What would you do with a Billion?

Yes and that's a Billion Washingtons. This is not a trick question and there are no hidden parts to the question. One simple direct question - What would you do if you were given a Billion USD.

Its nice to see people come up with a variety of answers and more importantly similar ones. Almost everybody who gets this question asked, answers philanthropically with sentences like ' I will spend most of it on fighting poverty, world hunger and environment protection/global warming'. Though it is nice that everybody thinks of saving the world first, is that really what will happen once you land with the Billion.

Lets take a closer and practical look at the problem and the common answer.

A Billion is a lot of money. There is no denying that. This much money can fix a lot of problems in today's world where almost everything and anything is possible if you can pay for it. Now there is no denying that either. Setting up stuff for goodwill is not an overnight process. It takes a lot of time, effort and thought to get it right. Small mistakes could end the money in wrong hands and not to mention that lots of money brings in lots of problems. There are folks all along who want a piece of that wealth for themselves. Not just people who you need to work on your philanthropic project, even family members are interested too. More money means more greed.

By the time you realize what is going on and keep everybody in check, you have already spent a whole lot of time and the interest and zeal with which you took up this task has faded away. Now this is what makes this question a tough one to answer.

I am yet to come across an answer that I feel would really work in a practical world. As for me, I would answer the question as - ' You keep the money and do all this philanthropic work. As a payment for getting all of it done, you can keep half of it if you like to after the task is complete. I am content with what I have. Thanks'. Honestly. smirk and wink.

Crappy device

You know its not a good day for technology when a device that is considered to be a big breakthrough in the tech world stops working and starts frustrating you. Well that is the day for me today.

I recently purchased an iPhone. Now for people who dont know what iPhone is, it is the standard for smartphones as some might like to put it. I initially liked the phone a lot but not so much lately. The phone is slow, takes forever to load the apps, drops calls all the time, runs out of memory (oh yeah! I see the oom msg pop up almost everyday) and most of the apps dont even work. Not to mention the sluggish 3G network of AT&T and weird battery draining problem.

So today I decided its time to pay a visit to the genius desk at the mac store. The guy there basically ran a quick sanity health scan of the device and decided that there is nothing wrong with the phone. When I tried to discuss the issues I have had lately, he ran the list of issues and their reasoning which pretty much pushed iPhone out of my fav 5. This is how the conversation went.

Me (M) - So what do you think
Genius (G) - Your device is working fine. There is nothing wrong with it.
M - But the battery keeps draining all the time.
G - Oh. About that. You need to turn off wifi to save your battery. Wifi has a tendency to drain batteries.
M - mmm... But I need Wifi for faster access to content.
G - Not just wifi, you will have to turn off or better manage your 3G and push mechanism for email. These usually need a lot of power to keep running and are the primary reason for draining your battery.
M - But I need my mail and 3G gives me faster downloads where wifi isnt available.
G - Yah about that, 3G from AT&T isnt really that great. So you arent really gaining anything there with 3G turned on.
M - Oh. So whats your recomendation now.
G - You have about 100 apps on your device and thats basically chewing up all available RAM. You will end up with OOM no matter what you do unless you delete some of these apps.
M - (in my mind, but iPhone is famous for its apps)
G - and you might want to download the memory freeing apps to keep your device running.
M - Alright. Thanks (in me mind - for this sucky device.)

So I began a quick comparison of this phone and the Windows Mobile phone I had before. I used to run multiple apps, had easy access to outlook servers, could connect to windows machines without any issues, built in media players, better call quality and service from Sprint. This phone had none of those but for the form factor.

Bottom line -> iPhone - useless crap = nothing. (unless I see some improvement with the phone) If you are looking for more info on love/hate relationship with the iPhone, here is an interesting article on msnbc. Check it out. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32177251/ns/technology_and_science-wireless/wid/11915829/

This is just venting out my frustration with the phone, please do not take this as a review for iPhone or reco for their Genius bar service.

The move...

So I havent blogged in a while. But I was never a daily blogger and I will try not to pretend to be one.

So I recently moved to a bigger city from a not so big city. Like many people I said to myself, so whats the big deal, so its a big city, life is not so different after all. But slowly I have come to realize that maybe Big City does have its effects after all.

There are more folks that you know who live nearby.
There are more parties every week that you have to attend.
The crowd to cinemas keeps growing every week.
There are more folks poking in your matters.
The number of people who dislike you is very high.

And this is just to name a few, not including the real problems of a big city like peak traffic, bad traffic and regular traffic jams. The lines in the grocery stores are always long even at 100am.

Damn the move... huh the big city.

1 billion, 2 billion, 3 billion ...

This morning I was doing my daily roundups of online news sites and I came across this article on Bill Gates by rediff.com.

Seems in his November 2005 visit to India, on one of the occasions he had to share the dias with Narayana Murthy. They were asked to test their mikes and Mr. Narayana Murthy said the usual 'one, two , three mike check', but Mr.Gates said 'one billion, two billion, three billion'. The article goes on to describe how rich and modest he is and how much his personal property is worth (no guessing, its around $50 billion).

So I was thinking, even I could have said 'one billion, two billion, three billion..' but could I have pulled it off as good? If I were to really say that in public, the general audience could mistake me as ...

one billion - current population of India.
two billion - people of Indian origin around the globe.
three billion - our population target for this decade.

Now as you can see its not a very wise thing to say.  Doesn't sound good at all .. does it?