Negotiating with car salesmen...

If you ever purchased a new car, you would have experienced first hand the negotiations and bargaining that you need to do with the car dealership before you freeze the deal. I remember my story way back in 2001 when I went to purchase my first car when I was initially given a price tag way more than the Maximum Retail Price, that too in big bold extra-size font (to have that stamp of authority!). When questioned about why the price is even higher than the recommended MSRP, the salesman mentioned that "this is such a great car in great demand that it is worth paying that price"! I wrote back my offered amount (which was way less) on the same little piece of paper, the salesman went into his manager's office (not sure if his manager was really sitting there), came back after a few minutes with another number lower than what he had originally offered, and then I increased my offer, we kind of repeated the process...until..er...the negotiations broke down ;), you get the drill....

Well, if you love to negotiate, then it is a different story, but for most people, negotiating with professional negotiators such as car salesmen is not an easy task and is something which they dread upon. Well, check out this great 10-part article titled "Confessions of a car salesman" where a Edmunds.com reporter does an undercover as a car salesman and tells us what really happens in those dealerships...

Improv Comedy

Malcom Gladwell in his new bestseller, Blink briefly touches upon the basic concept behind Improvisational Comedy. I have watched a couple of Improv Comedy shows before, but never realized this before until I read this in Blink - the actors in a Improv Comedy typically "accept all offers made", saying yes to things which one would normally deny, thus opening up new scenarios and directions in the scene. A couple of nice examples illustrate this point very well in the Blink. If an actor says "your arm needs to be amputated", the second actor doesn't say "No, it cannot be". He accepts the offer and says something more interesting and positive like “It is the same one that you did last time". In other words, "They accept all offers made—which is something no ‘normal’ person would do.” - Keith Johnstone, improv pioneer. It would be interesting to analyze how adopting this kind of behavior in certain real-life situations could open up new directions.

This site has a bunch of cool exercises to get the mindset for Improv Comedy - need to try it out sometime...

Harry Potter 6 - Half-blood prince

Pre-ordered the sixth book in the Harry Potter series "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" today. Fabmall has a promotion going on currently (20% discount on the book + free book club membership worth Rs. 275 + possible special bonus). Can't wait for July 16.

Want to publish a computer science paper? It's easy..

Do you dream about publishing your Computer Science paper?
Do you dream about enthralling audiences at conferences with your talk?
Do you dream about seeing your name in various CS papers?

Well, there is a solution. And you don't need a Ph.D. for that! Welcome to the random CS paper generator! Go to the above link and fill in your name, and click "Generate Paper" and it will generate a random CS paper. As the site mentions, "Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence. ". I tried one and got a jazzy paper with lot of graphs and jargons.

The funny part is one of the randomly generated papers got accepted to a conference and they are actually going to go present it :).

Find the right person to do the job....

It has not been the best of times for Saurav Ganguly but he gave a fine example of what captaincy is all about during the first one day match between India and Pakistan yesterday. Pakistan were cruising along at 45/0 and threatening to run away with the game when Akmal played uppishly and the catch went straight to Saurav who was the fielder at Point. Saurav dropped the catch (it was kind of a blinder) but then guess what he did? He took himself off that position immediately and brought Sehwag in that fielding position. And a couple of balls later, the same place, the same catch, this time Sehwag holds on to it.

As they say, leadership is about finding the right person to do the job when you cannot do it right.

For the record, in the very next over, Saurav too held on to a difficult catch, this time of Salman Butt...

On an unrelated note, when will our commentators stop commenting about the benefits of "left-hand right-hand combination"?