I found these stamps at my latest visit to the local USPS Office. Usually this time of the year, one find stamps with holiday themes, but what caught my eyes were these stamps with green messages. Really cool, what you might also notice is that there were 15 unique stamps, and no repetition.

I know my holiday cards with have these on this year!

mayank

Carpool is a necessity and a headache for parents today. As a founder of a carpool site, I can vouch for this first hand. We thought that carpooling would be important for people commuting for work or traveling between cities. But to our surprise, the biggest demand for carpool solutions is from parents trying to solve the challenge of hauling their kids to soccer games, swimming and other group activities.

-mayank

Read more at: The carpool: a staple of modern parenting

The BASES 150K Challenge is a prestigious Competition hosted by the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students. The Product Showcase part of the competition let’s entrepreneur show a demo-able prototype product to the entire bay area, and the most powerful Silicon Valley investors.

BASES 150K Challenge

We were selected for the final round, but unfortunately we didn’t win the competition. Still it was fun participating. Here is a picture from the venue. Many thanks to Poorvi and Dinesh Patil (two close friends) for help with the final entry.

BASES Product Showcase Venue

Here is an example of a flight ticket between San Francisco and New Delhi on two different websites. One is the United.com website in the US and the other is the Lufthansa.com site (in US or Europe?) The flight #, times and destinations are exactly the same. Yet miraculously the price on Lufthansa is $6,939.54 and the same flight on United costs $3,715.40. The funny thing is that since both these airlines are part of the Star Alliance, they should at the least show the same price. Before you cry foul, I must also qualify that both the fares were taken within minutes of each other.

The Air Fare SCAM Game

If you are curious as to what happens in the winter, trust me they are unfazed by the snow.  See this next video

Here is some info on bone marrow matching:

Bone marrow matching
Please register as a marrow donor for her or anybody else in need at http://www.marrow.org/JOIN/Join_Now/join_now.html It’s super easy. They ship the registration kit to your home, and you don’t even have to donate blood to be registered
Join Now – online registration for Be The Match Marrow Registry

and a Flyer from our friend,

And yet all of us have been feeling the pain of the rising gas prices over the last 3 months, as prices have gushed from ~$3.00/gal to $4.35/gal. I have even switched over to biking to work twice a week just to “stick it up to the man”. Yes, there is a instability premium due to the middle east revolution/unrest. The obvious question is how much is this “premium”? I would say that the unrest in Yemen and Syria while barbaric, should not affect the crude price. Lets look at the top 15 producers of Oil. (I am not looking at top exporters of crude oil to the US, because the prices are obviously a global number).  From the CIA website

Oil Producers, CIA facts 2011

None of these places have had their oil production disrupted by the recent unrest. Right?

So the almost $30/bal ($110 vs. $80) premium we are paying seems a bit unreasonable. Now look at what happened this Thursday. Oil prices plummeted by a whopping ~8% in one single day. Yes, this is a commodity we are talking about. Did the demand drop by a astounding 8%? or did they find a giant pool of oil? neither did all the problems in the Middle East get solved. Nothing.

Oil Prices, 5th May, 2011

My take is that there is a lot of money sloshing around and people are speculating with Oil futures and prices, unfortunately you and I have to bear the cost of all this. Still there is one way to stick it to the oil Co, carpool, bike, walk and let us all use less OIL…

That is why I have pledged to bike to work at least once a week and probably more when the rains stops. The bike ride to my workplace  is a roughly 30minutes (including the changeover) vs. the car commute of ~20minutes, so it is actually not that bad a deal. Plus the added benefit of free exercise. With that in mind I have also been building my biking capabilities (who knows my commute could be 20miles each way on day :D ) and recently  I hit a personal record in terms of distance 37.5miles (60km)! here are  the details of that epic bike ride.

The Epic Bike ride

ps: by the way runkeeper and runtastic pro (I like this better) are both really great apps for iphone to track physical activities.