The Guzzly bear American way of life.

I was doing some market research to survey the Recreational Vehicle (RV) industry today. I came across some stunning results which seem oblivious to the oil crisis. My idea about RV's were that these huge motor homes (much like the one Shah Rukh Khan drives in Swades) were common place only among select households who could afford large houses in suburbia (discounting people who actually live in trailers).

According to the University of Michigan's 2006 market survey quoted in this consulting web page 225,000 R.V's were shipped in the first half of 2006. This was more than in any other similar period in the last 33 years. Plus U Mich reported that currently 1 out every 12 vehicle-owning households also own a RV. That is a cool 7.9 million Guzzly bears. A little math tells me that number is a little more than the total 2006 sales of Toyota, Ford, and Chevy.

The 2010 projections are that 1 out of 8 households will own a personal Guzzly bear - Generation X'ers continuing to be the prime movers of this bearish trend. With RV fuel averages at 7 to 14 mpg, do you think this is a trend worth celebrating?

And the elevator is yours, starting... now.

Come this November the 14th, twenty teams in Madison, Wisconsin will live the toughest 90 seconds of their life. 4 people strong, each team will taste the same intensity that their MIT colleagues did exactly a month ago. Only the MIT team had it worse. They had to get away in 60 seconds.

No, it's not a Houdini contest. Not a sports car caper either. It's the Elevator Pitch Olympics. Venture capitalists and angels will be standing by eagerly to grab the team that could sell themselves in 90 seconds. Teresa Esser recently reminded me the story of Christopher Columbus back in 1485, when corporate elevators did not exist.

Columbus had a well thought out plan of reaching the Indies through the Atlantic Ocean instead of the treacherous land routes. In 1485, he visited John II, King of Portugal, and laid out his proposal. He also made a few funny demands. He demanded to be made "Great Admiral of the ocean", and also the governor of any lands he discovered, and also be given a tenth of all revenue from the discovered land. The King summarily rejected him on grounds that:

• His calculations of the proposed route were way shorter than what could actually be. This meant that he could have oversimplified certain routes, and also made some assumptions.
• He had not taken safety measures in case his calculations were indeed wrong. No ship that existed then could carry enough supplies to last a longer journey. The sailors accompanying him would die of thirst or starvation.

Columbus's elevator pitch had clearly not taken off ground floor. He pitched John II again three years later, but to no avail. Clearly the investor was not interested.

Not the kind to be bogged down, Columbus secured an appointment with Queen Isabella I of Castille, Spain. On May 1, 1486, he pitched the same plan to the Queen. After much time, the Queen and her committee dismissed his case on the same grounds as King John of Portugal. However they did want to keep their options open and not lose his idea. Thus it was decided that Columbus would be given an annual stipend of 12000 maravedis, and free food and lodging.

Persistence finally paid off for Columbus in the famed year 1492, when the Spanish empire decided to back him up. They also met with his other demands. Columbus set sail. He might have made some mistakes for sure, but he did set sail.

Immortalized in stone: Columbus' elevator pitch to Queen Isabella

Columbus teaches us, the elevator generation; that it's not a trivial matter to be able to impress an investor by the time he exits at the 60th floor. It is not just a matter of articulation, but is the ability to do your distance calculations accurately enough.

• Know what your assumptions are, and be able to speak them out.
  
• Do not make outrageous demands, unless you know how good you are.
  
• Arrange for exit strategies and alternatives for the worst cases.
  
• Lastly if all else fails, then stick to your guns and persist.

Welcome Prasad

I welcome my close friend Prasad to add to this space with his creativity and energy.

A few minutes of my life.

It has been about six months since I blogged. I could say I didn't find time to blog all these days, but I won't. Sitting up in front of my laptop now at 6 a.m., I suddenly realized I had a few minutes free in life to do what ever I wanted.

But how did I know that? Microsoft told me of course. All I did was try to change permissions of an empty local folder.


This blog post is about to be completed, but lucky me! The few spare minutes of my life are still not over. Microsoft will take a.. few more minutes.

Yah.. Let me get some coffee.

Maybe I should consider..

..renaming this blog as the Weather blog. It's got the winter rants, the fall haze, and even a lightning storm.

The woods beside Lake Mendota

It's Spring's turn now. It's interesting to see how the tough snow gives in to the touch of the Sun's heat. Some of the snow mix up with grime as if to escape a watery death. And then there's the snow which just sits in humongous mountains. Strength in unity. The nastiest ones are the slimy layers of sleet on the sidewalk. In two weeks time I'm going to be loving the familiar feel of concrete against my boots.

On the way to school, I saw this small puddle in the middle of all the whiteness.

Wild cherries thawing

Music Hall clock tower's hundred and twenty seventh winter is over.

Nature cools her heels..(and mine too)

A lone park bench at Eagle Heights awaits a visitor.. this will be a long wait.

It's freakishly cold nowadays. I never said a word while Nature was showing us the low 10's....not even when it snowed for a whole day. Nature did it when she turned it down below 0 F. Before you go away and fire Google up to convert that...that's -17 C.

It's -22F now.

I don't even have the courage to convert. Like when I stopped converting dollars. But now everything looks a bit different. Life feels different. There's a certain urgency to your every movement. You don't want to get to that bus stop too early and God forbid certainly not a second late. You make sure that your appointment is still on. You double check if your gloves are in your jacket pocket where you last left it. You triple check. Now there's a new purpose to life, one that's so primitive and yet so fervent. To get to your desk with blood still intact in the liquid realm. To be able to savor the generous embrace of artificial heat; yet another child of survival instinct. To be able to go through your entire day in the safe arms of concrete and wood, knowing too well, that you will have to soon give yourself up to the killer outside.

You step outside again to behold a blinding world in the nightly calm. Ready to forgive its fugitive and welcome you back. For tomorrow's another day, and you maybe a sure prey.

Eww. Don't even comment on this one. I wrote this because my feet froze in my snow boots today. It took me an hour to thaw.

Santa's gift.

I normally do not believe in Santa. Of course he might not believe in me too. But this year I do, I do! As luck would have it, my old laptop stopped working completely the week immediately after Thanksgiving. Its timing was derisively perfect. All the $300 laptops in America were now sold out, and I had a brand new paper weight to show off.

Then followed a month of frantically tearing my hair apart, with sleepless nights of toil to get the paper weight to be more useful.... all it said was 'no can do'. I guess it needed the Christmas break too, just like I. So I just let it be, and wished my nights away for a miracle to happen. Christmas was so close. It was not too unreasonable to expect a miracle. After all this country runs on that stuff.

My friend asked me one fine day if I needed a laptop. I thought he was nuts. The look I gave him definitely showed that. He said his roommate was moving, and wanted to throw his laptop away. (More of this species, God!) For the moment I will call the roomie as Santa. So Santa gives me this pretty sturdy Dell Latitude with a Pentium 3 and 256Megs of RAM. Complete with a case and all. Ofcourse it has Windows XP working(!) on it with a blue screen here and there for variety. I stripped it down the very night, and installed DSL, the OS made for my machine.

Ok. enough said. Here you go.

A fresh boot consumes 30 MB of RAM. The GUI comes bundled with Firefox, Acrobat, Spreadsheet, Word processor, and a ton of other goodies, all stuffed in a 50 MB ISO.

Oh.., and thank you Santa :) Merry Christmas, and a Happy new year! Ho ho ho!