Just a thought

Mobile phone has become a basic necessity of our lives. It’s hard to find a person who doesn’t use one.

Each and every person is familiar with PhoneBook, where you can store your friends’ names and their respective phone numbers. Consequently, when your friend calls you, it checks his/her number with the set of phone numbers that you have stored in your mobile and displays his/her name on your mobile screen. Ex.: Consider that Michael Jackson is your friend and you have stored his mobile number, which is 767 5464, in your mobile. When you get a call from 767 5464, it shows “Michael Jackson calling” and not “767 5464 calling”.

Let’s say that you get a call from a stranger. By stranger I mean a person whose phone number is not stored in your mobile. Hence, his number will be displayed on your mobile. What really happened is this – when the stranger initiates a call to you, he sends his phone number to the base station. The base station then finds you and forwards that phone number to your mobile. Your mobile would then check if that number is stored in its flash memory. In this case, it hasn’t been stored and hence would display his number on your mobile screen. My question is “Can we not have a ‘look-up system’ in place which will retrieve the name of the stranger and then forward both his name and number to you rather than forwarding just his number???” I think this feature will be very useful.

Each phone number is registered under a name. With this look-up table whenever you get a call (or an sms), you will at least know the name of the person/organization. Will building such a system be overkill for adding just one feature??? Will this system be an overhead to operations such as call or sms??? Are there any other constraints, technical or otherwise??? Why hasn’t any mobile/base station company implemented this yet???

Oh GOD!!!

pour water down the drain...
pour water on the wash basin carefully...
pour water on the front wall and its the opposite wall...
pour water on yourself...
keep the mug back in its position...
look at yourself in the mirror...
wipe the mirror with your banian...
pour water on yourself again...
hmmm... DONE.

It's a small world after all

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines technology as "the practical application of knowledge especially in a particular area". Definition or not, we can't argue about the fact that technology has indeed broken all barriers, geographical or otherwise. Very complex things is made to look simple (though it ain't!!!). We all love to send sms... I love to send group sms though. Though SMS is an acronym for Short Messaging Service, to me it means Simply Message Send maadi :-) During my tenure at my previous company, I was (un)fortunate to see the actual code of the SMS protocol. Believe me... you wouldn't send an SMS if you saw how complex the architecture is. And SMS is a baby compared to Calls. But its simple to use and that's the beauty of technology.

Just now, I had a first-hand experience of how technology has changed our lives. "I am just a call away" really isn't applicable only to neighbours. My close friend who is currently pursuing his M.Sc abroad asked me to give a book to his cousin and gave me her number too. I forgot to take that number with me and went to his cousin's house. I realized I had no number... hmmm... what to do now??? I called my friend and told him to tell his cousin that I am waiting outside her house. Within 20 seconds, she came out and picked the book from me. 20 seconds is all it took for the message to pass from India ---> abroad ---> India. Its that simple. Hats off to all those who slog to make our lives simpler and simpler.

It really is a small world after all...