Back from Saraburi, Thailand

I was in Thailand last week for the project that I am doing and will go live soon. In the past few months I was not too confident about the project due to the many issues. But most have been solved and things are looking good. The team is a bit more confident and the project seems to be in good form. Of course, there were a lot of 'potholes' during the course of work and a delay of about 3 months. I got a lot of flak because of the delays and problems but were able to overcome them and I soon would need to make a lessons learned document.

I was in Saraburi province which was about 2 hours away from Bangkok. The factory is located in a very quiet town which had basically no night life. We had a lot of good times with the project team and had dinner with them in some modest places often beside the main road. But the food was excellent. I spent a night in Bangkok and was finally able to see the famous cabaret. It was fun and I did not venture much in Bangkok except for a good dinner in the usual place near the hotel plus the cabaret. I was actually a day well spent without much indulgence as in the past and had a chance to go swimming in the hotel pool.

Working in the factory was fun and it was a slow and quiet period with lots of calls to the team in Europe to help out on the issues. Overall, it was a good week and I feel more confident. I am glad that I was able to go there to prepare for go live. I have some mixed feelings and I read about the passage about Lincoln who felt humbled despite knowing that the Union will succeed in the American civil war. Similarly, I feel that we will succeed with the project going live but feel immense humility on the prospect of success because I have learned a lot and took a lot of effort and luck to get where we are right now with help from many contributors.

There was a lot of slow nights in Saraburi and I had a chance to finish the audio book of John Le Carre's latest book 'The Mission Song.' I also had a chance to see good movies again such as 'The Beach', 'The 300' and a scary Thai horror movie. I got also a chance to see how the people live in the province. I plan to return there next week for the final preparations. Hope things will turn out well. I just kept too much thing to myself although I see that the project team are very supportive of me and the project. I feel that they would like to go live soon and have a project success.

I arrived back home last Friday afternoon, went jogging and watched a great Indian movie 'Mr. & Mrs. Iyer' by Aparna Sen. During the weekend, I attended an officers training for Toastmasters, watched a movie and read books. I went swimming on Sunday and borrowed interesting books. It was a great weekend with anticipation of more work and excitement in the coming weeks.