It has been a while now that I have written something in this blog. This post should have been here 5 months ago but I was waiting for myself to process all the pictures taken in the trip and do a final post. Recently I realized that ain't happening. Well thats what the TSA woman official said to me after seeing my T-Shirt slogan which said "
Imagine all the people. Living life in peace" in her southern accent.
Anyway trip to Seattle was full of learnings. A lot of PHP, Couchbase and system administration of physically hosted servers. Key learning was how to deal with people who are technically challenged. While a little bit of technical details may make them nervous, lack of the same may make them think you have no control over the system. Management do not remember details. You can reiterate the same thing over and over without actually worrying about freshness of the update. Sometime asking direct questions or expressing direct concerns may not help, on the contrary it may just make you look like not willing to take any step towards any solution. In fact its OK to say yes to stupidest of the Ideas to begin with and take months of time and come back and say that it was stupid, which you already knew as soon as the idea was floated. Meanwhile you bought time to calm everyone down who are in an urgency of get something done as part of a solution after a catastrophic problem . The problem itself gets de-prioratized. You get to spend a lot of time on your own things and account that time for the analysis of that stupid idea. You learn a lot. The only disadvantage is that you may not feel honest about yourself. But wait ...this is business. You just see the profit.
OK above gyaan is totally fictional ...... based on real events. Now somethings about Seattle.
This was no first time for me in USA and its not a very diverse country like India that you get to see new culture. Thanks to Amazon and Microsoft , its full of Indians unlike Austin or Salt Lake City. If you look Indian, people may just ask you which of these company you work for.
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| Rialto Beach - Pacific Ocean |
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| Blake Island |
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Seattle is geographically interesting. Its on the north-west corner of USA in the state of Washington (not where Obama lives, he lives in east cost , in the city of Washington DC in Virginia.). Its very close to Canada, in fact the Canadian city of Vancouver is just on the other side of the border. Technically its also closest state to Alaska. Seattle is actually part of twin city of Sea-Tac, Tacoma being the other smaller city in the south . They share the same airport which is somewhat at the midway of the two cities. Portland is another city even south of Tacoma in the state of Oregon. All these cities and states combined sometimes called pacific Noth-West (PNW) as they are in the cost of pacific ocean. IT giants Amazon and Microsoft are in Seattle and Bellevue (Redmond to be precise ) respectively , separated by a water body. Combined they are called "Greater Seattle Area".
I know its too much of geographic gyaan which you can know from Wikipedia and Google maps, especially a lot of Indians know a lot about American states but does not even know whats the language spoken in the neighboring state. I just wanted to feed you this information in case you are not aware of never get a chance to visit.
Seattle is also not technically on the cost of Pacific ocean , its on bank of backwaters, so there are several beaches , like Alkai beach which is not actually facing and sea or ocean.
