I went to the doctor’s office on Monday and told them about my nagging cough. Turns out they had this nice graphic on the wall that says the cough will go away in about two weeks. Bummer, I could have saved $10 reading about that on the Internet. I guess the saving grace of it all is that:

a. Work gave me an iPad 2!
b. After Thursday is over my life will be infinitely better
c. K is now working at Google
d. After sickness and this conference, the next problem to tackle is what gift to give all of our wedding guests.

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Summer Sickness

I’m taking a class at work about leadership and got a chance to read a bit of Strengthfinder 2.0. You get to take an online assessment and above are my five strengths. I’ve lately done a fair amount of self-analysis such as True Colors and Myers-Briggs and I think it’s been pretty useful to get some academic pointers on acting as an effective manager and leader. On the other hand, I think you can talk about your personality all day but in the end it really boils down to how you act during the workday and how you interact with a multitude of colleagues, execute on a project, etc. No book can really teach you that. I think instead, these courses help me reflect on my own personality and helps me understand what type of manager I am. And if you’re curious, I tested as ESTJ in mBTI. Not sure where I was going with this, but this has been something on my mind the past few days.

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Top 5 Strengths according to Strengthfinder

From Hyderabad 2010

A burlap sack of tea. Tea in India is SUPER CHEAP and on previous trips I’ve brought it home and then ended up not drinking any of it. I’m not a big tea drinker and it’s actually very time consuming to even drink 100 grams of tea (which costs like $1 if you get a less expensive brand). So, no more tea bringing back for me!

From Hyderabad 2010

Since Mohith went to grad school in Texas, there was a football around the office. Albert spent some time showing the guys how to properly throw a football, which was harder to grasp since they were so used to cricket-style throwing. The entertainment also proved interesting to the workers behind the office who were dangerously constructing some steel overhang/thingy for some generators.

From Hyderabad 2010

Why I was in India.

Well, that was a lot less detail than I probably would have written a few weeks ago, but a lot has happened since I went to India so I don’t remember much. Thanks again to the guys for taking me out. I finally was able to go to Ten Downing and see what the deal was with karaoke night there. I also go to finally go to Creamstone and have some pretty delicious ice cream. And of course the food was excellent. I’m still missing the food. Hope to be back sometime in 2011!

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Hyderabad 2010

Plans are still open for my one free weekend so we’ll see what there is to do. That is all for now!

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Hyderabad

Last week I went to Krakow, Poland for a week-long offsite with my global management team. It was a tiring but worthwhile experience, both professionally and to visit a lesser known but still beautiful city. I flew out on Friday and arrived Saturday evening after connecting in Frankfurt. I ended up sitting next to my teammate Albert on the flight and watched “Streetdance”, “Karate Kid”, and “Grown Ups” on the flight over. All mediocre movies. We had a 6 hour layover in Frankfurt. Let me start by saying that the airport there is horrible. The layout doesn’t make sense – in order to get to certain restaurants, you actually have to go through immigration and sometimes, security. We passed through security 3 times to get to McDonalds and sat on some very stiff seats to kill the time. On our connecting flight to Krakow we met up with Rahul who had smartly flown out later on Friday and took a short flight over to Krakow.

When we landed our only directions to the apartment was a print out I had quickly made before leaving – so, we showed our driver the street intersection where the apartment was located. Expecting a building sign that said “Krakow Apartments” we instead found..nothing. We released our driver and walked around aimlessly looking for the apartment before running into a Polish student who we asked for directions. She was more than helpful and I guess a little bored, because she walked around with us, called us a cab to get to another address where we thought we should be, and then another cab to go back to our original location. Our teammate from India eventually called Rahul and said she had been in the apartment this entire time! So, we came to the apartment, which was part of an unmarked building we had walked by a few times that evening. The apartment was a 5 bedroom place that we would share amongst 8 people.

* Food

Had a mixed bag of meals on the trip. Pierogis at some traditional Polish restaurants were fantastic. There were 3 that I had – mushroom/cabbage, meat, and cheese. The meat dumplings were so-so, I feel that I prefer the thinner wrappings on Chinese dumplings plus some onions in the meat filling. Mushroom/cabbage dumplings were actually quite delicious and one thing I could tell about Polish food is that it’s all locally grown. There were hardly any giant markets that I saw around Krakow. Really delicious meals included a nice sized piece of beef or pork along with some cabbage and potatoes. On the other spectrum, I had some weird cranberry sauce along with turkey, which was like a traditional Thanksgiving meal but just didn’t taste very good. We had very poor service at this restaurant called Wesele (despite being Michelin guide recommended!) and during on Auschwitz/Salt Mine tour, ended up getting 4 orders of pierogis instead of 1, meaning we had 40 to eat instead of just 10 to share!

One night, Aruna actually made us Pav Bhaji! It was really delicious and it was the first meal Kolina and I tried to cook when I got back. It didn’t turn out that great =\

From Krakow and Auschwitz

* Work

Spent a lot of hours at the office but learned a lot. We took a very short breaks to play ping pong or escape to the microkitchen for some food.

From Krakow and Auschwitz

* Around the City

Didn’t get to explore or walk around the city as much as I would have liked. We basically walked 10 minutes from the apartment to the office everyday. It was in the city centre so we got to see the busiest place throughout the day. On Sunday we saw Wawel Castle but didn’t get to go to the Jewish district or see any of the museums. A jazz club at night was pretty relaxing, but I guess between work and not much sleep, I didn’t get to see as much as I would have liked. I do think I’d like to spend another day or two exploring Krakow if I ever got the chance. It’s a very nice, less visited city.

On Thursday we spent a few hours doing a fun activity. The surprise (since I didn’t organize it) was a “Communist Tour” around Nowa Huta, which I learned was a communist built district of Krakow. The tour was a bit ‘alternative’, meaning we rode in a bus normally used for bachelor parties and a very old Trebant from the 1970s. On the way back it actually broke down and we got out, pushed the car off the road, and then hailed a cab to get back to the office. We also saw an old communist built apartment and received a brief history lesson on the place.

From Krakow and Auschwitz

From Krakow and Auschwitz

The city centre was very nicely lit at night:

From Krakow and Auschwitz

And that’s about it! We flew back on Saturday and got stuck on the ground for 2 hours in Krakow. Albert and I missed our connection to San Francisco and stood in line for 7 hours (!) trying to get new tickets. We could have easily gotten onto Rahul’s flight but there are so many things wrong with airline ticketing that he rode off in an empty plane while we were stuck in line. We finally got rebooked for the first flight out the next morning and spent an uneventful night in Frankfurt.

Surprisingly, I did not have any problems with jet-lag when I came back. My guess is that I never got over jetlag when I flew to Krakow in the first place! Lots of 3am/5am mornings and despite the little sleep, I made it through the week.

Thanks for reading. I’ll blog about Auschwitz in another post.

Post from: Read Reid's Blog

Krakow

From Sonoma Team Offsite

From Sonoma Team Offsite

Besides the nice views, I wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend these wines and still prefer my favorites like Cakebread, Michel-Schlumberger, Seghesio, etc.

Probably the highlight was spending the late afternoon / evening at a gigantic home in Sonoma. Dan and Mark fooled around on the basketball hoop:

From Sonoma Team Offsite

We cooked a lot of food, like bacon wrapped asparagus, grilled pineapples, mac n cheese:

From Sonoma Team Offsite

And also ate some burritos, went swimming and hot tubbing, and played pool.

So all in all, a good Sunday.

This Sunday is Labor Day and despite a 3 day weekend, I stayed in town and am relaxing and taking it easy. Work has been hectic and planning a wedding is a lot of work! At least for the latter, we’re very very close to finalizing our venues!!

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Sonoma last Sunday

I learned a lot in the process, but I got to say that I have a lot of respect for engineers who deal with things like this on a daily basis. Sometimes the answer is so stupidly simple. But, when the problem is solved, you feel so great!

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Foray into “coding”

Heading back to California tomorrow and will land around 2PM. Can’t wait! I always seem to miss the food when I’m gone. Is it sad that I’m craving Taco Bell?

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This week in Dublin

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Why I love working at Google

Luckily, this year, Kolina took charge and created some awesome, home-made Max Costumes! You can read all about it on her blog post and check out the photos, so I won’t cover those details. Instead, a quick recap of the weekend, Halloween-wise:

Googleween

So, I dressed up for work on Friday in my Max Costume. It was definitely well-received, with one person even asking me where I bought it. The best part was when Sophia and I were late to call into a meeting with about 20 people. Nobody in the other room was dressed up, so when we showed up on the projector, the conversation immediately stopped and the meeting lead said “Wow, what are you?”

My pictures are here, but here are some of my favorites:

For obvious reasons:

From Googleween 2009

Henri was a banana!! Nelson was also a Max!

From Googleween 2009

My coworkers had such awesome costumes:

From Googleween 2009

Gregory, who I traveled around Goa with, is ON A BOAT:

From Googleween 2009

San Francisco:
On Saturday, I headed up to San Francisco with some friends. We first stopped at Selfedge, where Eric and I purchased Imperial Dukes. They are an incredibly tight pair of raw denim I’ll no doubt wearing in over the next few months (while I wait for repairs on my Samurai’s.

We enjoyed a nice meal at Delfina Pizzeria after more than a one hour wait (yes, it was worth it). We then headed to Suede for a Halloween party – I ran into a few folks I knew from Stanford and had a generally good time, despite the loud music and being really hot in my costume. We got several more compliments about our costumes, so that was worth it :)

So Halloween was successful, since Kolina spent so much time putting together such awesome costumes.

Sunday was almost a day of recovery, before Wilmot and I went cycling around the South Bay. More about that later in another blog post.

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Halloween Weekend!