When you are an expat one thing you miss is TV from home. For me I can get tv shows via torrent, but a more legal way is to buy a TIVO and have it setup at home on your home network. At first it seems daunting, but its really quite easy.

1. Buy a Series 2 tivo, at the moment they are $30 for a refurb unit on tivo.vom
2. Set it up at home in my case it was setup in the master bedroom.
3. Login to your router, setup the port forwarding to point towards your tivo, in my case we have the tivo setup at on ip 192.168.1.104, and I have forwarded http port 80 and https port 443 to it. (each router is different on how to forward ports so it cant be explained here)
4. You need to find your actual ip address www.whatismyip.com from one of your home computers will show you this.
5. Now type in https://your ip here:443 , it will ask for a username and password, the username is the same for everyone so enter:  tivo , the password is your mak (media access key) you get from your account at www.tivo,com .
6. You now can see what you have recorded on your tivo! and download them.
7. Another good free program is http://tivoplaylist.dyndns.org/ its a great little program that lets you queue your programs for download.

One big problem is you need someone at home to delete the programs you no longer want, I havent found a way to do this yet, it must be possible, I just havent figured it out.

In this episode lets talk about working with Indians…

Its maddening, to say the least. I have to say its like dealing with a bunch of school children. You have to watch every little word, and never criticize. And be prepared to work with people with little or any experience in the position to which they are employed.

One of the bad things is the english language versus the hingslish language and how you always feel like you are walking on thin ice. See we who live outside India use english as english should be, an example…. the word ‘solution’ used in a sentence doesn’t offend you does it, but here it does, here for some reason it means you are telling them this is the way it must be done.

Also I found they employ people in jobs who never have any experience in that position or job description. So expect a management level of total incompetence, its in every company it seems. But they dont see this, here they dont seem to care about the background of the person they employ I don’t get it.  They also love titles, in my section of 9 people, 7 people have Manager titles, a title is a big thing here, its some weird status thing that I don’t get. But whats weird is they wont work in a iron lung, I have personally never seen such a lazy group of people, and they will rarely work outside their job description.

Its very frustrating also as Indians cannot make a decision, and they never want to make a decision as they dont want to be responsible for anything. If something does go wrong you will have to be ready to be blamed, they love blaming people. This week I got the blame for the fact that is costs money to service the jet… it was like WTF you bought the thing, you used the thing, and you expect it to be in a airworthy condition if you don’t service it?

Overall Indians are extremely frustrating people to work with, and nothing is easy here. One funny thing is when something is found to be easy, just wait and they will invoke a procedure to make it hard and no longer easy.

You see some weird things here driving into our city office, its 30 km away from the airport and where I live, but it can take upwards of 2hrs due to the traffic.

One big problem about Kolkata is the traffic police, they control every intersection, with absolutely no logic or training , you will frequently see 3 different police forces manning the same intersection with none of them communicating to each other, or you will see one guy controlling the lights and another directing the traffic in the opposite direction… here are Kolkatas finest in action….