Hello and Welcome to Sugar Mountain!

Release day with a big R!
A lot of great work to be released.

The wakeup call did not wake me today, so I hade only 20min to get my shit together and have some breakfast before Ram would come by and pick me up. I managed to get a toast and two cups of coffee before it was time to join Ram on his tripp to the office.
Once at the office I noticed something, every time we come to the office the parking lot is empty, and the same when we go home! Ram, you need to go home earlier!
In the morning between 9AM to 2PM we hade three interviews with some potential developers(with great interest in creating cool web GUI:s) to join the team down here. We even managed to talk to the guy who was involved in the car accident on his way from Chennai to Bangalore for the interview last saturday, and we have chosen to meet two out of three again next week to get a better feel on who they are and what they love.

At 2PM we hade a great meeting regarding frontend coding and Technical Debt meetings. The outcome of the meeting is that we shall test the Mikado method by @ellnestam and @danielbrolund to start paying of some technical debt. We also hade a great discussion regarding how we can get better at validating the xHTML and Javascript code that we create. I’m certain this will turn out into something great!

After the meeting is was time for me and Ramesh to get some lunch, we thought we’d go to Melanies favorite veggie restaurant but unfortunatly it was closed.. So it had to be the Bayleaf, the resturant I hade promised not to eat at on this trip..Well we’ll see.
On the way to the restaurant I told Ram that I have promised my son to take a picture of a cow in the middle of the street. Ram then started talking, in swedish, about a queue on the way to the office today:
- “I saw this big queue before I picked you up at the hotel”, Ram said.
-”What! A queue”, I said, thinking a queue in Bangalore was not something to call home about.
- “Yes, it was really big. A male queue”, Ram says.

Ok, so the thing is that Ram swedish has really taken a nose dive to the worse these 1.5years he’s been back in Bangalore, I think it’s about time to send him on a swedish course.
Ram, cow is “ko” and “kö” is queue!

After lunch we started doing some final tests before the release tonight, and at 6:30PM it was time for the Release Information. It was really great that we could join, all of us really liked it. Adarsh and Appa fixed some sweet indian sweets, Mango juice and some really hot chips for the show.
When Lena started to talk about the new version of Projectplace Plugin something happend with Ram, he started screaming “Start of the year, that’s me.. that’s me”.. Well the development time has almost been a year so I guess it’s not more the fair, and luckily the microphone was muted.

After the meeting the gang started looking at different things, I heard talks about one of the SMART Q4 goals, some wave stuff and such. By the way, is there anyone out there using Safari Version 4.0.3 (6531.9) on Mac OSX 10.6.2 gettings a nice malicious software warning at http://www.topachievement.com/smart.html , it does not really go hand in hand with the name of the site!? Or possibly the question shall be, is there anyone out there reading this blog?

So time flies when you are having fun, all of a sudden 10:30PM and time for Release. It was really fun to see, 10-15minutes before the release it was dead calm, but the second the mail from Christopher came it all exploded! People were running around talking to each other, a par fixing one bug calling for help from another par, Ram talking to Christopher looking for logfiles etc etc.

So we were fixing bugs and testing until 2AM in the morning, we had a chat with Barry, Lena and Per and after that the gang down here went home. Me and Ram stayed behind for a couple of minutes… Now this is something we should not have done!
At 01:58 me and Ram stepped into the elevator, going from the fourth floor to the entrance level. All of a sudden the elevator stops and we are stuck.. Ram started laughing hysterically and saying things like “It’s all your fault! Why does all the bad things happens when you Olle are here?”etc etc.. After a minute or two Ram calms down a bit, but still really happy, and we start screaming to see if there is someone left in the building who can help us. Ram screams “I can’t breath”(this was due to his laughter), and then we hear someone calling on us to be calm and that they would fix it. And so they did, the elevator had got stuck so the elevator cart was halfway on the entrence floor, the guys outside managed to open the doors manually and we could crawl out and jump out of the elevator, felt like John Mcclane. I bet Ram is stil laughing about this, since the elevator does still not work today Wednesday at 11:11AM.

Day 5 Wednesday

The morning started with me checking out of the hotel. Prasad had promised to come by to get me since Ram had to leave his mother at the bus station at 07:30AM and I had refused to get up that early! Before I left the hotel, the hotel manager came down to me to ask how my stay have been. The only thing I complained about was the weather. And as Alanis Morissette would put it, And isn’t it ironic… don’t you think, that is has been raining for 4 day, and the hotel has a pool, and on the fifth and last day it’s sunshine and hot and I’m going home.. No pool for you the gods seem to say.

Talking about gods, an interesting fact is that Lord Krishna has 16008 wifes! It’s true, Jayesh told me, and Suprita told me that he’s not really married to all of them. The woman simply feels that they belong to him. Being a love god seams like a pleasant life.
The gods thing seems to be a big thing down here. When I asked Prasad in the car on the way to the office if he knew that Lord Krishna had 16008 wifes(he knew surprise, surprise ) he started telling me about the time when his body was taken over by a dead grandfather.
Apparently every year his family has a big ceremony for dead relatives in his home village, where they somehow try to get in contact with the dead ones. They fast for something like 7days and occasionally a dead relative takes over the body of the dead relatives favorite relative. They stand in a ring, have drums and fluets that eco through the night(this can be scary to kids Prasad says). The ones not been taken over by a dead relative, sometimes get really angry and starts to hit themselves with big knifes leading to big wounds in the front of their heads(also scary for kids). But luckily the one who has been taken over by the dead grandfather, in this case, can calm the angry ones down and eventually all chill down.
But still being under influence of the religious moment, some people can do crazy shit. Prasad has a cousin that always, after he has been hitting himself in the head with the big knife, wants to take a bath.. So one year he jumped down into the village well! So now it’s somewhat of a tradition that the family always brings out a big bowl of water for him to use instead before the ritual starts.
Another thing to handle for the family is that big parts of the males in the family have big bleeding holes in their for heads,  but they have a solution for this as well. In the temple they have a mixture of different things to put on the wound, and the main ingredient is cow shit.  Make one thing about all the “oil of oley” shit we buy.

Now it’s time for me and Ram to have a meeting with the Blue Star people, after  that probably fix some eventual bugs and then take a trip to the airport for the flight home.

As always it’s great to be down here in Bangalore and work with the great people of Projectplace, but it will sure be nice to come back home and meet the family!