SMS Integration with a Car Rally
I was going to start this post saying "We recently went on a car rally/treasure hunt", but with this extended break from blogging, I will have to amend that to say "We went on a car rally/treasure hunt about a month ago". This rally was organized by an organization called the "Duchess Club". The competition had about 75 cars participating and was a good deal of fun.
The treasure hunt consisted of cracking clues to identify different places in Chennai, and getting to each of the spots at exactly the right time - The point is not speed, but timing. For example, the first clue was a photograph of a statue of Rani Mangammal, and we had to get there in exactly 5 minutes, neither more nor less. And because the distance was only about a kilometer, the challenge was to drive at an average speed of 12 kms/hour, keeping in mind each of the traffic signals on the way.
We had one of my friends with a stop watch, and we were being absolutely scientific in getting to each of these checkpoints at exactly the right time. However, the problem was that there was very little synchronization between the times that each of the check points were working with. Hence, if we left one of the check points at 10:29 and were told to get to the next check point in five minutes, we did that such that we covered the distance in exactly five minutes according to our stop watch. However, the person at the next check point would tell us that we had gotten there at 10:35, because their watch was a minute faster.
I think the best way to have conducted the contest would have to been to do this through "SMS". At each of the check points, we would be given a special code which we would have to text message to a central number. This way the organizers would have the ability to look at the time each of these text messages were received and calculate the time taken for each leg based off of a central time. This would also make it much easier for them to determine the winners, rather than the two hours it took for them to calculate the results manually.
Ah, what one can do with technology !
The treasure hunt consisted of cracking clues to identify different places in Chennai, and getting to each of the spots at exactly the right time - The point is not speed, but timing. For example, the first clue was a photograph of a statue of Rani Mangammal, and we had to get there in exactly 5 minutes, neither more nor less. And because the distance was only about a kilometer, the challenge was to drive at an average speed of 12 kms/hour, keeping in mind each of the traffic signals on the way.
We had one of my friends with a stop watch, and we were being absolutely scientific in getting to each of these checkpoints at exactly the right time. However, the problem was that there was very little synchronization between the times that each of the check points were working with. Hence, if we left one of the check points at 10:29 and were told to get to the next check point in five minutes, we did that such that we covered the distance in exactly five minutes according to our stop watch. However, the person at the next check point would tell us that we had gotten there at 10:35, because their watch was a minute faster.
I think the best way to have conducted the contest would have to been to do this through "SMS". At each of the check points, we would be given a special code which we would have to text message to a central number. This way the organizers would have the ability to look at the time each of these text messages were received and calculate the time taken for each leg based off of a central time. This would also make it much easier for them to determine the winners, rather than the two hours it took for them to calculate the results manually.
Ah, what one can do with technology !
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