President@Toastmasters

I was elected president to the Gurukul Toastmasters club and was inducted to office last week. The induction ceremony went well and we had the Gila Division Governor DTM Matt Jones visiting us. I feel I have a good officer committee with me this year with everyone committed to their respective job and I hope to achieve most of the objectives that we have outlined.

Some of the challenges that await us include

- Retaining members

- Bringing in new members

- Improving the quality of speeches and to have winners in Area, Division and other contests.

There is a new "Mentoring Program" that the VPE and myself are currently working on, which will help assign an appropriate mentor to the new members based on their level of public speaking skills.

From the last meeting, I see a good level of interest amongst the current members and I hope to build upon that interest. Its said - Success of any club or organisation depends on people who DO things that they had thought they cannot do. My biggest priority is to develop such a feeling amongst the members. Once done I think it should be a smooth ride from then on and we should be able to achieve our goals.

Auto Insurance

As the time for renewal of my auto insurance came up, I looked about to find which insurance company gives me the the best and cheapest coverage. I also looked up at the coverage numbers and what should I opt for my car.
I came up with some material which I would like to share here.

1. Get Sample quotes : Go to naic.org and select your state insurance website. There is an Automoblie premium comparison guide whic hyou can download for free. This list certain hypothetical cases and the premium corresponding to each case by the different isurance companies. You will get some idea about the premium you should expect. The drawback is you cannot have exactly the same scenario as yours (year/type of car, mileage, number of drivers etc)
2. Get five best quotes: Go to insweb.com and submit your car and driver information. It will give you a listing of five companies with the best quote.
3. Call for addition discounts : You can call agents of these companies to see if you are eligible for more discount.

Coverages on your vehicle

1. Bodily Injury liability : (Description taken from Geico.com) This provides protection to you if you injure or kill someone while operating your car. It also provides for a legal defense if another party in the accident files a lawsuit against you. In the event of a serious accident, you want enough insurance to cover a judgment against you in a lawsuit, without jeopardizing your personal assets. Bodily injury liability covers injury to people, not your vehicle.
2. Property Damage: This liability protects you if your car damages someone else’s property. It also provides you with legal defense if another party files a lawsuit against you.
3. Uninsured/Underinsured Motorist Bodily Injury: This coverage pays for your injuries caused by an uninsured driver or, in some states, a hit-and-run driver, in a crash that is not your fault.
4. Comprehensive and Collision: Comprehensive and Collision options provide compensation for damage inflicted to your vehicle in the event of an accident. Collision provides coverage in the event of an accident. Comprehensive provides coverage in the event of car damage from other perils such as storms, theft and some other non-accident damage inflicted to your car. Comprehensive and Collision are sold with deductibles which needs to be paid first. For older cars, one should consider dropping this coverage, since coverage is normally limited to the cash value of your car.
5. Medical Payments: This usually pays for the medical expenses of the injured driver and passengers in your car. There may also be coverage if you are injured by a vehicle as a pedestrian. You can avoid this if you believe everyone sitting in your car has medical insurance.
6. Rental Reimbursement: This coverage pays for a rental vehicle (around $25 a day) when the insured vehicle is out of commission as a result of a loss covered under comprehensive or collision coverages.

As a general note, I have read that, once your vehicle is worth less than 10 times what you pay each year to insure it you should get rid of comprehensive and collision coverages.

I hope to add on to this as i find new things.

Journey to Portland

There is a Japanese saying - "When you have completed 95% of your journey, you are only halfway there". I don't know in what context this was said but it definitely applied to me when I went to Portland in the month of May.

My uncle and aunt had been inviting us to visit their place from a long time. Also my cousin (Reetu Didi) had her baby shower, so my wife and I decided to go to Maine. We were to fly from Phoenix to JFK, New York and from there we had a connection to Portland, Maine.

11th April 2008

As I was putting my luggage in the trunk of my friend's car (who was to drop us to the airport) he asked whether we were flying by American Airlines. AA had cancelled hundreds of flights the same day. I was happy that i didn't book by American. We were taking Delta.

We started at about 8am from our house in Phoenix and reached the airport. Our flight to JFK was on time and we boarded the aircraft. However, due to rough weather conditions at JFK our flight was to not take off for another hour. All the passengers were advised to stay on-board so that if the conditions changed, the plane could take off. After a boring wait of around 50 minutes we had some more bad news. There had been no improvement in the weather at JFK, and due to the backlog of flights there, we were not allowed to take off till about 1.30pm (that's 2 hours more wait). On the positive side we were allowed to get off the aircraft and roam around the terminal with the promise of returning back in an hour.

Our wait ended at 1.30pm and we flew towards JFK. We reached JFK at around 8pm local time. I was worried that we might have missed our connecting flight because of the delay. Therefore as soon as we landed, I checked the monitors and rushed towards the gate where our flight to Portland was to depart. On reaching there I heaved a sigh of relief as the connecting flight was also delayed by half an hour. We grabbed some snacks at the airport and waited. 9pm slowly became 9.30....9.50...10pm. We finally boarded the aircraft at 10.15pm.

Madhavi (my wife) was very tired and I said to her to just relax as we would be there in Portland in just an hour. It was a small plane and that also was half full. Overall 40 passengers in total. The captain announced that we didn't had the permission to fly for another HOUR! (Great!!!!!), and as we had to free up the departure gate for other plane we would be taxiing around for an hour. After around 50min of agonising taxiing, we wished for some good news. Instead the captain announced that the aircraft had developed a "snag" while taxiing and we would have to return back to the terminal.

On return to the terminal all passengers were asked to get down the aircraft so that the plane can be inspected by the maintenance crew. As soon as we came back to the waiting area - I saw one airlines representative asking a passenger - "Was this flight empty?". This made me circumspect as to whether all the excuses being given by the airline are genuine and do they really want to fly us out tonight.

We all waited at the terminal - some passengers talked amongst themselves; some tried to take a nap on the seats while others just roamed around; all expecting some news from the airlines soon. An hour passed by; two hours passed by .....still no confirmation from the airlines as to when the plane will fly....only excuses. The agonising wait continued. At around 3am in the night, the airline announced that the flight is CANCELLED!!. My ears instantly went buzzing by the sound of some @#@$$$ words. The passengers were so angry...if they had to cancel the flight, they could have done that hours earlier. Why did they made us wait for so long?

To make matters worse, the next flight to Portland was at 9am and that was FULL. So we will have to fly to Boston in the morning and a bus will then take us from Boston to Portland (around 2 hrs drive). The passengers argued with the airlines but to no avail. They said that the weather was bad and they cannot do anything else. Some passengers suggested that instead of waiting to go to Boston and then by bus, why don't we take a bus directly to Portland. The airline representatives quickly latched on to that idea and started convincing other passengers. Although reluctant and first, all passengers agreed to the idea slowly. It had more to do with the bad weather conditions predicted the other day than anything else.

30 passengers; two mini-buses; 4am in the night and 6hours drive.

We all finally "took-off". Our bus driver "Vladimir" was going to Portland for the first time and wasn't sure of the way and had decided to therefore use the GPS. My fellow passengers, some of whom were very familiar with the way, instead suggested they knew a few short cuts. So we all decided to go by that. It was drizzling outside and the visibility was very poor. Vladimir, to this credit, drove the vehicle carefully and really slowed down at places where he wasn't sure of the way. It was very cold outside, and we being from Arizona, were shivering. The airlines had packed a few blankets with us on the bus, so we used a couple of them to keep us warm.

We stopped at a couple of rest areas to stretch our legs and to get something to drink. Due to the bad weather conditions it took us nearly 7and half hours to reach our destination - Portland.

Yes we had finally made it to Portland. It had been more than a day since we had left our house in Phoenix to finally reach there. I was wondering that we could have reached India in the same amount of time.

Our luggage wasn't there with us as the airlines had agreed to send it with the next flight. I gave our contact address to the airport authorities and left for our Uncle's house. I was dead tired and went to bed as soon as i reached there.

The luggage came to the house at around 4pm in the afternoon.

Experiences Organising the Phoenix Cricket League

How many times has it happened to you that you are dissatisfied with certain things and think you could have handled them better? You feel you could have taken a better decision than the manager or would have changed some policy to ensure better efficiency. These things happen to everybody.

Last year when I was playing in the Phoenix Cricket League, I faced a similar situation. I was not happy with certain decisions that were made by the organising committee and in some cases why a decision was not being made. So when the opportunity came this year, I decided to take the initiative and organise the Phoenix 20-20 Cricket League.

Given below are some steps I followed. Many of these steps are generic and can be used for any event planning. These steps reflect the approach I adopted in organising this event. I would be thankful if anyone can suggest some ways on how I could have done things differently to achieve a much better result.

Initiative:-

The first step in any event planning is taking an initiative. However, before taking an initiative one should atleast have a basic idea of what the event is about. What is the targeted audience? What are some of the common issues?

As a regular player of the Phoenix Cricket League from the last 4 years I had good understanding of the functioning of the league. So that made it easier for me to take up the job.

Delegation:-

Since organising a league is time consuming and involves a number of tasks, my first goal was to find the right people for each task. I decided on finding and delegating tasks to people who were responsible, shared my visions and can give constructive ideas. As a manager of the local Chandler cricket team and a regular player of the league, I had an idea of whom to call. With just a little bit of convincing I was able to find two friends who were not only interested in joining the organizing committee but were also passionate about it.

Task Breakdwon :-

We broke down our entire task into 3 parts with each part to be handled by one of us separately. This gave everyone a sense of responsibility and also allowed us to incorporate our own ideas, while working as a team.

1) Financial - Responsible for deciding the tournament fees, collection fees and fines , and purchasing inventory and trophies.

2) Marketing - Responsible for placing ads, distributing pamphlets etc so as to develop public interest. Also responsible for getting sponsors and coordinating with them.

3) Governing Policies - Developing rules of the tournament, resolving controversies and general day-to-day functioning of the event.

Problem Identification and Analysis:-

The next thing that we set about to accomplish was to jot down on a piece of paper, a list of things that went wrong the last season and those that went well. This gave us a fair idea of which areas we needed to concentrate more. There were two major problems that we highlighted -

1) Difficulty in maintaining player interest over 6 months
2) Absence of neutral umpires and hence controversies during games.

The cricket league goes on for nearly six months and if there is no means of communication about how different teams and players are performing, people start losing interest. A points table is just not enough to maintain interest. Therefore we decided to have a website which would, in addition to the points table, also keep track of the performance of individual players and give them rating points based on their performance as batsman or bowler. It would also have the entire scoresheet and individual match reports which would help maintain player and public interest. We also set about a criteria for the best bowler and batsman of the tournament.

The second issue of neutral umpires was more serious. Although everyone tries to be honest and plays for fun, sometimes there are controversies and heated exchanges during the game. Over the years we have had controversies due to the absence of neutral umpires and umpires have been accused of favoring their sides. Previous organising committees had asked for neutral umpires every year from the non-playing teams, but their have always been defaulters. We thought of adopting a stricter stand on this issue. We decided that the only way we can pursue individuals from a third team to come and umpire a game, is either through incentives or through penalties. We decided on implementing both - a) gave financial rewards to the umpires, and b) applied penalty points to teams that didn't sent the umpires on the scheduled date. This has had a great effect and the worry of losing points has forced captains to be more responsible in sending their players for umpiring.

Documentation:-

It is very essential to have a proper document explaining all the policies. A lot of things can be said and conveyed in emails, but if we have an official document listing all the policies it makes one's job easier. In case of controversies, we can always show the document, and say - "Hey! Its written here in the rules. You did not follow the rules so we cannot do anything."

We created a rules document listing all the policies and also came up with a requisite amount of tournament fee based on the expenses calculated.

Presentation and Approval:-

Then came the most important part of sharing our ideas with the captains of all registered teams. As expected, we were praised for certain initiatives while we faced backlash for some of our other proposals. The captains also questioned us with certain scenarios and asked our policies if those issues came up during the course of the tournament. We had to quickly come up with solutions to those and added them to the rules document as addendum. However for certains issues which only affected a couple of teams, we had to come up with the famous "Divide and Rule" policy, which asked the affected teams to show up with majority vote to have a policy change.

After a few policy changes we were able to convince everyone.

Implementation:-

We were able to start the tournament in October and things have proceeded swiftly since then. There were a couple of issues in between but have been able to easily handle those based on our preparation earlier. As of now things are working pretty smoothly.

It has been a good learning experience and I have been able to learn a lot of things. If I reflect back there are a few things that I could have done a little differently at the start of the tournament, but I believe thats what experience is all about. Hopefully the league works properly and ends on a good note.

Car Care

Tips for Increasing the Gas Mileage of your Car

Some of these tips have been taken from an article on Wyane Gerdes (the guy who can get 59MPG from an old accord) and summarized at moneyhacks. I am copying these tips here for my record or for anyone else interested. Also i have added a few more tips from ehow.com

1) Do not speed.
2) Use your breaks judiciously. Don't brake too much.
3) Inflate your tires to maximum pressure. If the tire pressures are low, the car will consume more gas.
4) Keep the vehicle as empty as possible. Added weight reduces fuel economy.
5) In parking lots, do not use reverse. Pull into a spot so that you’re facing out.
6) Accelerate slowly from a stop. Slower acceleration requires less gasoline than quick acceleration from a stop.

Checking Tire pressure

1) Know the correct tire pressure of your vehicle.
2) Check tire pressure when tires are cold.

I hope these tips will help you to improve your gas mileage.

Managing Your Finances

As 2007 draws to its close, its time to make plans for 2008. As with every new year people tend to make a few resolutions. With the economy predicted to be not-so stable in the near future it is time to be careful about the expenses and how to manage the money you have.

The recent issue (January 2008) of "Money " magazine gives a list of money related websites. I believe the amount of knowledge one can gain from this issue alone justifies the amount paid for a one year subscription. If you are concerned about your finances I would advise you to grab a copy of it soon. The last I checked, it was less than 20 bucks on Amazon for a year's subscription.

1) To track all your money at one place - moneycenter.yodlee.com (Yodlee powers major banks online products so is safe, as claimed by the magazine)

2) Financial Advise and to Exchange Ideas - GetRichSlowly.org, SavingAdvice.com

3) Investing Ideas - Pimco.com, EfficientFrontier.com, DieHards.com

4) Bargain Hunting - Fatwallet.com, Slickdeals.net, Pricegrabber.com (Comparison shopping)

5) Real Estate - trulia.com or zillow.com

6) Getting a new car - Consumerreports.org, edmunds.com and get the best price at cardeals.org

7) Blog Search : Outside.in searches for blog posts by city/zip.

Other than these bankrate.com is the best place for comparison shopping of your banking needs. It lists the banks, lending services, where to get the best rates on CDs, Money Market Accounts, Mortgage, Auto Loans etc.

Another item that I recently read about is PriceProtectr (priceprotectr.com). If you buy a product from one of the specified stores mentioned on the website (there are 74 stores as of now); and the price of the product falls below your purchase price within 30 days of your purchase; the website will let you know. You can then ask the store to refund you the difference.

Trip to Las Vegas

Madhavi and I went to Vegas during the Thanksgiving weekend in November 2007. We started on the 22nd morning around 8am from our house in Phoenix. It is around 6hrs drive from Phoenix to Las Vegas. We stopped by Hoover dam on our way to Vegas.

We reached Vegas at around 3pm and checked into Bally's Hotel. We spent the evening looking around and gambling in different casinos. We saw the conservatory at Bellagio, Eiffel tower at Paris, the fountain show at Caesar's Palace, and gambled at Mirage, New York - New York, and Treasure Island. The next morning we visited the Forum shops and gambled more at other casinos. After losing a decent amount of money :), we decided it is enough of gambling. On 23rd night, we watched the Cirque Du Soleil show "Le Reve" at Wynn. It was a mesmerizing show taking place on an aquatic platform with hundreds of gallons of water. Le Reve, which means "The Dream" in French, featured acrobatics, sparkling lights, music, and amazing dancers.

We returned back to Phoenix on the 24th night.