Earlier in the week we had rainy weather, courtesy of a cyclone blowing up from Sri Lanka.   That storm brought strong winds blowing from the south. 

The door on our top balcony faces south and suffers from the same endemic lack of quality as everything here. The result was an indoor waterfall. The rain came in around the door, ran across the third floor landing and then cascaded down to the ground floor, pooling at the foot of the stairs. As all our floors a marble, it became extremely difficult to walk. Max was screaming because he slipped and fell on his head.

The door was installed incorrectly.  When the wind drives the rain against the door, the water runs into the house.  I need to find a carpenter who can replace the door (it is warped) and redo the door jams as that the rain will run off to the outside.  Otherwise we have this to look forward to each time it rains.

Today is the tenth anniversary of joining my current employer.  If I had been told then that I would still be working for the company and that they would send  me to India I am not sure I would have believed it.  My plan back then was to work here for 6 months and then go work for a dot com startup.  The CFO back then was very wise and predicted the collapse of the boom and convinced me to stay.    

Over the past few weeks this job has been exhausting and all consuming.  That is the reason for the lack of posts.  Back then it was hard to imagine being at the same job for 10 years.  Now it is not so hard to imagine being here in another 10 years, but only time will tell.

If you are reading this then you are seeing my site running on a new server.   My old host (WebHost4Life) seemed to just get slower each week to the point where I was hearing about it from readers.   Researching web hosting services is difficult because there seems to be a lack of credibility across all the services that offer comparisons.   

My new host is DiscountASP.net which I chose because  it has many good reviews from developers I read as well as top hosting service recognitions from developer magazines.

It seems like the right balance of features, performance and cost.   I had hoped that WebHost4Life would in fact be for life, but it is just too slow.

Please let me know how the site performs or if there are any problems. 

A member of my team flew into Chennai over the weekend.   For the last three weeks Jayashree had been getting packages from Amazon containing replacements to electronics that had been destroyed by the horrible electrical system here.   That list included replacement power supplies for our Xbox and Wii consoles.   I added one small treat to the list, a pair of Skull Candy Full Metal Jacket headphones.  I am impressed to the point that I have to spend a few minutes raving about how good these headphones feel and sound.

They are an in-ear design and come with three different size gel ear sleeves.  The ear bud is all metal (hence the name Full Metal Jacket).   The sound quality is amazing for head phones.  There are two size of speakers, I chose the larger 11mm over the 9mm.  I have been using the standard issue iPod headphones and they aren’t low quality, but these are far superior.   I started off listening to the Grateful Dead’s “Sugar Magnolia” and Jerry’s guitar really comes through.  I switched back to the iPod phones and everything sounds a bit more muddled.   This is impressive considering my ears have been surgically repaired and even now don’t work too well.

For the next test I chose Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.   The piece has a strong cello foundation that cause my old phones to crackle at high volume.   The FMJ phones remained crystal clear even max volume.

The SkullCandy website targets the punk rock set and I finished off the test with “Rocky Road to Dublin” by the Dropkick Murphys.   I usually listen to DKM at full volume and the Skull Candy buds lived up to expectation.  Very clear, absolutely no distortion.

Due to permanent tinnitus (ringing ears), I prefer to keep headphones on as much as possible, and these are a great way to go.  Very comfortable and high quality.

 

I am envious of Joshua.  Monday night he took the overnight train to the heart of south India.   He is on a field trip with his school to a place called Mis'tea Hills, a campground up in the Western Ghat's near the hill station called Ooty.    He is due back on Friday morning.    I had imagined he and I  taking a journey on the train, a weekend away from the girls (leaving Max in charge).   The school beat me to it, but I am excited to read his stories.   He is traveling "AC 3-tier" which is an air conditioned coach that has a padded bench to sit on below an overhead bunk.  At bed time the back of the bench folds up to make a third bunk.   The school reserved an entire car for the students.   As much as I wish I was with Joshua on that train, I do not envy the chaperones.   It is hard enough to get any sleep on a train, without 45 kids on their first Indian Railways adventure.

As for me, I flew to Kolkata this morning.   On the cover of the newspaper was a minor mention of a "work slowdown" at all the airports tomorrow.   Hopefully my flight out will not get cancelled.

And the home front with the men all gone?  No problems, they say they don't even miss us.

 

She was dressed in black silk interwoven with gold thread.   She shimmered in the morning sun as she walked.  We were driving up the sidewalk, shortcutting past a slow stoplight.   We sounded the horn to scatter the others out of our way, then we came up behind her. Bweeep beep went our horn, but she flicked her head around in a motion that sent her black hair and black silk fluttering in an arc.   She gave my driver a look that ended his honking.  For good measure she gave me the same look.  We formed a quiet procession behind her stately walk. 

The cars on the street raced by.  The light had turned green.

I have a rule of not responding to "blog tags", where someone tags you to write about something and then tag a number of others to do likewise.   But, I got tagged by my nephew Skylar to "write six things you love about yourself".   Since I really like Sky I will play along, plus I just found out that Sky's aunt Gabrielle has a blog. 

Gabrielle:  Consider yourself tagged.

Now this is a difficult topic to write about.  My mother would tell you "Oh, Shawn has no problem listing the things he loves about himself." But that is not the problem.  That topic would induce nausea and vomiting and I don't want any puke on my new site design.  I was going to just copy Skylars, but "Curly Hair", "Good at rebounds", "Loves playing tackle football" is not something I could claim for myself.

Instead, I did a little detective work and found the comment entry where Sky was tagged and found out that the rule is "Write 6 interesting things about yourself, then tag 6 people to do the same".   Much easier to digest.

Enough dithering, here is my list of 6:

1. I LIVE IN INDIA!!!!  I was walking up a little tree lined street on my way up to the highway to catch an autorickshaw to Sarah's soccer game against Bombay and stopped to play cricket with some kids on the street.   Ever day I find a new reason to like being here.  Once in a while I find something that I don't like or wish were different.  The score is certainly in favor of this being a great experience.
   
   
2. Oh, did I mention that my family is here also?  I started this blog 3 years ago so that my family could read what I was doing in India while they were back home in Arizona.   Now they are sharing in the adventure.  I wouldn't want it any other way.
   
   
3. Speaking of adventure, Joshua and I are planning a hiking trip in the Himalayas.  We will be up higher than almost any place outside the Himalayas on the slopes of the 3rd highest peak in the world.     10-15 days total, April 2009.  Open invitation to anyone who wants to fly over and come along.
   
   
4. I have a rule about my work that I set a month into my current job.  That rule is "If I go 5 days in a row of not liking my job then I will quit".  I am three weeks away from 10 years at that same company and the closest I ever got was 3 days back in 2000.  It is a wonderful blessing to love what I do.  Sometimes I love it too much, but that is another post.
   
   
5. I also have the best job in my church.  I don't write much about church things here, maybe that will change, but my job is to work with young men age 12-18.  There are about 50 in our not-so-little branch here.  Most live in youth hostels. All are wonderful and it is the highlight of my week to spend a couple hours with them each Sunday.  Back in Arizona there were much more qualified people doing this job, but they let me tag along whenever I wanted and that was very good training.
   
   
6. The only part missing is a couple steps closer to being here.  Nothing final, and I hope I don't jinx anything, but we are making progress on getting Ian to India.  Ian is my 12 year old son who lives in Utah.   We are close to the "Not if, but when" phase.  Here's hoping.

That was harder than I thought.  Now, I will use this for good.  I have had many comments wondering when my much more eloquent and intelligent wife will jump into blogging.  I will tag her, along with Joshua and Sarah.  Those three along with Gabe are 4 of my 6.  I will hold onto the other 2 and consider my options....

Thanks to Sky for the tag and keep up the blogging.  I would link to his blog, but it is invite only.  Popular people have to take precautions, the paparazzi and all.  You know how it is.

I climbed down from the soap box to redesign my site.  The rants about India will return shortly.

I am a bit of a font-junkie, and a big fan of Wes Anderson movies.   Wes Anderson is a bit obsessive about fonts in his movies, or at least has one font that gets used for everything.  The Futura font family is used throughout his movies.  In case you don't have a working knowledge of wierd directors, his movies are "Bottle Rocket", "Rushmore", "The Royal Tenenbaums", "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" and his latest "The Darjeeling Limited".   The font has a nice symmetry and simplicity that I find appealing.   I had a bit of a Wes Anderson Film Fest today in honor of the arrival of his latest, The Darjeeling Limited.


Futura Bold used in "The Royal Tenenbaums"

The result is a new design that incorporates as much Futura as I could.    I was also getting tired of the mostly white and grey design I have had up for the last few years.  That site also had problems with different screen widths.

Please let me know if you have any problems or comments with this new design.   I had to edit the content of a couple of recent posts to fix a problem with the font color.  Apologies if that caused some readers to show the items as new and unread.