In the US next week

This is (also) not a BI post in any way - stop reading if you are not interested.

I shall be in the US next week, first to Oracle's headquarters at Redwood Shores, then a short one day halt at Burlington, MA, and then back to India. I shall also get to meet at least some of the Siebel Analytic people there (I met a few here in Bangalore a couple of weeks back). Don't know how much I shall be able to blog, but I shall certainly take lots of photos to post when I am back.

The thing that struck me is that I shall be spending almost as much if not more time travelling as I shall at work there. Consider this:
BLR - FRA: 9:40 (that would mean 9 hours and 40 minutes, and BLR stands for Bangalore, FRA for Frankfurt, SFO for San Francisco, BOS for Boston, and MAD for Chennai)
Halt at FRA: 2 hours
FRA - SFO: 11:10
SFO - BOS: 5:30
BOS - FRA: 7:05
Halt at FRA: 5:50
FRA - MAD: 8:45
Halt at MAD: 6:35
MAD - BLR: 0:45

That is a grand total of 57 hours and 20 minutes of flying and waiting at airports, about 30,000 kms, all over the course of a little over 8 days, and all in the uncomparable luxury of economy class (mind you this is still better than flying between Milwaukee and Seattle every week, or between Tampa and Seattle that I did a few years back for the better part of the year). At least it is better than the standing room future that Airbus has been supposedly pitching to Asian airlines (read the story and the subsequent denial). Looking at this photo and this one, I shouldn't really be complaining though; there are more 'compressed' ways of commuting.