Friday, May 25, 2007

London, Life, Work and more...

After my 3 months of UK stay at Ipswich, I've moved to London from May 1st for a new assignment with Apna Company. New place, new office, new people, new house (yes, on rent!). Aana Kalakalaye Kasi! Unlike Ipswich, London is on the expensive side and my purse is pinching me at lot these days!!! Also it was a sudden shift from my slow paced life/work style at Ipswich to London's fast track workstyle involving a 2 hr plus to and fro travel to central London from my house. During peak hours, the underground stations are crowded and very busy. Perhaps I should dedicate a new post to the London's underground maze and my experiments with tube-hopping-and-bus-travel- combo!

Thanks to my new work profile, excepting first weekend in May, I haven't spent any of the subsequent weekends eventfully as I did before (see below):

6, 7, 8 and 9th April: Scotland Trip

14th April: Nagarathar’s meet, Leicester
15th April: Kannan Annan’s place at Chesterfield, drive around Peak district and Chatsworth Palace

21st and 22nd April: One more London tour with the gang (Arpita, Nash, Sujata, Sachin, and Mithun)

28th April: Gosh, again to London! LSE Auditorium to attend TCS’ Reach Out session

30th April Evening: London again! Nah, this time it’s a relocation baby!!!

7 and 8th May: Trip to Birmingham, Blackpool and Lake District with the gang.
9th May (on holiday): Office. 13th May: Ipswich. Evening, accompanied Arpita to recieve her mom at Heathrow.
14th May: London, at AC's relatives place.

21st May(sat'day): After seeing the gala atmosphere and supporters crowd of Man-U vs. Chelsea FA cup finals atmosphere in Wembley Park stadium near my house in the morning, half heartedly had to go office.

Phew!! These were like my itinerary for the weekends from April.

In my new role, I am donning the role of a Developer, which is breaking almost my 2 year long vrat of hard core non-coding work. Initially I was bit reluctant, as I was pulled in when the project was undergoing critical phase with resource crunch and stringent delivery deadlines. It was tremendous learning for me, the work kept me on my toes as it heavily relied on detailed understanding of requirements (they kept on changing every now and then!) from the client folks. Thanks to some great people here, my work became 'approachable' from day 1 itself! I must admit that I tdid good amount of homework to catch up things fast and by learning new stuff. And then there were always friends of mine, who have worked on similar technology before to help me out when in need. Given these catalysts and favorable environment, yours truly now was able to deliver the second phase reports, ready for UAT (User Acceptance Testing) three days ahead of the estimated time schedule! It was challenging and now I am enjoying doing this and looking forward to implement the same in Business Objects.