extended stay?

Hi all,

Since everyone thinks I'm lying on the beach all day long, I'll give you guys some background on my job.
The project I'm working is an IPTV (digital TV over the internet) project for 2 telecom operators. One in the Dominican Republic (Codetel), the other in Puerto Rico (PRTC). Both belong to the Telmex group, which is the group of Carlos Slim, the richest (or at least one of the richest) guy on the planet. Haven't seen Carlos around yet, unfortunately but if I do, I'll make sure to make friends.

The project is led by the Spanish team, not by the Belgian which explains why I had to work with the team in Madrid for a few monts. Changin my boss from "de joeri' to "el ramon'

My assignment here concerns a monitoring solution for Codetel's broadcast TV channels. I'll try to explain a bit on how we get MTV and CNN from the air to everyone's TV at home.
Codetel has some huge satellites installed in the backgarden from where I work. These satelitte TV signals are processed by decrypters, decoders, encoders and encryptors before we blow them into the world wide web. Anyway, it's a bit a complicated process and lots of things can go wrong.
What we do is following; we take video samples after each main processing point and we display them on some huge screens. When something goes wrong with a signal the operators can perform some actions to locate the failing equipment as fast as possible so everyone can relax and return to watching HBO again without making nasty phone calls to Codetel to ask why Carry all of sudden isn't kissing Mr Big anymore. We also have probes installed so we get numerical measurements on the video quality. My job is to make sure everything works in the end and that everything is configured correctly. That includes making sure no porn is displayed on the big screen, but instead on a small screen in a different room. Untill now, I failed once and unfortunately the room was full of people, it wasn't my fault though, codetel kinda forgot to mention an adult channel to me. Thank god, the audio wasn't turned on at the moment!

My Spanish project manager has asked me if I wanted to stay a month longer on the project which would mean I'd be only coming to Belgium in October. They need someone to give trainng to Codetel and -congratulations to myself- hereby I've become a trainer. Will be funny though explaining all this stuff to a class of Dominicans. After the training I would stay like a week or so longer to give some support and then I'd finally go to Puerto Rico. That will probably be around 15th of August. By then I fear that PRTC is grumpy because I got there later then expected and the race to make everything work as fast as possible will start again.

I guess I even could stay longer on the project but that might mean that I'd need to transfer from alcatel-belgium to alcatel-spain since spain now has to pay belgium for my work.
Complicated stuff... But anyway, I'm glad I can stay a bit longer. I just hope my Belgian management agrees on the one month extension.

By the way, my Belgian number is still working (0477 961429) but keep in mind I'm 6 hours behind you guys.