broader set of things to watch.

  • Meanwhile, here in Australia, F1 TV Pro is not available since Foxtel has exclusive rights and the scumtards have made Sports as an add-on package, resulting in a very expensive subscription option.

    I’m not sure what I will do for now, let’s see when the season starts.

  • I’ve seen 8 episodes of Drive to Survive Season 5, and I’m fairly happy with the new season. One of the things I’m grateful for about the new season is that Will Buxton is less annoying this time makes for a decent watch. I’ll reserve final thoughts for next week.

Link of the week #

No link for this week, but I am experimenting with Substack as an alternative destination for the weekly notes so people can subscribe to email. I might also consider using some other tool instead of Substack for subscribe to email, but let’s see. So if you wish to subscribe via email to my blog instead of using RSS, check out my Substack page.