Its Thursday and...

... I am still completely overwhelmed! Work is really starting to kick into full swing, which is great, as it keeps me busy and not getting home sick!

Something which keeps amazing me each time I come across it is the bandwidth out of this place. (For the non-techie people - bandwidth is basically the speed of your internet - if you can imagine a water pipe, if you have a very small pipe - i.e. Zimbabwe - you can only get a small amount of water through, but if you have a big pipe you can obviously move water through the pipe a lot faster).

On a daily basis my machine is backed up to a data centre in Cleveland - and not just my documents or anything like that - my ENTIRE machine - all 15 odd gigabytes of it... And quickly too - initially it took about half an hour but now it takes 10 minutes to scan through the drive for changes and back those changes up.

Let me put that into perspective - it probably updates about 100 Mb of my backup a day - depending on how many changes i have made. In Zimbabwe if you were lucky on a dial up you would get about 10 true Mb through in an HOUR. This does 10x that in 10 minutes - with most of that time actually scanning through the drive!

I downloaded a 2Mb file just now and it took 10 seconds!

Anyways - as people who know me well will understand - I am extremely happy with that part of the 'Canadian Experience'!

Yesterday I went shopping for groceries at a Canadian SuperStore. The store is just completely ginormous - even that does not describe it! At a complete guestimate you could probably fit about 15-30 Jaggers size stores INSIDE this one store! So shopping there was amazing - apart from the standard bombardment with choices!

After that I went with Peggy (my relocation agent) to a recital. It was some scholarship recital where young people got the chance to sing in public. There were four singers altogether each performing about 4 songs. I was impressed at the voices these youngsters had - and I mean they are not much older than about 18 and their voices were so well developed.

Anyways from there I went back to the hotel and had some pasta for dinner (Yes, I mostly just bought pasta, coz that is the quickest and easiest thing to do for one person!!).

Oh yes and I have a high speed internet connection to my room so I can connect to the work network from my room using a VPN (Non-tech note: Virtual Private Network - it allows you to connect to your work network securely and use it as if you were sitting at work - you can even print to one of the printers!!)

There is a cheese and wine event going on in the board room today at 4:30 so I might head there and try and meet some of the top dogs in EY Winnipeg. Not too keen on the whole combination of cheese and wine, but anyways!

K, well, work beckons, shall post again soon!