I love long weekends. Getting a Friday or a Monday off is the bestest thing about work (yeah, that's the best thing). So I was taking a look at my leave calendar for the year and check this out - 2009 has 7 long weekends! Just look at the number of holidays this year that fall on Fridays or Mondays. I'm so thankful that I get public holidays off now, unlike previously at Directi.

An in line with my tradition of making everything corny, guess what's the first thing that came to my mind when I saw this.

Yaahoooo! :)

Ok now this is weird. Not just the fact that I'm sitting here in office writing this, but moreso that I'm acutally writing about this.

Back at my (not so) old workplace, God knows how many 'fights' I've had with my colleagues for the room being too warm. Like, so warm that I sweat when sitting two seats away from the air conditioner. Switch to Yahoo! and lo - it's bloody nice and cool here! :) For 3 days. Then it got chilly. :( Now, don't get me wrong, I'd prefer too cold over too hot any day, but really, does it have to be this cold? (Yes, I can see many people reading this giggling their teeth off right about now, but I'm going to ignore that for now).

That's not the end of it. Since I still don't have any much work to do yet, my favourite pastime seems to be heading to the water cooler and drinking up a couple glasses (I have no clue why). And then you throw in the odd glass of Pepsi in between.

Now, club together a good 5-6 litres of liquid intake a day with these cold temperatures here and you get, yeah, atleast 15 trips to the restroom - which apparently has turned into my second biggest pastime at work (mind you, that's only for the sheer number of times I have to go there, not because I like it!).

Anyway, so that's what I'm doing to pass my time here until I get some good work to do, hopefully tomorrow.

*thinking to self - Sheesh! Did I just write that?*

So, I'm only a work week into Yahoo! now and I just used my first employee benefit :) I've been thinking about getting a Flickr account these past couple of weeks and yesterday I learnt that Yahoo! allows all its employees to upgrade to Flickr pro for free. Thanks to the Yahoo! Internal Upgrade Perk you can now find me at http://www.flickr.com/photos/avirajsaluja.

I'm not sure how much I'm going to use this mainly since I don't know where I'll find the time for it. The sucky broadband speeds at home don't help my cause either. But photography is something that I really want to get into big time, and I'm hoping this is just one step towards building my motivation to start ASAP. I really need to buy my first DSLR before I turn 25.

Anyway, just for the sake of putting something up on my photostream, here's some pictures of my trip to China earlier this year. I'll try and put up the pictures from the Great Indian Punjabi Wedding sets that I blogged about earlier.

Cheers!

Today is my first day at Yahoo! India. Mixed emotions, to be honest. While I came here with no excitement, but a lot of anxiety, I was feeling good once I actually got there. Sitting in the waiting/meeting room while the documentation was completed, I was really looking forward to seeing my new workstation and getting started on whatever it is that I'm going to do here. But what a dampener that turned out to be. From 10:30 am to 3:30 pm, I was literally sitting by myself and waiting around. Nothing to do. Nothing damnit! Half the time I spent in the waiting room and the other half at an empty workstation that was assigned to me. The whole while I was waiting for my laptop to be given to me, but apparently there were some issues configuring my ID on the internal access server. 3:30 pm I was finally given a temp laptop so I could just surf around a little. That's really where I'm sitting and writing this post. What's a guy to do?!

Anyway, despite all this my first look here has been positive. The people seem to be nice but the general atmosphere doesn't seem to be as warm as it was at Directi; it's much more formal here. Then again, I've hardly spent any time here; I hope to change that opinion pretty soon.

I learn that there's been an internal restructuring here a week or two back so I'm now reporting to someone other than who I was told previously. To be completely honest, I'm now not even totally sure of my role here but I'm guessing (/hoping) it's going to be better than I thought (touch wood).