How busy are we?

Is this the heights of doing too much? I read this article on MSN about multi-tasking and I was quite intrigued by the following snippet:

Every weekday morning, Silverman, 33, a lawyer and new mother from central New Jersey, gets into her Volvo sedan, veers onto the highway, and pulls out her cell phone, BlackBerry, and breast pump. As she slides into traffic, Silverman punches out e-mail messages and holds a conference call with clients, while simultaneously affixing the pump to her right breast and plugging it into her car adaptor.

Whoa! I have been guilty of multi-tasking behind the wheel, with talking on my cell phone and eating but a breast pump? Where are we heading? Are we so busy that we'll start making babies while driving? Intriguing, but with the way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised!

Is Stealing Wireless Wrong?

So first, it's so cool that blogger allows you to type in Hindi (using English characters) and be able to post in Hindi. My previous post is more or less the amount of Hindi that I can speak!

So, I stumbled across this article on BBC about stealing wireless connections. Having myself been participant to many such an occasion, it's certainly an interesting moral debate. I found this reader response in particular very funny:

The rich neighbor found his poor neighbor salivating outside of his kitchen window from the aroma of his food. The rich neighbor demanded payment for the smell of the food. The poor neighbor took some coins from his pocket and said: "I'll pay for the smell of your food with the sound of counting my money".

Exactly! Why should it be illegal to use something that invades your space? Throw some apples into my balcony and I'll take them!

मेरा नाम प्रशांत है

Geoteaming @ Microsoft

Last week, my group at Microsoft had a morale event around Geoteaming. Geoteaming is a corporate team-building activity based on geocaching. Geocaching is essentially a high-tech treasure hunt using GPS devices. In this particular geoteaming event, there were about 25 "caches" hidden in Seattle that the teams had to discover. Using the GPS devices to navigate to the point of interest, and then a clue to find a particular object of interest, we found answers to questions that were each worth a certain amount of money.

The 50 people in attendance were divided into teams of 8. My team, named the "Blue Tsunamies", hustled in the allocated time for the exercise to uncover 16 of the 25 treasures. Our strategy was to target the high value treasures (which we defined as over a million) first and then focus on the smaller ones. We also used a strategy of having 2 sub-teams navigate simultaneously. One sub-team navigated to the current treasure of interest while the other sub-team navigated to the next treasure of interest. That way, as soon as we finished with one treasure, we were ready to navigate to the next one without any downtime. The "Blue Tsunamies" raked in well over $16 million in "cache" value to finish in first place! Our prize you ask? Not quite the $16 million but a handsome $50 gift card to the Cheesecake factory! Not a bad deal if you ask me. Earn money while having fun. Isn't that the way it is supposed to be?

Geoteaming @ Microsoft

Did I ever tell you I was on CNN?

So, it's been 3 years since this piece aired on CNN. And it just occurred to me that I could upload the video on youtube and write about this on my blog! Hooray for technology!