Author: geoff

I’m just wrapping up here at the Sun Prague office, after a full day of meetings. Most of them were on technical or business topics, but Roumen (or Roman) scheduled a session with a number of the bloggers here in Prague. (I didn’t get everyone’s name: please leave a comment if you were there, and I’ll add you to my blogroll.)
In a few minutes I’ll don sweatshirt and jacket (it’s warmed up a bit, but it’s still -4C), walk down the hill to my hotel, have dinner, pack, and hit the sack. I’m booked on a 6:50 AM LH A320 to Frankfurt tomorrow, connecting with an LH 747-400 to Denver. If all goes well, I’ll be arriving there at 3:25 PM. And the temperature is forecast to be 12C, which will make a nice change. I hope I can sleep on the flight, since I’ve got a dinner engagement in Louisville tomorrow evening!
And thanks to all who took the time to meet with me here in Prague. (And also to those I met in Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Pune.) I’m looking forward to our next face-to-face discussions, hopefully in the summer.

Monday was a very full day of meetings at the Prague office. I began by walking the 10 minutes from the hotel to the office, thinking “Oh good – this is going to be convenient!”, and then getting a presentation from the site director on how they’re about to start moving everyone to a new – much larger – facility! Next time I visit, I’ll have to learn a new pattern.

Next I met with some of the managers at the site, which really brought home to me the growing diversity of our operations in Prague. This isn’t just NetBeans any more. After lunch, I addressed an all-hands meeting. As in Hyderabad, I finished with Q&A, and initially no-one spoke. After I’d worked the crowd for a while, someone piped up hesitantly, and within a few minutes we were discussing some interesting topics. I wish I knew the trick to short-circuiting that initial silent period, if there is one.
Because it’s not as if this group is shy. After the all-hands I had four more meetings with various groups and individuals, and then I went out to dinner with a bunch of the participants in the SEED program. On each occasion, everyone was talkative, forthright, and not afraid of controversial topics. I had a really great time. At the restaurant/bar, the beer was first-rate, and to ensure we had our priorities straight the entire ceiling was covered in bottles, as shown here….



So here I am at the office. It’s 7:53am on Tuesday morning: the security guard looked surprised to see me, and I doubt that anyone else is in the office yet. I expect that many people here start late and end late, to maximize overlap with colleagues in the USA. Never mind: it’s a good opportunity to catch up with my email (127 unread) and blog, before my meetings begin.

I’ve ranted about Lufthansa enough, so I think I’ll omit the blow-by-blow account of my journey from Bangalore. I will, however, note that my day trip to Pune was on Sahara Air – they fly various combinations of BLR/PNQ/HYD service using CRJ-200’s – and their evening PNQ-BLR was 55 minutes late. I’d built enough time into the schedule to allow for this, but even so: on future visits to India, I think I’m going to make it a rule not to rely on evening connections on the day I leave.
So back to Europe. The FRA-PRG flight was on a Lufthansa A320 with no more than 30 passengers, which made it a very comfortable 45 minute hop. And they served a simple cheese sandwich – wonderful black bread, sharp cheddar, iceberg lettuce – that was infinitely better than anything they’d provided on the various intercontinental routes. There must be a lesson there.
Arriving in Prague, we pulled in to a rather deserted, obviously new terminal building, and the intrepid band of passengers traversed the jetway and various escalators, breezed through Immigration, and waited for our bags to appear on the carousel. I noticed that one of the passengers had a Sun Networks bag, and about the same time he noticed that I was wearing a bright red Sun Microsystems jacket. It turned out that it was Pavel Suk, the site director in Prague and the host for my visit. He’d just returned from 10 days in California; like me, he was finding the transition to -8C weather something of a shock to the system. The coincidence was convenient, since we were able to share a taxi into the city: Pavel was going to the Sun office, and I was going to the Diplomat Hotel, just a few hundred metres down the road.
I LIKE this hotel. My room is comfortable, and everything just works. OK, Internet access is overpriced and a bit unpredictable, but it’s functional. But the decisive factor was my experience in the CD Club restaurant. After unpacking and taking a shower, I headed downstairs for a relatively early dinner. I’d already checked out the menu on the web, and had picked out (vegetarians avert your eyes) the “veal goulash with black beer, roast chanterelles and ham-dumplings”. You can’t get much more Czech than that. But to complement such a rich combination, I really wanted a simple salad, and they didn’t have one on the menu. All their salads were, frankly, over-elaborate.
So I explained that I wanted a local red wine, the goulash, and a simple salad to go with the goulash. The maitre d’ didn’t bat an eyelid, and moments late I had one of the best mixed salads I’ve ever tasted, with remarkably good tomatoes and cucumbers, and olive oil and balsamic vinegar on the side. The goulash was superb, too, and the very dry red wine balanced the intensity of the veal and mushrooms perfectly. And there was more wonderful black bread, this time with finely chopped nuts stirred into the batter.
(Is this an example of what Terry calls “food porn”?)
Tomorrow I plan to explore the old city – the Stare Mesto. And then on Monday, before I head over to the office, I have to make sure that my laundry is in hand. I deliberately packed light for this trip, and if the hotel doesn’t make good on their same-day service pledge, I’m going to be in some difficulties….

Later this evening I’m going to start packing my bags in preparation for the most complicated bit of this business trip. Tomorrow morning I’ll check out of my hotel (the Royal Orchid) in Bangalore, but I’ll leave my suitcase here. At 7 AM, my driver will take me to the airport to board a flight to Pune. My colleague Vish will meet me at the airport and we’ll drive to the ex-Storability facility just outside the city. After a packed schedule of meetings, I’ll return to the airport and fly back to Bangalore, arriving (hopefully!) at 8:05 PM. My driver will take me back to the Royal Orchid, where I’ll grab a quick dinner and retrieve my suitcase. Finally at about 10 PM I’ll return to Bangalore airport, pay off my driver, and check in for my 2:15 AM flight to Frankfurt. That’s scheduled to land at 8:15 AM local time, and I’ll have a 4 hour layover before my flight to Prague, which I should reach at 1:30 PM.
Whew!
So if all goes well, my next blog entry will be posted from the Diplomat Hotel in Prague, on Saturday afternoon. (However I might post a “Quicky” en route.)