Learning journal (how do you do this?)

Here's some advice. As far as I can tell, I'm doing this, but not in a focused way. So I'll try to increase my focus on these points. http://www.audiencedialogue.net/journal.html

In my own words, things to do in a learning journal:

• make notes about what you learned
• what confused you?
• what is interesting / you want to learn more about
• tag entries by topic for easy retrieval later
• my opinion of how well I'm learning what I'm learning and/or how well it's being taught

Friday

My trainer, Wolter, is having me make a goal spreadsheet, and also recommends keeping a "learning journal" which could be incorporated into my blog. Also, I have to take the online test.

Today before lunch I had my first trainer conference. We went over my interview feedback. Positives- enthusiasm. Negatives- not professional. (There's more, but that's the upshot from my perspective.)

Lunch was tasty, and I sat with some of the Indian people and we talked. My flatmate is a very interesting person. I had fun finding out what I was eating. We talked about cheese.

At the icebreaker, I threw the doll into the ceiling twice in a row... :/

Ron is currently calling C beautiful and gorgeous. O.o

My coworkers read my blog, lol. Hi, coworkers.

Reasons I blog:

• keep my parents in the loop so they don't worry
• my friends can check it out and laugh at me over im later
• make sure that my memories of the day form coherently and are preserved in a useful form
• help out future TWUers in the same way that SGHill's blog helped me http://sghill.blogspot.com/search/label/twu

Bangalore survival & enjoyment presentation

Notes from this morning.

Starting on Monday, we have class at the Royal Orchid. It's down the river away from the gates. Be there at 830.

In N block there is a grocery and laundry.

We had breakfast at a place called the cow standup! It was delicious. Masala dosas and south Indian coffee.

The Manipal hospital is nearby.

hundred-feet road- resturaunts

south on 100 is Axis books.

To get to the Bangalore 2 office, take a shuttle from the 2nd week onwards.

Every city in India has an MG road. The one here is very busy and very broken-down. They're trying to build a metro, which will be done in April and which will improve everything very much.

MG road has lots of shops.

The the corner of Brigate and MG is a handicraft shop - gift shop

Blossons bookstore is on a road which is paralell to MG road.

Gungarams is another bookstore on MG road.

Survival tips

dress modestly.

pay by meter. rickshaws constantly try to rip you off.

busses- big, red, safe, 15 rupees.

schedule trips with the trip planner guy at the office.

hot food. hand sanitizer.

avoid ice- it might not be from safe water

carry tp for non-office toilets

train - win. but slow.

Myseore- couple hr drive

Prices:

b1 to b2 not more than 30 rupees

B1 to MG 40 rupees maximum

trips already set:

Rob - kabini he's at B2

Sahana - elephant camp. 29, 30 Jan.

MRP = maximum retail price - printed on most products.

The start charge for auto is 17 Rp. If the meter shows 13, it's an older meter and isn't converted yet.

2 airport taxi companies - easy cabs & meru. call or go to website. Website is unreliable.

----

our schedule today:

Bangalore presentation

break -

Learning and collaborating at TW

lunch

phones

coaching mtg

Shopa surprise at 5pm

While on break, I talked to my flatmate Pah-vee-thra and a dev guy Car-the (thesaurus) and Juan from Brazil... about the batter buckets at the Elephant Standup... and Chicago... and also some other dude...

70-20-10 rule

Google:

70 regular projects

20 own stuff - but could be business relevant

10 not business related

Princeton:

70 learning - real exp

20 - feedback

10 training

me- graph, cartesian coordinates.

know, don't know (2 matrix)

confident novice

thoughtpedia-public.thoughtworks.com is partially out of date. moving to new system.

thoughtworks google groups - you should join thought communities, especially the one related to your role.

reflexive performer

Networking methods:

Yammer network

facebook groups - TW india

thoughtblogs - very useful blogs.thoughtworks.com rss feed...

twitter - check sumeet's groups... use tweetdeck

delicious... sumeet has 1000s of bookmarks

TW google videos, docs, spreadsheets, presentations

slides.google.com/a/thoughtworks.com

videos- what's cooking tag

adjusting to using a Mac

I restarted my mac so I could get something in Picasa working, but now I can't find eclipse or intelliJ using Finder. So now I'm trying to figure out how to fix that, which would be pretty easy but I'm having trouble understanding the mac filetree because this is my first time...

Backup solution is to reinstall but I'd really rather just fix what's wrong.

Mosquitoes

There was at least one mosquito in my room last night, although from the splat of blood and bug guts on the bed I suspect that I killed it in my sleep. Go me!

I have three large impressive bites on my left arm, and three large impressive bites on my right back-of-hand, and a small but very itchy one on my right elbow... but none anywhere else!

Provided I don't get malaria (unlikely; I'm taking the right pills) I'm still not overly bothered by this distribution of bug bites. There are far worse places to be bitten. I won't go into that.

There's a raised white hard lump in the middle (about a half-centimeter in diameter), surrounded by a larger reddish area from where I've been scratching in my sleep.

Question 2 is why the hell am I awake at 2:30am? I went to sleep around 10pm and I was exhausted. Logically, I should still be very unconscious. I was going to have a perfect sleep schedule, dammit! Sigh. I blame the mosquitoes. Maybe I should have dosed myself to sleep... I would have, but I thought I didn't need it! And if I did it now, I know (by experience) that it wouldn't wear off fully by the time I had to get up... which would be very unpleasant. Maybe I should do it anyway. I definitely will tomorrow night.

It's 3pm in Chicago right now... not really a waking-up time. So I don't know.

I saw the damn thing fluttering around before I went to sleep but I was too tired to do anything about it. Dammit, tired-me. Mosquitoes.

Edit: in the good news, the bug bites of doom detumesce and stop itching after an hour or so. Tom commented on that earlier today also so I think it's a trend which I can count on. AWESOME!

Pics from day 1 of TWU

http://picasaweb.google.com/wordymusic/IndiaImportAndDay1#

United flight credit

Fellow TWUers, here is the link to the simple form to get your flight credit. https://www.mileageplus.com/mp/retro/retroForm.do?userAction=loadForm

To fill out this form, you will need the email that Kenyia sent you and ALSO your boarding pass. I believe that if you have tossed out your boarding pass, Kenyia can send you the important number from it which the form requires... but I'm not sure.

Also, "You must allow 3 days after travel is completed on a United or United Express flight before submitting your request for Mileage Plus credit." And you have to wait like two weeks after the completion of your Lufthansa flight. So in other words don't even bother until Jan 15 or so. (I just now learned this.)

TWU evening

Had a great conversation with my Indian flatmate about the differences btw the Indian and USA university systems and what it does to hiring requirements by the companies in each country, and companies that hire in both companies.

I've been increasingly cranky all night because of being tired. I really need to develop better tired-me social skills. I developed better drunk-me social skills years ago; this shouldn't be hard. I just need some more practice.

I wish I'd gone out with the other TWUers to dinner, but I wasn't hungry, and I just had a pretty wonderful shower, and I'm going to get like 10 hours of sleep, so I guess I don't regret it that much. I do want to experience India but I'm content to do it tomorrow and Sunday rather than tonight.

So far I have no bugbites that I've noticed, and only mild intestinal discomfort. Hopefully this happy state of affairs will continue. Brushing my teeth with bottled water isn't difficult.

I feel bad for Tom because apparently his room is much less wonderful than anyone else's... bugs, no bottled water, no snacks, small... Tomorrow if this is still going on, I think I'll try to talk him into calling housekeeping and getting some of that fixed.

Dani's room has broken internet... the router puts out a network but the network isn't connected to anything. I think Ron was going to try to fix that... I wonder how that went.

I feel like everyone here from the USA has had more travel experience than I have. Everyone is like "I just got back from Amsterdam/Belize/LA/etc..." I mean, I travel excessively... but they travel uber-excessively. Which I'm cool with but it means that I'm a little behind when it comes to the ability to understand and discuss the common threads and themes of travel.

I'm really really really looking forward to shopping. I have a list. On the recommendation of Wolter, each of us withdrew 5000 rupees, which will probably last us about two weeks, maybe a little more? My bank charged me $111 for the amount and didn't charge an atm fee, which makes me happy. Wells Fargo is so much better than Chase. I'm leaving most of it in the same locked cabinet with my US money and checkbook (oops, didn't mean to bring that) and carrying my pared-down wallet and my passport (in a passport baggie holder thingie) in my pocket...

Mango cornflakes

Mango cornflakes are delicious

Rebecca and I agree that women in CS are a good thing and you have to start mentoring young- before college, proabbly before high school, and that mentoring is a high return results for time invested.

Day 1 continued again

Someone is ringing a bell in the office. The kind that's on the desk of the IIT post office. It's making me oddly homesick. Or that might be the fact that I turned my screen brightness to max to try to make myself more alert. It's not really working, but I'm still plugging along. I really hope that I'll think better tomorrow when I'm better rested.

Things I'm trying to do:
- get Ruby and ruby version manager working on mac
- finish the analysts problem part 1
- finish the microtesting segment of Industrial Logic

Things which are making me fail:
- indian bathrooms
- the book cabinet is locked
- my music and the micrpotesting movies can't exit simultaneously
- Mac keyboard shortcuts
- IntelliJ vs eclipse
- eclipse autocomplete is different on mac
- shouldersurfing
- worrying about the stuff in my room that's locked up because the locks are crappy

I'm enormously happy that I have a power converter. I can charge everything now.

I'm a little worried that my team isn't meshing yet... but these things take time. Actually, I'm more worried that I specifically am not meshing. Partially because cubbing, tourism, and drinking are subjects of lesser interest to me than to others. I shoudl stop worrying. It's day one. We barely know each other. And we're all sleep deprived and in culture shock. It'll be fine.

The guys in reddish-purple polo shirts are... servants? Staff? They serve the food, come around and pick up the dishes, take out the trash, etc. It's a little awkward but not that bad.

There are two coat trees of motorcycle helmets in the front lobby. Apparently almost everyone has one of those.

Martin Fowler is sitting at the table to my right. I'm debating with myself whether it would be too terribly horribly geeky to ask him if we could take a picture together. I know several people who would be very envious. ...to be honest, that would involve getting up, which would involve motor control... and I'm too tired to have that.

Something about India makes me use many elipses. Possibly because of the uncertainty factor inherent in everything?