India

Okay, now I’m just getting tired. Fortunately, this is the last working day of the trip.

Spent the entire day in the hotel working yesterday, and the same will be true today. Not too many interesting impressions to report. Yesterday, I talked for about two hours in the morning about sales, and for about five hours in the afternoon about how to build clusters. The students had mini-clusters (one portal, one node) and almost but not quite enough hardware to get them running. We were strapped for power, network, etc. I cobbled together one complete system for my demo, but they weren’t so lucky.

I’m getting the impression that my training just needs to be more than half a day. If I’m going to have people build clusters under my tutelage, I can guide one or two of them through the process in a few hours. It seems to take half a day to overcome the obstacles of connecting to a headless server, configure a network using that same network, and getting clean OS images onto a number of nodes.

In my continuing quest to stay in shape despite being a serious road warrior, I hit the fitness center in the hotel yesterday morning. It’s a hotel fitness center. Yay. Turns out that the mundane aspects of travel are generally the same, around the world. Unless the hotel is making some sort of concentrated push to provide unique and awesome experiences, all the little annoyances are still there. Again, duh.

They have no concept of decaf in India. Anything ending in “caf” is assumed to be the westerner mispronouncing “coffee,” and leads to a steaming cup of pure, steaming, twitching awakeness.

On the plus side, fully half of every buffet they’ve provided me has been vegetarian. Mmmm.

Had my laundry done by the hotel. This is actually a first for me, but I think it’s a sustainable alternative to packing crazy amounts of clothing. I have no idea how much it cost me, but it was worth it. When the laundry guy delivered my clothing, words like “fawning” and “obsequeous” spring to mind. He insisted on laying out my clothing on the bed with phrases like “very whiteness” (socks), “no tumble dry, no color bleed” (t-shirts), “much starching, processed with my own hands” (dress shirts). Once I tipped him, the grovelling stopped and he let me put my clothes away.

Decent dinner last night in the Chinese restaurant in the hotel. The Chinese and Singaporian people from Apple were doubtful at first (“we come to India and eat at a Chinese restaurant?”) but the food proved up to the task.

After that, we stayed up until 12:30 building a single large cluster out of the training machines. This will be our demo for the series of “key customer meetings” today. This revealed other fun and interesting things about the hardware we had used for the training, like DHCP was blocked at the switch, and the servers had a “flake out and die” rate of about 30%. Poor students, here I was assuming that those things were my fault.

I think I worked about as effectively as I ever have. The two apple guys basically did everything that involved physical movement, shifting drives, moving wires, and checking lights. I had four terminals open, to four different spots in the configuration of various machines. I just thought aloud, making requests from time to time and typing constantly, and we slapped a working cluster together out of crappy parts in under two hours. Maybe I actually am good at this stuff.

Today we had a fairly brutal meeting in the morning (aggressive customer who wanted placation. The Apple guys were bowing and saying “yes sir” all the time. I decided that the better part of valor was to stand up to him. It was rough. Then we had a larger format customer seminar. Maybe 25 people from a variety of groups.

This afternoon, more meetings. I’ve got a couple of hours to myself now. Maybe time for a swim.

All day, I’ve had Paul Simon’s “Call me Al” in my head. “He is a foreign man, he is surrounded by the sounds, the sounds, cattle in the marketplace, scatterings from orphanages. He looks around, around, sees angels in the architecture, spinning in infinity, says ‘amen, hallelujah.'”

I would like to see some angels in the architecture. Maybe tomorrow.