Traveling

It’s 3 am and I am at the Goa airport waiting for my flight to Doha. I am on my way to attend my first ever Autodesk University in Las Vegas. This is my fifth visit to the US this year alone and my second round the world trip. From Las Vegas I fly across the Pacific to attend PlanetPTC in Shanghai.

My first round the world trip was in April this year and was not intentional. While I was attending COFES 2010 in Scottsdale, Arizona, this April someone decided to leave a volcano open in Iceland, which messed up the travel plans of a number of people including me. Instead of flying back to India via Europe as I had originally planned I ended up flying across the Pacific to Hong Kong and finally made it back home from the other direction.

Most of my trips are paid for. For some I need to pay myself. For AU, Autodesk is paying for hotel but not air fare. For PlanetPTC, PTC is paying everything, even airport transfers. I have to admit that this blog has started to take me places, literally. And I enjoy it. I like to see new places and meet different kinds of people. But I hate the actual act of travelling. I mean the back breaking long haul flights one after the other are killing. Just getting myself to the US takes a minimum of 24 hours in airplanes and airports. And then another 12 hours of rest to recover from the jetlag. But all in all I think it’s worth the trouble.

These travels have become a major distraction for my work which actually involves sitting in office or home and writing C++ code. That’s the thing which actually pays my bills and puts food on the table. But now that I have started selling ad space on this blog and have started to make some money off it, I am feeling a little less guilty of spending the time and energy that I do posting stuff here.

Anyways, I shall end here as I need to get ready to pass through immigration. I didn’t know how to kill my time. So I decided to waste some of yours. 😉