March Madness!!

It's March in Raleigh and that means a few things:

1. Spring is Here!!

It's officially Spring and the weather is getting warmer. Yesterday, my buddies Steve, Martin and I went out to Pinehurst to play golf. It was 74 degrees and sunny. It is even supposed to hit 80 degrees next week. It's still snowing in Chicago, so I'm going to cherish the warm weather while I can.

It has rained somewhat in Raleigh recently so we are now officially out of Exceptional Drought and into Extreme Drought. We are up from 45 days of water to 120 days :)

They don't have water restrictions in Pinehurst so the course was in incredible condition!!

2. March Madness!!

Duke, UNC, and NC State are all within 20 minutes of here and Wake Forest isn’t far, so the NCAA tournament is a pretty big deal around here. It’s basically all anyone talks about out here this time of year. At Cisco, we have taken this to a whole new level.

We have a product called IPTV which allows us to stream High Def TV programming over the Internet. One of our Technical Managers formed a team and bought an 37" LCD monitor, which he set up on our floor at work. Now, when we are walking to class or on a break, we can catch up with what’s going on in the tournament.

Note the network diagram above the TV explaining how the whole thing works :)

Of course, we had to take March Madness to a whole new level and launch an internal tournament of our own. Instead of doing our normal training activities, we have turned them into a competition. Being part of a sales organization, naturally there is a cash prize. The top team wins $500 and the top individual wins $1000!!

We have 3 brackets posted near the elevators:

I did well enough during our seeding exam to earn a #2 seed, although I highly doubt you can read that :)