And then, four weeks later...



Can't say I've been too busy, just too lazy, really. I'm entering these words from the SSC office in Sydney, Australia, where we're all busy at work on a Saturday night converting over their backoffice FX system. I was glad to get the thumbs-up to come on this trip, and this time there are nine other people here from the Boston office. When I was here in 2002 I was an envoy of one, and it was kind of a weird feeling to walk around the streets thinking "I don't know anyone in a 10,000 mile radius". So at least this time around I've got somebody to have dinner with.



Took off bright and early Wednesday morning and arrived here Thursday night, an hour late but otherwise unscathed. Because this was a sanctioned visit and not the stealth operation I was operating under before, this time I could fly business class and take advantage of the Qantas club lounge and LAX and get hot towels and choice of movies and all that good stuff on the plane. One of the other Boston people was on my flight, too, so we split a cab to the Hotel Intercontinental and were checked in by 11pm or so.



Before I left I switched my phone over to international service with the promise that my regular cellphone number would work in Sydney, but it didn't behave as advertised. After a couple of calls to the Boston help desk, they finally got a Nextel guy who determined that I should have Worldwide service rather than International service, and once he'd pushed a couple of buttons from his location in Canada somewhere, about 10 seconds later I, on the other side of the planet, was connected. I was telling some of my co-workers here, "that's so much more cool that what we do".



Anyway, I showed up in the office Friday morning with the last of the arrivals (some have been here for two weeks or more) and got all hooked up and plugged in and ready to roll. Most of us went to lunch at some pizza place over in The Rocks, where the waitress insisted we couldn't charge the tip, so we didn't leave one. There wasn't much to preparation to do from my end, but I was able to line up a couple of meetings with other groups in Sydney for next week, plus meet with the middle office guys here to give them a heads-up of what to expect. We hung around till 7 or so at the conference room that's really a bar here on this floor, then headed off to dinner at the hotel. Although I woke up several times during the night both Thursday and Friday, I felt like I got a decent night's sleep, and I'm enjoying the two block commute.



Today is when the conversion began in earnest, once it hit 6 pm Friday in Boston. This whole 14 hour difference makes your head bleed, because not only do you have to keep track of what time it is at the other location, but what day it is, and when you're in Boston you're used to adding 14 hours, and now that you're here you have to subtract instead. Got the cellphone working this morning and called Beth and talked to the kids as they were getting ready for bed. After getting set up here this morning, I went shopping for a couple of hours, mostly at Dymocks main branch on George Street, where I got a couple of British and Australian sf books I was looking for. Came back here and did some conversion verification stuff with Aiming over the phone (it was midnight at his end by then), then we had some down time so some of us went over to the Rocks again and did some shopping. They didn't need me until around now, so I went back to the room for a couple of hours and watched some rugby and read.



I'm here until next Sunday, so I hope to cover some more ground than I was able to do in my last trip. Couple of concerts later in the week I wouldn't mind going to, but nothing too exciting. Weather has been great by Boston standards, but the days are short as it's nearly winter, and the locals are all freezing. Cheers, mate!