Thursday, February 23, 2017

What is Focus

Focus, is to have your very good friend working out with you in the early morning hours and she repeatedly tries to greet you (3 times specifically) and you don't even notice that, let alone acknowledge her, for the only thing going on in your mind is, "will my left knee hold up till the end of the workout, was all that rolling worth it?". 

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

How easy is it to get hacked?

The below incident happened to me and is true

Other day I was getting back to my office from lunch break and my phone rang, the number that popped up was a 1-800 number. I usually ignore these kinds of calls, but to my bad luck I answered. The caller on other side had a very very thick accent and said he was calling me from AT&T and they are conducting a survey for customer satisfaction and so on, he also mentioned that there is a bill credit of $x per line for taking the survey. Considering I have been with AT&T for more than a decade and have been happy with their service, I was more than happy to answer a couple of questions. Towards the end of the “survey”, he mentioned I would be receiving a message with a number and I should repeat the same back to him to process my credit. I did receive the number and faithfully repeated the same to him. He said thanks and good bye and I did the same.

Once I came to office, I saw a series of emails that my account has been locked and need to be reactivated before I can use my phone. The idiotic me thought this was a hoax and when tried to call my wife it went to “AT&T Fraud Department”,  I cut the line and re tried with the same result. At this point I didn’t have a choice but to talk to the AT&T fraud department who explained to me the following
  • Some one was trying to hack into my account and buy a phone on my account
  • There is a pin number that is established between me and AT&T which should never be given to anyone at anytime
  • There are apps out there that can make a phone call to have come from any number of your choice
  • AT&T never calls people for a survey
  • I have to go to the AT&T store with 2 forms of ID (DL and credit card would do) to get my account re-activated. Which I faithfully did and got my account back.
In retrospect, there were lot of red flags that should have triggered my defense mechanisms. For starters, the call came to me, I didn’t make the call; the guy on the other side had an extremely thick accent (even for outsourcing, it was bad), the bill credit of $x/line is ridiculous considering I have had to fight tooth and nail to get even $4.99 back from them. 

Of course all of these are hindsight, which in most cases is better than 20/20.    

Friday, February 17, 2017

More than one way to show and tell

A very good friend of mine recently pointed to me that our pet Daisy is getting featured on my blogs more than Avni. Not that anything is wrong with it but it means my focus is probably becoming lopsided. So, here goes one for Avni without Daisy.

As part of her kindergarten vocabulary builder and associated show and tell we had Avni do the word “Satellite”. Explaining the concept to Avni and her ability to reproduce were both easily achieved. Now came the challenge of the show and tell. We figured since moon is a natural satellite of earth, we can do moon as the show and tell. But the question still remained how would we show the satellite aspect of moon or in other words it wouldn’t make sense to just show picture or toy for moon without showing that moon goes around earth and that’s why it is a satellite.

Avni had a clear idea in her mind, she said she would make a moon and earth and hold them in each hand and rotate moon around earth. I wasn’t convinced with the idea and asked Dr. Google for help which came up with some sort of kit to show this. Needless to say, Avni wasn’t convinced with Dr. Google’s idea either. So, we decided to implement on our own.

After almost half hour later we had the following, 


Even though the pirated version was more representative, we let her take her own creation for show and tell.