Helen Stephenson's India Trip - June-July, 2006 - My second day at work

Tuesday June 20^th

I overslept! My alarm went off, but I didn’t! So I had a quick wash, grabbed a health bar and a carton of fruit juice out of my personal bar, and made a run for it.

I got to the office before my scheduled training session was due to start, so everything was OK.

The laptop went into a meeting room and got connected up to a digital projector and a microphone, and Gagan installed some recording software on it so that my training sessions can be replayed again later as the need arises. I spent the rest of the morning doing training. I had an audience of about six people of varying backgrounds.

I had lunch in the staff restaurant again, and then did some preparation for the next day’s training session. During the afternoon I noticed that it had gone very dark, and when I took a good look outside, I discovered that it was absolutely pouring with rain. It was described as “pre-monsoon” rain, and it only lasted an hour or so, but there was certainly a lot of it. There’s a little garden at the front of the building and the holes where trees are planted all quickly filled with water.

Gagan took the time to show me some more of the building after he’d pointed out the waterlogged garden. I’d asked whether they had UPS backups because I’d noticed that the lights often go off (which everybody ignores) but the power to the PCs stays on. I got to see the UPS room, where they have two walls of shelves completely covered in batteries! I also saw the server room and they showed me the exact cable through which all transmissions to London go.

Due to all the rain, the swimming pool was closed when I got back to the hotel. I thought about eating early, then doing some photography, and then having a late swim, but I didn’t have time to fit it all in and missed out on having a swim. Later, I realized that if I’d wanted exercise, I could have visited the gym, but by then it was too late.

I had vegetarian food for dinner. I found the okra with fresh tomato and onion a little on the rich side. It wasn’t hot, but was a bit spicy. I enjoyed the lentil dahl rather more, and got through quite a bit of naan bread with it.

Time was getting on, and I decided not to connect to the hotel’s wireless Internet. I did use the laptop to view the photographs I took during the evening. I was a little bit late really and didn’t get enough colour left in the sky, but with a couple of stops of exposure compensation and the contrast control turned right down, the digital camera didn’t do a bad job. Unlike the daytime photos from the previous day, I did need to tinker with the night time ones a little bit with IfranView to make them presentable – although I think the laptop screen was a little dark, so I may have over corrected them on the versions I uploaded to Yahoo Photos, and I’ve been back and re-edited them with PhotoShop now that I’m home again.

I also discovered that the Jobo Giga One likes to find four consecutive drive letters to use. I’d hibernated the laptop and still had a drive mapped to H: but when I rebooted the laptop and the H: drive disappeared, the laptop was happy to see the Giga One’s hard drive.

If the picture on the left looks familiar, that's because it was taken from virtually the same spot as the one on the right, which I've repeated from the previous page.

It is looking across the water feature towards the rear of the hotel. There were spotlights on the frangipani trees, so they show up quite well. The four towers near the swimming pool have flames which are burning so brightly that you don't get the proper flame effect from them.

The picture below really pushed post-processing as far as it could possibly be taken - at least when using JPEG rather than RAW to capture the image. The picture was taken from the rear of the hotel looking out across the water feature towards the front. The domes on the skyline are over the reception hall and one of the restaurants.

Here are some floodlit pictures of the swimming pool. You can almost get the effect of the flames burning from the two towers where they are reflected in the water in the middle picture.