I moved to Vancouver and started working with Microsoft 6 months back. So far things have been pretty good in general both at work and otherwise.

I’ve been living in downtown since September. Vancouver is a nice city (was voted the world’s best city to live in, in a survey). So far I’ve lived in Muscat, various places in Kerala, Coimbatore, Kanpur, Bangalore, Sammamish and Redmond apart from Vancouver. Of these, if I leave aside the feel-good factor of living in India, Vancouver would definitely be the best to live in.

My apartment is a little over a kilometer from both Stanley Park and the beach so I usually end up going for a 3 hr walk every weekend by the coast/beach and the park. The smaller parks next to the beach especially are really nice to just sit and enjoy the view either listening to music or watching kids play around you (and maybe realizing you are one too and joining them). There are restaurants of all types within a 1km radius – Indian Chinese Japanese Mexican Thai, the usual KFC Subway McD Tim Horton fastfood places and of course Starbucks – there happen to be to Starbucks places on opposite sides of a particular road, both generally busy.

Work is good both in terms of the actual work and the workplace/people. The Vancouver centre opened in 2007 and currently has 300+ employees from 50+ countries. The diversity is something that shows up at various events and also in discussions.

My work has so far been going good with my first project being demoed to BillG in December. While my team (Live Search) has a significant presence in Vancouver, a large part of the team is in Redmond including most of the management. There are both positives and negatives of working in a location different from that of the management team – as of now though, I have been able to bypass a lot of the negatives largely because of supportive managers and team members. One plus of being in Vancouver is the monthly road trip to Redmond which is a free to gain driving experience as long as one does’t speed

Yeah I know, the title probably reminds you of one of those CTV commercials…anyway : over a period of about 4 months, starting in August, I was on a diet. The net result : I am lighter by 15 kilos thus making me lighter than at least one of my BTP partners

The interesting aspects were that

a) I generally ate what I wanted (99% of my meals had chicken which supposedly is fattening).
b) I went to the gym a total of 5 times in these 4 months (My excuse : the gym is very far away : I live on the 23rd floor and the gym is on the 3rd floor…)

In case anyone is looking to lose weight and is interested in my strategy, all I did was account for the calories I ate : I tried to have food only during the 3 meals and each meal was on average 300-400 calories, taking the total to 1200 calories a day which should be enough to lose ~ 1 kilo/week especially if you are overweight. Within these 300-400 calories you can generally find a reasonably number of meals that are filling. In my case, it was generally grilled/microwaved chicken + some kind of bread and at times lettuce. On alternate weekends though, I ended up going to an Indian buffet and having the usual 10 naans + butter chicken so that slowed the progress a bit. But in the end I reached my target

Update : During the 2.5 weeks at home in India I put on 4 kilos…so here we go again.

Trivia : If I continue to lose 1kg/week then I should be weightless by mid 2010.

It’s almost been a month since I came to Vancouver and so far things have gone good, slightly better than expected.

Last week, we shifted apartments to a place in downtown. The new apartment is good in terms of furnishing and being in downtown, there are plenty of things to do nearby. In the process of shifting I managed to set off a car burgular alarm on our car (by first managing to get locked in and then opening and closing the driver seat door a few times till the alarm went off ) Witnesses saw a guy in a blue jacket (moi) running away from the scene but eventually it was all sorted out

On Friday three of us made use of our B1 visa to attend this river rafting team morale event on the Skagit River. I got to meet a lot of the other devs on my team. I also ended up splashing (with the paddles/shooting using a 2 meter long water pistol) water at many of them, so will have to be careful when I go to Redmond next to meet them I also got to drive on the way back for about an hr (after a reasonable amount of persuasion )

On the work front, I will probably start with a second project sometime soon. So far, work has been better than I expected and despite being fresh out of college, my views are taken seriously if they have merit. Hopefully it will stay that way.

I also have started running on the treadmill as of yesterday – generally end up running/walking 1 km in 15 min at a 15 degree incline (so that’s about cos 15 = 0.95 km forward and sin 15 = 250m vertical and hence tiring). I think its much better to have one burger less than have one treadmill session more.

On the cooking front, things are better : I set of one smoke alarm again when making a curry and by the time I waved the smoke away from the detector and came back, the curry was burnt Anyway I’ve finally found a way to prevent the smoke alarms : the trick is to switch on the chimney before starting

I stumbled across this today : http://www.iitk.ac.in/hall2/iitktour

It’s a small page I made 3 years back at the request of an alumnus who wanted to see pics of the campus – I had totally forgotten about it and it was good to see the pics now that I myself am an alumnus.

I tried driving last weekend on a rented car. In total I drove about 60km on the first day which is decent given that I got my DL in India only in June and this was my first try in Canada. I went around for an hour in the morning close to the house, mostly in circles getting the hang of the car. In the evening we ended up driving to Richmond with Shubham and me taking turns at the wheel. Driving is nice and convenient when the traffic moves fast but when you are stuck in traffic, it’s boring – on a bus you can at least watch a movie on your media player without worrying about what’s happening outside.

I tried cooking a few curries (A coworker disagrees with me on this “yeah right, men mix powder and chicken and then they call it cooking”. But I still call it cooking since I have to DO stuff and the ROI is pretty good ). I also made french fries a few times and ended up setting off the smoke alarm the first time. What followed was 2 min of waving the smoke away from the detector until it went off. Phew!

Work finally has started – my manager assigned a project on Friday. I am excited to be working on this project with one of the laziest guys in the world, a title that I have at times gone by in the past (Shubham, if you are reading this, remember to buy French Fries from Safeway on the way back from work).

Today, I went to get my air shipment cleared at the customs office and also got my B1 visa approved which means I get to go for a team morale event in Redmond (white water rafting). Not bad no? Eligble for a morale event after just one week of effective work

One thing I’ve been thinking of doing is working on this startup idea on weekends but so far haven’t started (let’s just say I’m having “start-up” issues ). Ever been in a situation where you think of an idea that could have a big impact on so many people you know but are too lazy to get up from the bed and work on it? I’ve done that one too many times at IITK, but somehow managed to get back that spark during the MSR internship and hopefully it will stay now.

–

Random email thread on MCDC Humor
(Derived from the posts by Kerwin and George)

Starbucks names all 600 stores to be closed

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

As the great Obi-Wan Kenobi once said “I felt a great disturbance in the Force…as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”
Yoda : “Hmmm, Closing the starbucks they are.  Coffee addict I see.”

Monday morning 9 am was the reporting time. We took the new Microsoft Shuttle from downtown Vancouver to MCDC. Breakfast was served there – mostly fruits, chocolate cookies and cakes.

We then had a few talks from Par Singh and also the HR on the Vancouver centre and on working at MSFT. The next few days were spent setting up bank accounts, social insurance, aliases etc. I had (have) some issues since I had an alias change as a result of which a lot of sites still didnt open even at the end of the week. There is a good selection of soft drinks/juices like at Redmond and also some fruits. The cafe is okay but Redmond has much better variety.

Tax is a lot here – about 33% of the base gets witheld as taxes. However on the other hand, at least in my case, the expenses would be restricted to just food, transport and entertainment till April after which accomodation would also be an overhead. I came to Canada with 300$ which turned out to be slightly less that my food+transport expenses. Fortunately my First Tech account that I set up during the MSR internship works here and so I can use my VISA for shopping and hence problem solved.

On the second day me and Shubham were sitting in the office with essentially nothing to do. Well we were supposed to fill some forms that HR gave but that was a boring job and hence deserved to be postponed till the day of the deadline. We then ended up doing the following derivation

at level n, we have n*(n+1)/2 cans
so total no of cans is sigma ((n*n + n)/2)
= 1/2 * [n*(n+1)(2n+1)/6 + n*(n+1)/2]
= 1/12 * n*(n+1) (2n+1 + 3)
= 1/6 * n * (n+1) * (n+2).
Hence, for n = 8 we have no of cans = 120. QED.
—————————————

Well maybe at least I should have filled in those HR forms that day itself since I eventually forgot about it till the Friday deadline and ended up filling it on the bus to work.  The HR mildly fried me for two mistakes I made – instead of signing and dating at one place I put my sign and date of birth “So, did you know you were going to work for Microsoft from the day you were born?” . Secondly, the form was such that you fill in a detail in the line below the description and I mixed up above and below in one place and ended up with “Spouse : India”. Anyway

I got in touch with my history teacher from school who happens to be at Vancouver. I’ll be going to her house on Monday for dinner – a welcome relief from microwaved food.

——————-

Random conversation snippet

C: Dude the WiFi doesn’t work – what’s the number to call?
P : <number> – it’s a 24 hrs service
C: oh ok so that means I should wait for 20 min from now before calling?
P: No, why ?
C: Cos its 24 hrs and its right now 23:40 hrs?
————————————

Random incident

After I submitted the forms, the HR lady gave me a small blue post-it note with the name (Elizabeth) and email id to which I was supposed to mail asking for a new security badge. I had this huge file with me and so I just took the blue slip quickly and stuck it to my shirt. Then I headed back to B4 with Shubham, talking as a result of which I was looking sideways and ended up bumping into a tree Anyway, then when we entered the building, the receptionist saw me. Basically she saw a guy coming in with a blue slip saying “Elizabeth” on it so the inevitable leg pulling started Now I just hope she calls me by my real name the next time she sees me.

Semester 1 – Came to IITK knowing just 3 people. Studied for exams Settled in. Got to work on the Techkriti site. Relief that getting 9.x wasn’t as tough at the IITs as rumoured as long as I put in some effort.

Semester 2 – The computer arrives. Watched all 10 seasons of F.r.i.e.n.d.s. in 2 months. Got elected to the Hall 2 HEC as CC secretary. Spent a lot of time censoring a particular individual on the Hall 2 Discussion Board   Joined the group of elite CSE ex-9 pointers of my batch who had an SPI drop >2 Realised that the “putting in effort” is not that easy for extended durations

Summer 2005 – Returned to Muscat, did an off-site internship at home. Alternate week Pizza Hut partying with school friends   Was selected for the Lucent Scholarship and went to the US for the week long Lucent Global Science Scholars Summit.

Semester 3 – Made a lot more friends , did my first CS course. Started working on SPO Automation. Trained the Hall 2 Webteam. Managed to “put in effort” academically.

Semester 4 – IMS started off as a CS course project. Got elected to the Students Senate. Another SPI drop.

Summer 2006 – Internship at Bell Labs Bangalore. First major paycheque. Tried rock climbing, trekking and parasailing (inclusive of an accidental crash landing ). Put on weight as a result of having dinner daily at the mall (Forum).

Semester 5 – IMS gets deployed by CSE-IITK to manage internships. Got selected for an internship with MSR Redmond. The first “real” CS semester Coordinated the deployment of a placement portal developed by an alumnus. Again managed to “put in effort” academically.

Semester 6 – The first of the three 5 project semesters. Voted Best Senator in the Students Senate. Deployed IMS in the SPO. A lot of new friendships developed and old ones got consolidated Looks like I have optimized the art of getting 9.x SPIs (would you call it a science or an art?) with minimal effort and maximum learning.

Summer 2007 – Internship at Microsoft Research Redmond. Got 3 patents in my name by the end of it. Travelled a lot on weekends – Hawaii, California, Texas, Michigan and Oregon. Tried trekking, river rafting and kayaking.

Semester 7 – BTech Project decided : an e-passport application that eventually got deployed by the Government of India. PAS gets deployed at IITK. Another 5 project semester. Got placed with Tower and Lehman.

Semester 8 – BTP got selected for funding from Microsoft. Got placed with Microsoft Live Search. Treats, treats and more treats. Multiple Farewells. Left IITK knowing roughly every 2nd person in my batch of 500

Summer 2008 – The IITK tradition of travelling around India followed by Convocation. Worked with the SPO on a proposal for revenue generation via ads on PAS. Thought of various possible ideas for a startup and rejected most. Learnt driving at last and got a license.

40,000 lines of code, 100+ exams, 40 courses, 20 projects, 20+ project partners, 4 years all for one BTech but well worth it!

After the endsems, I went for this one week trip to Dharamshala and Dalhousie in early May. It was a nice experience and the weather was nice and cool in comparision to the 40 degree summer at Kanpur. I subsequently returned home via Bangalore (where I got to meet a few friends from school/college).

I got home in mid-May and continued with my driving classes for 2 weeks before appearing for my driving test which I cleared. After that, I went back with parents to IITK for the convcation.

We faced some problems in the onward journey : to start with the Jet flight got delayed by over 4 hours as a result of which we missed the train (Shram Shakti) we had booked. So then I called up Kshitizg who booked tickets for the morning Shatabdi. Shatabdi was the first train that left from Delhi in the morning at 6am and is usually on time but not this time.

There was the Gujjar strike that very day and they had blocked the train tracks. So the train just stood there for over 7 hrs before it started moving. The plus was that Shatabdi has a generator and so the AC was on the whole time (and it was in fact chilly inside despite being hot outside) and also they kept giving us something to eat every now and then. There was also a plug point so I could use my laptop all along. The train finally reached Kanpur at 7:30 pm, about 7 hrs late.

Kanpur was hot and so it was good that we had gotten a confirmed VH AC room. I was feeling tired and so slept off. The next day, after breakfast I went to Hall 1 to see the situation in my room (which I had yet to vacate). Then I went to the SPO at 11 for a meeting with the chairman (which should have been held the previous day but was postponed because of the train). Then I went to meet a few profs and subsequently for the rehearsal. The rehearsal was for over 3 hours and the second half of the programme was boring. But then, the entire deptt was sitting together so it’s tough to get bored thanks to the usual antics that go on

After the rehearsal again I went back to Hall 1 with parents and we managed to pack everything. Then I remembered that I needed a gate permit for the courier company to be able to take the boxes out of campus and so drafted the letter. The next day morning I took the letter and went to the Hall office and left it there. After that I rushed through breakfast and headed to Audi for the convocation.

The convocation took about 4 hours after which we took some photos. It was nice to see all your batchmates and others going up on stage to collect their degree. After the convocation, there was the usual photo session for some time after which I headed back to the VH. I then went to the Hall Office to  collect the gate pass which hadn’t been done since the warden was out of station (now they tell me!). So I then went to the SIS office and got the letter signed directly. I then went back to Hall 1, called the courier guy who took the gate pass along with the boxes and that was the end of that.

We left for the station around midnight. The train was late by about 2 hours again and we went off to sleep after boarding at about 3:30 am. It reached Agra at about 8:30 in the morning. We went fromt the station to a hotel and checked in and relaxed for a while. Then we left at about 11 to see the Agra Fort and then had lunch. After lunch, we went to the Taj Mahal. It was beautiful and looked better in real life than in the pictures. We spend about 2 hours there before moving on to a handicrafts place for some shopping. We subsequently went back to the hotel and left for the station and caught the Bhopal Shatabdi to Delhi – took 2 hrs to cover the 200 km.

We reached Delhi at about 11:30 pm and went to the IITK Transit Guesthouse at CR Park that I had booked for the night at the VH. We woke up in the morning and had a bread + omlette made by the cooks there. At Rs 2000 per night per room it is definitely expensive but in hindsight it felt worth it.

We then headed to the airport and caught the flight back to Cochin. From there we went home and caught a night train to Mangalore to meet my sister. We were there for a two days before leaving for Coimbatore to meet my mom’s aunt with whom I had stayed with long back for 2 years (before going to Muscat). We stayed there till Sunday before coming back to Kerala.

I got back to Kanpur just before New Year.  Kanpur was very cold this time (sub zero).

I went to Delhi during the first weekend of the year for an interview with Microsoft Live Search. I went with Sid, Khantal and Soumyadip. We went by Shatabdi and checked into this hotel near the station. It so happened that Sid’s birthday was on the following day so Somu and Khantal decided that we should stay awake till midnight and then give Sid his GPL. Unfortunately, Sid was on the phone nonstop after midnight so Somu and Khantal decided to give me the GPL instead (I still havent understood the logic they used to select me )

Ten days later, I got an offer from them. I took a month to finally accept the offer. It was for Microsoft LIve Search initially at Vancouver and subsequently at Redmond after a year.

These days (ok…make that years) it’s impssible for a BTech from an IIT to work immediately at any company in the US for visa reasons : to work, one needs a H1B work visa for which one has to apply in April first week (since by then the visa cap/limit of 65,000 is reached). Now as far as I know,  all BTechs at IITs graduate only in May or June and so can’t apply for the H1B in time. So to solve this, companies post the student turned employee at a location not in the US and then apply for the L1B visa for which there is no cap. The L1B however requires one year of work at the same company and at an office outside the US. In my case, I will be posted at Vancouver which is 150 miles from Redmond but in a different country. Ok enough of talking on visa issues, back to IITK life.

The last sem is usually the one with the most number of treats and it was pretty much the case with me too. I also started playing tennis early in the morning and continued for 2 months before switching to running but my weight refused to go down because of the treats.

In terms of classes, I had about 2 classes a day which left the rest of the day free to talk to friends online/in person. A trip to the CC canteen was an almost daily event and it wasn’t unusual so see a big crowd of cse final years outside the CCC at 4pm daily.

I had 2 CS courses that sem… by 4th year one tends to learn that with non-theory courses, one of the best ways to approach a CS course is to do a really good job on the project (for starters by spending time and planning) which helps you appreciate what is taught in the lectures. And yeah, it also ensures the A grade in most cases

Towards the end of the semester once again I was in a situation with 5 projects to be submitted in 2 weeks but by now one gets used to it. It’s tough to focus on Project No 20 of your BTech when it’s the last sem but I think I did an okay job on most of the projects in the end.

The farewells and photo sessions were all in the last month – both the departmental one and also the one organized by the Alumni Association. No dues at IITK hasn’t been put online and so one has to run to each of the 21 places to get signatures including places one hasn’t ever seen like the Glass Blowing Lab. Maybe it is one of those things that shouldn’t be automated – one gets to see all the places one has spent time in during the past 4 years – the TA Labs, NCC, Auditorium, Media Lab and so on.

When the endsems came, it didn’t really feel like endsem time in Hall 1 – most of the regular activities (like cricket…or let’s call it phatta) continued with some people having a book in their hand maybe. The gtalk status messages at this time as expected were interesting with all sorts of countdowns.

After spending 3 months in the US, travelling on fast cars, trains and jets, when you return to India and the car on the way to IITK, gets stopped by a cow standing in the middle of the main road, you can’t help smiling and feeling good about getting back

Well, like I said, it felt to be back and I had a lot more enthusiasm in me than when I left. The sem was going to be a standard IITK-CS sem loaded with projects apart from the usual exams. Given that this was a critical sem career wise, I decided to do some planning for a change.

I took a Video Production course expecting it to be light thus giving me more time for placements and apping (it turned out to be time intensive mainly cos I ended up going to most classes and tried to do things a little sincerely ). I also took a finance course (which was the eventual reason I actually sat for the finance companies).

I gave TOEFL in September and GRE in October. I didn’t really prepare that well for either of them but did reasonably ok in both. I had made this plan for the semester scheduling my preparation for core/consulting/finance company interviews along with GRE, TOEFL, SOP writing, contacting alumni etc but somehow things got postponed and in the end November got really busy.

A lot of my time that semester went on this initiative called PAS. It is basically a web based system to streamline the placement process at IITK. Since it was the first time that it was being deployed, there were quite a few minor issues but on the whole things went smoothly.

November was the busiest month of my entire stay at IITK : on one hand I had to prepare for placements while also write my statement of purpose for grad school applications and if that wasn’t enough, the 5 semester projects and endsems also came along, not to mention having to manage PAS. But somehow I managed and eventually I got placed with Lehman and Tower Research on December 1 which happened to be Day 1. I guess apart from having prepared, the one thing that did help me was having seen the placement process happening for the past 3 years which tends to remove the nervousness since you feel you know what kind. Maybe I someday will write a post on placements at IITK (and in general the IITs) – there are a few myths that one tends to hear in the media, from seniors etc that need to be cleared.

I spent a week working on the search engine, doing some optimizations and also adding a feedback mechanism so that we could compare our search engine results with that of Live/Google. I also worked on the transaction ads protocol and finalized it.

On Friday, I again headed to the airport after lunch. The flight to Dallas was via Alberquerque (incidentally the place where Microsoft began). I stayed there with my mom’s cousin who incidentally is a Director at Microsoft Dallas. I last saw him when he visited us in Muscat but that was probably over 10 years back. It so happened that his parents were also visiting at that time so I got to see them too after about 6 years. We went around to a few places in Dall including the Microsoft campus there, which at least in terms of refreshments was identical to Redmond

I returned on Friday and started winding up the 2 projects I had worked on and started on a third project. The last week was a little hectic because apart from winding up the projects, I also had to pack. I somehow managed to pack whatever I could into my suitcases and stuffed the rest into Nilendu’s suitcase without him noticing

We left on the 28th, a Saturday from Seattle to Chicago and from there to Delhi and then Kanpur.

The summer was easily one of the best summers I had. I got to visit a lot of places in Washington, California, Oregon, Hawaii, Michigan and Texas so am really happy with the amount of fun that I had. In terms of work, my mentor seemed happy with my work and Microsoft eventually filed 3 US patents in my name based on the three projects so on the whole I guess the summer on the whole gets a 10/10.

Hopefully I’ll get to visit Redmond again someday