Last night's commute home was interesting. Cycling through the backstreets of Angel, I saw 3 boys, about 10-12 years old, squirting each other with a small fire extinguisher - one of the dry powder types. I thought about explaining why this might be a bad idea - if there's a fire, someone could be hurt because the fire extinguisher is missing; and I think it's a fairly serious offence to monkey around with fire safety equipment, isn't it? Anyway, by the time I'd thought it through it was too late. In any case, I didn't want to get squirted.

Later, I was doing my usual cyclo-mingling with the pedestrians for 100 yards outside my train station (I take a folding bike on the train and cycle at both ends of the journey), when someone suggested I should be on the road, and that it was illegal for me to cycle on the pavement. Which of course, it is. However, in my defence I said...I always cycled with extreme caution when among pedestrians, often dismounting (I'm not a BMX maniac racing through the crowds leaving a trail of chaos behind). Also, the stretch of road I'm avoiding is notorious for fast traffic, and has a right hand turn 2/3 way up a steep hill on a left hand bend - not nice on a bike. As for the legality of it, I'm pretty sure he was about to get into his (polluting, resource glutton) car and go speeding home at occasionally more than 30mph. Another chap joined in with an indignant "yeah, it's really annoying - everyday some cyclist zooms by and nearly hits me!" - which is a cause for concern, but not exactly my fault. I mean, everyday several pedestrians throw themselves into the road in front of me, causing me to swerve - but I don't blame all pedestrians for the few that are suicidal. I tried really hard not to be aggressive and unpleasant, but to remain coolly confident and explain myself. I'm not sure they cared - I think they just wanted to have a go at someone (bad day at the office, perhaps).

About 500 yards later, as I was reflecting on the iniquity of it all, when I saw about 8 youths meandering toward me on their BMXs. We were on a split pavement - 1 half cycle-track, 1 half pedestrians. No pedestrians around, and the BMXers were sauntering across both tracks. I kept my head down - no eye contact is key - and pressed on towards them. They made no effort to make space for me to pass, and I had to brake hard to avoid hitting one of them (who was concentrating on writing a text message at the time). As I came to a halt he looked up and spat a huge gobful of saliva at my head as he passed. I stood there stunned, the spit dribbling of my helmet. I turned to look at the group who had moved on 5 yards or so, and the gobber stopped, turned, looked at me, and said something like "come on then!". I thought it best to be on my way...

So O2 wouldn't let me upgrade to an iPhone - my contract had too long to run. My last upgrade, to a Sony Ericsson K850i was a disaster - so much so that I went back to my earlier Nokia 6250.

Anyways, Bill had just upgraded and kindly sold my his old non-3G iPhone. It was easy enough to pull the sim from my Nokia and, once I'd figured out how to eject the sim holder in the iPhone (requires a metal spike and a bit of jiggling), I stuffed it in and turned it on. Oh yeah,we did a 'factory reset' too - can you believe that took over an hour!

With my O2 Pay Monthly sim inserted, the iPhone worked fine. I'd read on the O2 website I needed a tariff upgrade - iPhone tariffs all have unlimited data - so it only took a few tense calls to O2 customer service to get an equivalent unlimited data tariff.

Minor glitch over the weekend - no Edge availability at all. Luckily Andy's a genius, and he thought of turning it off and then on again, and since then it's all been dandy.

Last day in Delhi - that was quick! Woke early, walked in since it was 0745 (0600 if you're reading this Kevin) and was well under 40. Tell you what, you don't have to walk far here before you really appreciate air-con. Refreshing like a fridge.

Today should be about the build. The team have some questions about whether we need to do dev and test builds sequentially (is it just a habit - or is there some value?); also with the increase in the number of environments needed, I want to see if we streamline the deployment / test env creation a bit. We're also due to spend some time looking at the new models, and how they work / what they're for.

Build started - probably some work needed on the release notes to ease automation, and also on the process; maybe a culture of checking the release notes page in London by Thursday close would help Delhi build manager.

Good meeting with Mitts, Monika & Abhishek re the new models. It helped clarify my understanding of the models, but also demonstrates that we need to take extra care that the team here receive a better flow of knowledge.

Some builds issues - mainly database (naturellement, I hear you cry)...need to look at increasing automated build checks for db commits, triggered by bamboo (perhaps scheduled nightly db build, but maybe 10g will give ability to rapidly refresh to a known state, and then build...?)

Traditional Indian pizza lunch in the canteen with all the Delhi team. It's like normal pizza, but with 1 important difference...

Usual London business in the arvo - jiras, emails, and finalise everything for trip back.

Interesting meeting with Pravin towards the end of the day.

Slept right through in the end, to be back in the office 0830 today - fresh as a daisy (nearly), after a slap-up breakfast at the hotel.

Northern India is having a bit of a heatwave at the moment - BBC says way over 40. But it's so dry, it doesn't feel toooo bad. I still haven't walked from the office to the hotel, and it still feels ridiculous driving it...must try harder.

Things are changing on the project back in London, nothing settled yet though. Further talks with Mittlesh about how we track effort - for costings and estimating confidence in delivery dates.

Long meeting with Shailesh, Mitthlesh and Charles, re support.

• Would like to ask Ops to call Delhi desks during 0400 - 0700 (London time) for batch support issues - possible?
  • Can Ops call Delhi? need group number/chase number for Delhi (Shailesh)
  • Can rota handle the split in overnight rota (Reg)
  • Escalation will be existing Primary/Secondary (i.e. whoever would have got the call previously)
  • Proposed start date 6th May
• Mitthlesh to liaise with Bill (twice?) daily to pick up any suitable prod issues, and hand back when done.
• Create 2 dummy JIRA users - prodsup-LON and prodsup-Delhi to be used when london or idc need to assign an issue to each other, but not sure who it should go to. Mitthlesh & me to monitor issues assigned to these users.
• Delhi handled prod support issues to go back through Bill, so he has complete view of L3 support.
• Probably need to narrow the occasional maintenance window to noon-Saturday to noon-Sunday to avoid global working day impact.
• Discussed possibility of support team handling batch overnight calls; although desirable, unlikely with a 3 person team.

Grilled veggie sandwich in canteen (not spicy).

Afternoon spent collating hours on project - a trivial task if we had 100% coverage in jira work logs...think we need to make it mandatory that all effort is tracked against jira.

Walked back from office - how intrepid is that? By about 1830 (or 2130, if you're reading this Kevin), it had cooled a fair bit - couldn't have been more than 35 or so, so the 10 minute walk was not quite suicidal. Dodgy the traffic is fun - it's just a battle of wills really. Fix your eye on the other side of the road, and walk calmly and confidently towards it - whilst secretly watching the 7 thousands rickshaws, taxis, buses spilling passengers, lorries spilling landfill, scooters, cyclists all hurtling towards you, doing the same confidence trick. Gets me through the day.

Evening, we trawled up to Connaught Place (shopping/eating centre of New Delhi) for a wander round. We hadn't reckoned on the incredible traffic (rush hour lasts well beyond 8pm), and the shops were mostly closed by the time we got there; still got some bargains (papier mache, pashminae (top quality, for the baby goat's chin hair - honest guv), clothes for son), then eats at the Imperial again.

I've run out of luck on the food stakes - what a dreadful night! It might have been worse for Charles, as he hasn't appeared yet...

Got some medicine from the Doc at lunchtime, and spent the afternoon sleeping. Doc says it's a bug, not just reaction to spicy food. Also, Doc said must not take normal anti-diarrhoeal medicine, since that keeps the bugs in. Take rehydration salts (electrolytes, dioralyte), and anti bactierals if necessary, and levobact to replace normal gut flora. The important thing is to get the bugs outside your body, not keeping them in. I found not eating for 24h seemed to help (if you can believe it).

I've changed my return flight from late Sunday night to early Saturday morning, since I'm not going sightseeing feeling like this. It means I'll be back in the office on Monday.

Sanjay drove me in again. It seems quite ridiculous to be driven 600 yards - I think I'll walk home tonight. Although BBC says it will be 40+ today, so I'll reserve judgement.

Finally managed to clear my JIRAs. This never happens in London, due to constant interruptions. Now the list is clear, with a bit of luck, I can keep it clear.

Another good meeting with Mittlesh. We covered what (little) I know of future work.

Lunch at a local colourful restaurant called 'Pind Balluchi'. A kind of tapas lunch, with lots of small dishes, all delicious. Jaljeera is a new drink for me - kind of spicy lemon barley water.

Meeting with Shailesh and Mittlesh Delhi / London interaction, expectations, operations, interaction etc. Talked through support plans (needs input from Charles - later in week, I expect), mainly day time user help, rather than overnight batch.

Went to Galleria market in evening, but it was closed. Ended up at Crowne Plaza for burger + chips!

5 minute drive to Delhi office. Looks just like London
Chat with Shailesh re potential DB recruit for Delhi. Seems reasonable to me - there must be enough db work to justify it, plus there's helping out with the build, and perf tuning coming out here.

Long meeting with Mittlesh covering operational aspects of developing, like why we do it like this and what could be better. We got the following actions

1. Prod support - all time must be logged in jira. We need to make detailed reports visible to the business - otherwise, they'll assume our time is only spent on dev.
2. Post this project, all bugs to entered as separate issues in JIRA (but linked to the main one, if there is one) - not as subtask (current process). Otherwise, high level project status is inaccurate.
3. London team prioritise Delhi issues/comms for first half of the day. Otherwise, time difference will delay projects.
4. Expose Prod Issues effort on wiki - should encourage jira work logging too.
5. Email prod issues (and maybe issue effort) to interested parties weekly.

Lunch in the canteen, supplemented by Monika's home-made chapatis - ace.

Fantastic view from the rooftop area, looking over the construction site for the Delhi Metro extension. Huge football-pitch sized pits of sand/cement, armies of cement mixer lorries, continuous pouring into casts to create the cross-section pieces to be assembled onto the end of the line, about 300 yards away.

Afternoon spent on London issues and wiki reporting.

Dinner at Park Plaza hotel (right next door to our hotel - The Palms, which is about 600 yards from Delhi offices). Rather lacklustre (imho - think Charles liked it) Indian non-veg buffet. I suspect the Great Kebab Factory (also in Park Plaza) might have been tastier. At least I haven't got, y'know, sick yet...

New Delhi. Walked around India Gate and govt buildings. Thousands of people playing cricket - very friendly. Fabulously splendid lunch at the Imperial Hotel. Iced tea, doncha know?

Arrived Delhi 0830. Had some sleep on the plane. Met by Sanjay, our driver for the duration in Arrivals hall. Fleeced by 'porters' outside who managed to get 1 GBP out of me for picking my rucksack up and putting in the car. I blame the jet-lag.
Drove from airport to The Palms hotel in Gurgaon. Nice hotel, friendly staff. Freshened up and then back to Old Delhi. Sanjay dropped us at the Red Fort, which costs 5Rs if you're Indian, or 100Rs if you're foreign. Faffed about trying to find money - eventually found ATM on Chandni Chowk across from the R Fort. Fort very interesting (very red, at least). Lunch in the restaurant was 293Rs for both of us. Coke was 20Rs / bottle. I've been advised to lay off the meat for the first few days.
Back to the madness of Chandni Chowk after the Fort. Bought some "Punjabi Princeling" suits for my kids - excellent prices. Quite an experience if you go off the main road into the back streets. Indescribable is the best description :)

Flight BA257 from LHR to DEL. Taxied to runway on time, then someone noticed we had bags for someone who wasn't on-board...so we taxied back to the stand to pick him up. I wonder if felt the waves of love and affection as he boarded the plane and found his seat. Only delayed us by 90 minutes.