Making new friends in India

This is a worker at my hotel who helped me replace my laptop hard drive. It was 4 am and I had given up because I didn't have a small screwdriver. We tried everything. Finally, he creatively used pliers and a large screwdriver to replace my Sony laptop hard drive. Not an easy thing to do.

I had a 250 gb ocz solid state hard drive. It's fast for email usage, but turns out it's horrible for doing any type of development work. Suresh and I swapped hard drives. He gave me his 7200 rpm laptop drive, and I gave him my solid state. He was happy cause he got the better end of the deal. I was happy cause I could code again.

That's a rickshaw. It's the preferred vehicle of choice when traveling short distances.

Rajesh and Karthik from Sun convinced me to ride one with them. All three of us have big butts, so it was quite a squeeze.

It felt a lot like the Indiana Jones ride at Disney.

They took me out to a nice Indian restaurant. I spent a lot of time with the developers on the Sun portal team as part of our collaboration with Sun. They are a smart bunch of guys and gals.

Oh, and the food was really good.

We decided to walk back to the Sun campus because we ate too much. It was fun wandering the streets of Bangalore.

A bunch of us in an elevator. I'm surprised we fit.

I had dinner with the other JAX speakers. I got to hear Keith and Craig argue about JPA vs. JDO. Craig is the spec lead for JDO and Keith is a spec member for JPA. Ken talked about how he loves to fly his private plane. And the Ruby guys kept making obscene jokes.

On my way to the airport, I got to meet the guys from mPower. They've implemented a lot of Liferay solutions the last few years. One of them is www.inikah.com, a marriage website for Muslims. They also gave me flowers when I met them. I've never gotten flowers before. Caris, I don't think you need to worry.

They made us some yummy lamb and chicken. I didn't feel comfortable eating rice with my hands though, so I had to use a spoon.

And last but not least, I got to make new friends with folks from our new Indian office. It was a fun week.

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On the lighter side the 4am thing that you have mentioned is definitely something you will find in India only. And that too not on hourly basis emoticon
Thanks for sharing the snaps though.